“The world has changed, but our organizations haven’t changed along with it. We can no longer rely on the old solutions and proven products and services that we’ve built our efforts around. Good enough just isn’t cutting it anymore, because everything is good enough. Now, more than ever, you need to be remarkable – remarkably innovative, remarkably driven, and remarkably authentic.”

This is the basis of The Big Moo – a new release by Seth Godin and 33 leading minds on how to be remarkable. There is something for everyone in this remarkable book as all author proceeds are going to charity. Each passage is just a couple pages in length and provides a jolt to your system to get you out of your comfort zone and onto thinking of remarkable new ideas.

As an Agile Executive, we talk about how we innovate through collaborative understanding with our customers, we develop cross-functional teams to help drive our innovative product solutions, and we release our products in increments to get early and frequent feedback from our customers. These are steps in the right direction, but they are not enough. Let me highlight a couple of passages from the book to wet your appetite…

Get out!
Get out of your comfort zone – You may be the master of your domain in your office, but chances are you’re also a victim of your mastery. Too often in the business world, we preserve and revere experience when we should be challenging it and renewing it. Go out and get some inexperience. Go back to square one. Put yourself in a position to learn something new.

Get out of your frame of reference - The best way to open your mind is to apply a jolt of unfamiliarity. Yes, this is hard for any grown-up, and especially tough if you live in the managerial bubble. That’s why you have to make it a personal goal to seek out new sources, mix up your milieus, and rearrange your references.

Get out of your own skin - It’s not enough to mix it up with the rich resources available out in the world – you also have to stir up the passions, dreams, and projects lying dormant inside yourself. Our ideas are formed by the world around us. If we fail to change our context, how can we possibly expect to create new ideas?

Where do ideas come from? You won’t get the great ideas you need from the vice president of strategy or the head of new product development. They’ve got hurdle rates to consider, budgetary constraints to navigate, and lots of competing claims on their time, attention, and political support…

And you definitely can’t wait for great ideas to come from the CEO. He or she may be at the top of the heap, but that doesn’t mean a thing when it comes to generating the best thinking. By the time most CEOs actually make it to the top, they’re running on intellectual fumes, having spent their creativity in the jobs they had that propelled them to the top…

Where do great ideas come from?

• New hires –fresh green recruits that have not been lulled by the daily operations of the workplace
• People on the Periphery – distributed close to the customers, these people are not so stifled by the corporate roadblocks
• Front-Line Workers – the tech reps and call-service reps working directly with the customers, the developers and testers working directly with the product
• Customers – they may not know what they need, but they know what they like and if you show it to them, they will quickly tell you what they think
• Great Companies in Other Industries – the hard truth is, there aren’t any new ideas. There are only new applications and smart twists to old ones.

Recommendations
Get out and seek those on the edge, the new hires, the front-line workers, the customers and take a look at other industries. Ideas are not going to find you in your office – you have to get out and find them.

Get the book. It is a quick read, proceeds go to charity, and it will help open your mind to new ways of re-conceiving your world. Yes, you will find some passages that don’t strike you – but deal with it, we are a diverse community and you may actually find that they will come back to you later – because that is where new ideas come from – getting out of our comfort zone.