Genesis

Over the past few weeks, I have had a number of people ask me two questions...

     - How did I come up with the idea?
     - Why am I still so passionate about the idea?

In this column I lay out the steps I took and the experiences that have influenced me and have made me so passionate about this subject.
     While I hope you find it interesting and educational, I also hope you notice...

     - How long it took.
     - The convoluted nature of the path.
     - The role that experiences and conversations played.
     - The importance of synthesis in the process.

The thing that started me off on this whole quest was reading Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" (a book you should own) in the Spring of 1990. I say this because it was in that book that I learned that indignation was a good thing - a good source of ideas. The point of the book is that too many products and services are unnecessarily hard to use. His book taught me to notice poorly-designed products and blame my troubles on the product, not myself. Ever since I read that book, I have been bugging the crap out of my wife with my ideas for how things could be made better. The Recognition, Not Recall principle also came out of that book.
     Two years later I enrolled in the MBA program in Washington University. One of the things that Wash U. did a lot of was bring in guest speakers who would talk about creativity and innovation. I learned a great deal from listening to people like Russ Ackoff and Dave Buck, but found that many of the techniques that they mentioned weren't that good for generating ideas for new products and services, which was what I was most interested in.
     This dissatisfaction led me to start looking around for someone or some book who addressed the problem of generating ideas for entrepreneurs.
     After graduating from Wash U. in 1994, I joined Andersen Consulting. In late 1994 I bought Doug Hall's "Jump Start Your Brain." Again, I found that while I enjoyed this book, it wasn't that useful for me as an entrepreneur. It was good for helping people refine, extend, or build upon ideas, but it wasn't good for generating new-to-the-world ideas.
     I was still dissatisfied and kept looking around.
     In the Spring of 1995, while I was still with Andersen, two important things happened to me.
     First, I was given a copy of Darryl Conner's "Managing at the Speed of Change." This book taught me about resistance to change and how people and companies need a "burning platform" to force them to change.
     Second, I attended what had to be the worst creativity presentation that has ever been given. This got me thinking "If this idiot can make money talking about creativity, then certainly I can." He had absolutely nothing original to say. The gist of the presentation was to have the right attitude. While this may be a good idea, it does not answer the "How?" question.
     This experience got me thinking about what I could contribute to the creativity conversation. Given my background, I decided to focus on my knowledge of cognitive psychology and change.
     That Summer, two friends started a children's clothing store. From the moment that I heard about their store I was nervous because they had nothing to offer. They just opened the store because they wanted to open a store. The store struggled from the beginning and eventually closed.
     Later that year I had a conversation with Pat Sullivan. In it I asked him how he came up with his ideas. What struck me was how often he used the terms "pain" and "problem" and how the idea for Act came out of his own frustration. This conversation stuck with me and persuaded me that I should work for Pat if I ever got the chance. This chance came in April of 1996 and I ended up working at SalesLogix for two years.
     Toward the end of my time at SalesLogix, I joined a discussion list that Guy Kawasaki ran for his book "Rules for Revolutionaries." I ended up acting as a reader for RFR. While I really liked what I read, in my notes I would always put the note "How?" I felt that what Guy saying was good in principle but hard to apply. It was a little theoretical.
     As a result, I started collecting notes for what I called "The Revolutionary's Handbook." The idea was to create a companion to RFR that would answer all of the "How?" questions that I had asked when reading the book.
     I spent a year collecting notes and ideas for "The Revolutionary's Handbook" and, in the Summer of 1998, was asked by a friend named Russ Roberts to try to take some of that material and turn it into a course that I could teach at Washington University.
     The course that I came up with was called The Idea. The premise was that most entrepreneurship courses assume that you already have The Idea or treat The Idea as no big deal. However, I knew from my own experience and conversations with other entrepreneurs that often the hardest part was coming up with The Idea and knowing if what you had was any good. I decided to develop a creativity course that was focused on the needs of entrepreneurs - a creativity course that could flow into a traditional entrepreneurship course.
     One of the topics that I came up with for the class (on August 19, 1998) was called "What a Pain in the Ass!" The idea was to help people identify latent demand by looking for dissatisfaction. The goal was to answer the question "How do you know if a market exists?" This came out of my understanding of the 10X rule of innovation that says that an innovation has to be 10X better than what it replaces in order to be a success. As examples, I listed the auto repair and home repair industries as ones where latent demand likely exists due to significant consumer dissatisfaction.
     I also mad the point that passion and faith are intertwined and used the quote "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." as an example.
     It was also in late August of 1998 that I came up with the idea that became my Signals, Noises, and Pain column.
     I continued to think about my "What a Pain in the Ass!" idea as part of my Revolutionary's Handbook body of knowledge. For example, on May 25, 1999 I made the observation that Pain was a key to a guaranteed success. I noted that fads can and do succeed, but they are much more risky because there is no "burning platform" (a term from Darryl Conner's book).
     It was during the Summer of 1999 that things really took off.
     First, I had a conversation with a VC friend of mine named Mark Lewis. Mark and I would meet every two weeks or so and talk about the deals that he was seeing. Quite often he would ask my opinion about a deal or sector. While I had something to say about conventional technology deals, I had little to say about the dot-com plans that he was seeing. The problem was that neither he nor I knew what to make of them. We couldn't figure out whether they would succeed or fail.
     At the same time, my father-in-law was asking me my opinion about the IPOs that he was being offered through Schwab. Again, since most of these IPOs were for dot-coms like Quokka Sports, I really couldn't tell him much. These were not conventional technology deals and thus my experience wasn't really relevant.
     I was also traveling at the time and was part of the RFR discussion list. Since I did not have my own laptop, I had to use AOL's Web mail client. At the time this was a very high-volume list and one evening in late July I had had enough. It was taking me hours just to monitor and clear out my inbox. I exclaimed "What a pain in the ass!" and an idea for a product popped into my head.
     All of these experiences got me thinking and, when combined with the work that I had been doing on "The Revolutionary's Handbook", turned into a new topic on August 26, 1999 that I called "What a Pain in the Ass!"
     I spent two months generating and shaping my ideas and published my first column, "What a Pain in the Ass!" on Guy Kawasaki's garage.com on October 25, 1999.
     I thought that Tom Peters would be interested in the topic since at the time I was reading "The Circle of Innovation". I sent him the link to the column and within a day he got back to me with this response...

CHRIS: I LOVE THE COLUMN. [JUST DOWNLOADED IT.] BY THIS NOTE, I'M ASKING THE TOMPETERS.COM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TO LINK US TO YOUR COLUMN AT GARAGE.COM. ALSO: INTERESTED IN DOING STUFF FOR US?? YES: I THINK YOU SHOULD MOVE AHEAD WITH THIS. - tom [peters]