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Innovation Culture at KAYAK | Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored

FastCompany

Some of the editors of Fast Company were given a chance to bring a favorite innovator to the stage to talk about the founding principles of their company. Tyler Gray, Editorial Director, Digital, Fast Company picked Paul English, Chief Technology Officer and Cofounder, KAYAK.

In his introduction, Gray said that English is what’s known in business as a “weirdo.” He’s got a clicker on the outside of his office (like the kind that bouncers use to count how many people are coming in to a bar). He got it because he doesn’t like large meetings. When he sees 10 or more people in a room who pops in to see what they’re doing - three of you couldn’t do that? More people in a meeting are just more people who can say no.

That’s not the only iconic wackiness he’s added to the 162 person company. There’s a red phone in the dev area – if it rings its a problem with the site and it can’t be answered by a customer service rep, it has to be answered by a developer.

English credits a lot of his companies success (14 million app downloads,  100 million queries/month, profitable since 2008) to hiring the right people and giving them permission to fail. If someone isn’t failing or making mistakes, they’re not innovative. I don’t want 10 person meetings deciding thing. Taking risks is a requirement. We give people ridiculous power to try things and change things.

He looks for people who are fast and good, but also really fun. People who have past successes in different domains – he’s hired people (in part) because they had an Olympic gold medal, claimed a national foosball champion, or became an international grand chess master.At KAYAK it’s team first, customer second, efficiency third. English is working hard to foster the culture that inspires the best work.

English does hand off a lot of the creative to people who he trusts to take risks, but he stays involved in the business. He answers emails, takes phone calls from the millions of users who come to the site.

He says their ads are part of their risk-taking culture.

Like this one – the character is based on a real person who bullied the creative director in high school. He called the bully up to get permission to use his name and then gave a casting and makeup team a Facebook photo to create the character from:

BTW: This is the bully’s real Facebook photo (Revenge is sweet, huh?)

English says, it’s all about knowing when to make rules and know when to let go. It’s very liberating as a manager.

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Leigh Householder, VP/Managing Director of Innovation Strategy | April 18th, 2012 | 0 Comments

Meet Generation Flux | Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored

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Ok, so we know by now that Fast Company is seriously pushing this idea of Generation Flux – the open-minded, daring, flexible, and visionary people of all ages who thrive in today’s ever-more-chaotic business climate. What can we learn from them and how they work? Robert Safian, Editor, Fast Company, brought three of his favorites to the stage to find out:

  • Kate Brodock, CMO, Girls in Tech
  • Bertil Chappuis, Partner, McKinsey & Company
  • Liya Kebede, Model, Actress, Creator and Designer of lemlem

Brodock has one of those resumes that at first glance makes no sense – it’s a chaotic sampling of different things that interested her over time. The connector was a sense of personal activism – wanting to be part of changing or impacting something bigger. To her, that resume looks like a progressive opportunity to fix things. A lot of members of Generation Flux have that same kind of job-hopping, career-changing, identity-shifting background.

Chappuis is a management consultant. Dark suit, slicked back hair (he actually said the word rubric twice in the first :30 seconds). He doesn’t think the title of Generation Flux belongs on him, but Fast Company puts him there because he confidently works from a blank canvas – constantly cheffing up new ways to add value.

Liya starts to bring the common thread together – Generation Flux sees something they can contribute to and figures out how to do it. They’re life hackers.

One hallmark of GF is that Information Junkie gene – they love to know what’s hot and what’s next. They can be paralyzed by FOMO (fear of missing out). Safian asked the panel how they deal with it and embrace the chaos. The answers sounded deceptively simple – filters and folders, intentionally disconnecting and – all you business travelers will nod at this one: loving the time you spend on planes (where no one can get to you).

They seem to really love chaos. Juggling a million things is energizing. Being trapped in traffic is agony.

Chappuis says to successfully navigate a flux career, people need to be able to answer one question: What value are you adding (this week, this month). When you’re navigating through multiple organizations for relatively short periods of time, that’s the reputation you build.

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Leigh Householder, VP/Managing Director of Innovation Strategy | April 18th, 2012 | 0 Comments

The Team at Second City on Co-Creation | Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored

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…Or, the post in which we play Dave Sonderman’s favorite new game.

Brett Mannes is a producer at Second City Communications (how cool of a job is that?)

Second City has been making comedy for 50 years. In that time, they’ve been co-creating they just call it improv. Here’s how Mannes described how it works:

  • On stage all they have is their team and chairs
  • They build improv by asking for input from the audience
  • That shapes and builds the show
  • In short: Co-creating with an audience gets them to a product they could have never got to another way

Now a Facilitator Named Sue has us play a game:

Gather a group of three people:

  • Person 1: Take two minutes to describe the most amazing party you could create. A party that will be remembered for years.
  • Persons 2 & 3: Your job is to meet every response with no, we should…

Then:

  • Person 2: Your turn to describe the party…
  • Persons 1 & 3: Your job is to meet every response with yes, but…

Checkin here:

What effect did the no, we should have? It left the ideator thinking they needed to go back to the drawing board or give in and do something entirely different. What about the yes, but?  For some it forced them to make the idea better, but generally had the same negative effect.

No is a great answer for a lot of questions, but it’s not a great answer for ideas.

Try it again:

  • Person 3: Describe your party
  • Persons 1 & 2: New rule of engagement, respond with yes and…

And, of course, the experience builds bigger and bigger ideas and people lean in. Yes and shares the risk and the success – it’s how we accept, acknowledge and add to ideas.

The hard part is that you lose control of the idea.  That’s uncomfortable.  But that’s where innovation happens – when seemingly disparate ideas or entities come together to create an exchange.

Four more helpful tenants of co-creation at Second City:

  • Love every idea for a minute (try it on, you might be able to find the one piece of it that could actually move forward)
  • How you do the work impacts what you get
  • Bring a brick (a small idea we can build on) – not a cathedral (an exhaustive plan we have to accept or reject)
  • At Second City, conversations are better than monologues by about a billion
lhouseholder
Leigh Householder, VP/Managing Director of Innovation Strategy | April 18th, 2012 | 0 Comments

Brands as Content Creators | Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored

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Ellen McGirt, Senior Writer, Fast Company, is hosting a very cool panel about how brands are using content to build relationships:

  • Bob Bowman, President and CEO, MLB Advanced Media
  • Noah Brier, Cofounder, Percolate
  • Scott Roen, VP Digital Marketing and Innovation, American Express

Roen says content is more like service than sales or advertising. It’s a way to start a dialog with customers and prospects in a way that we could have never done before. One thing content has done for American Express is let them innovate beyond the company’s initial or core business. Of course, they are and will remain a credit card company, but increasingly they’re becoming a total resource for small business.

Brier says we had to become content creators. On social networks, there’s no place for traditional advertising. We have to be a natural part of the ecosystem – creating, tweeting, talking the way a person would.

Both advertising and content start the same way – understand the people, the culture, the context. But advertising doesn’t always work at that level of human connection – the product pushes forward. In true content creation, you have to deliver things people want and value.

Open Forum: The Small Business Community

Open Forum is a community of small business owners that was inspired by the physical world. This was before Twitter and  Foursquare. Facebook was still closed (just for college students). At that time, American Express was hosting small business events all around the country. At the events, they saw that people were veraciously consuming the content and walking around networking like mad. They’d leave with stacks of business cards.

It just made sense to bring it online. Today, they have 200 experts giving ~2 million people/month ideas, advice and connections. The community is still growing – 100% year over year.

Roen points to three things that helped them succeed:

  • Mission driven team: They’re shared goal is helping people succeed (not selling credit cards)
  • Decentralized organization: People are empowered throughout the company to try different things
  • Involved leadership: That’s what motivates employees. At a recent hackathon, C-level execs were looking at code with developer

Percolate: Social prompts for brands

Brier is often asked the same question by brand managers:  What should I tweet? He said it’s a funny question from a company that can send cereal to any story in the world. But he realized that companies have no interests – at least not the ways that people do.

Percolate is a social tool for brand managers. Its algorithms – interests graphs – help prompt a brand on what to say, what to share.

The tools can only do so much. Brands need to really see themselves the way people do. People who work at the brands think the brand is boring. But people on the outside think its this amazing company – full of stories.  Sometimes an outside voice can help you see what’s really there.

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Leigh Householder, VP/Managing Director of Innovation Strategy | April 18th, 2012 | 0 Comments

The Evolving Relationship Between People and Technology | Ad Age Digital Conference

AdAge

About the speaker:

Gregg HeardGregg Heard is the VP of brand identity and design at AT&T. Gregg has been in the branding game for 22+ years on both the corporate side at AT&T, prior to that at Philips, and on the agency side brands including Logitech, Sony, IBM, Harper Collins, Caterpillar, Revo Sunglasses and UPS.

Smartphone adoption is now at ~50% in the US and dominate new phone purchases. This handheld technology has changed the way we interact with places, things, and one another. Greg believes that there are 4 types of digital interactions spurred by smartphone technology.

Digital Intimacy: Simply, it means we are closer with our friends and family even when we are apart.

Digital Kinship: Creating new connections and new types of shared interests that allow us to break down barriers between generations, interests.

Digital Guardianship: We’re more productive, even when we are pressed for time. It’s a simple message “Hey, I just landed, I’ll be home for dinner”

Digital Heroism: We have high-quality content available to us at any time. It allows us to create learning moments.

People ultimately love their handheld technology, but don’t have the same affection for the carrier. In fact, Greg compared it to the relationship between buying a car and then purchasing insurance. Buying a car is fun and sexy, much like getting a new phone. On the other hand, the interaction with purchasing insurance is not quite as exciting, similar to that of working with your mobile carrier. There’s a couple of reasons for that:

  • Overwhelming and confusion
  • A neccessary inconvenience
  • Lack of transparency
  • Unclear added value

In an effort to change this paradigm, AT&T is working to “humanize” their marketing approach. There are 4 key ways they hope to humanize their brand:

Look: Starts with a focus on the look of the brand. AT&T has announced new plans for a flagship retail space on Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

Speak: AT&T moving away from generic, impersonal text marketing. One example includes a text message alert that is sent when a customer leaves the country to alert them of potential charges begins with “Hey Globetrotter…” versus “You are now subject to…”

Sound: AT&T is beginning to brand sounds. Sonic accents that you will recognize in ads and in the technology. Think audio

Behave: The new branding strategy is also focusing on how tech can bring possibility to people’s lives: “it’s what you do with what we do.”

tdurbin
Tyler Durbin, Marketing Manager | April 18th, 2012 | 0 Comments
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