Innovative? Creative? Visionary?

I like to think I'm a creative guy: full of ideas, thinking of new things to do and new ways to do things. Heck, I'm even a songwriter and musician. But, as I think more about it, I wonder: Is there's a difference to being creative and being innovative? Or a visionary? And can you be one without being the other? Or is one better than the other or are they just different shades of the same color? I mean, if I write a song — one no ones ever heard before and that sounds like nothing else ever heard — is that innovative or creative? Or am I visionary?

Brigham Young University professor Jeff Dyer and others have been doing research (read more here and here) to understand just what makes the innovators different. Or, more correctly, what do they do different and what can we do to be more innovative in the same game-changing, big idea way. In the article and interview, the words I asked about above show up: creative, visionary, innovator as well as other words that I'd like to associate with myself. But there are also many more practical and pragmatic words used to describe people like Jeff Bezos, AG Lafley, Meg Whitman and Michael Dell (granted, these guys aren't Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso or Elvis Costello, all people I'd call creative, innovative and visionary in an instant). Words like: associating, study, challenge, questioning, observing, experiment, persistence and networking. They also assert that two-thirds of a person's ability to innovate is learned and the other one-third is tied to how the person is hard-wired.

So in my non-academic way of looking at things, I think that I'll choose to agree with one of my questions above: I think that innovative, creative and visionary are different shades of the same color. I'll go a little further and add that I think that you can't be one of these things without being the others and that perhaps it's a chosen vocation or the way these traits are acquired that defines the label: artists are creative, academics are visionary, business people are innovative (although I don't typically like labels and I'm not applying them here).

And I take encouragement in the fact that you can work at these things to become better at them or develop them further. Speaking from my experience as a songwriter, I know that my song writing can become less creative if I am not seeking to be innovative and I am less fulfilled in both process and outcome if I am not making an effort to be visionary in crafting something that hasn't been done before.

Blog or Diary

My last post is almost a year old and I don't know if I can honestly tell anyone I blog. Or if I ever blogged. I had an older post where I did a little whining about no one reading my stuff and that, really, since it wasn't read by anyone but me, or more correctly, written by anyone but me, then it is a diary not a blog. And I used that as an excuse to stop writing anything else. I also used that as a reason to use poor grammar and not follow rules like not starting sentences with conjunctions or prepositions.

However, in thinking this through further, I realize that I actually do create and distribute a lot of content, share a lot of opinions and, I'm pretty sure, add some intellectual value to my clients, colleagues and friends. So what I'm going to set out to do as my end of the first quarter resolution is try and centralize all my activities through my blog and see if, finally, I can have more than a diary.

I won't kid you (or kid myself since, at this point, this is still a diary) that the pressure is on. That said, my goal is to have a hundred followers by the end of the year. I don't know if that's realistic or not but I first typed in a "few" hundred and then dropped it down.

So begins my journey...

The Less Influential Influential

I found this article from Knowledge@Wharton, the magazine from the UPenn B-school of the same name to be incredibly interesting. The key take away for me was, in short, that it is not the person who says, "Listen to me!" that gets listened to the most but rather the person who is asked, "What do you think?". It makes all the sense in the world but yet it was so eye-opening to see it represented this way.

I'd hypothesize that one of the differences in that the self-reported opinion leaders are more focused on themselves and how others perceive them than the Physician 184 types, who are focused and committed to their vocation, interest, cause or what have you. Maybe they're more interested in accomplishment and advancement related to their passion than self accomplishment and self advancement.

Particularly interesting to me — and I've been thinking about it a lot as it relates to me, my colleagues — is the thought put forth by one of the researcher that contends "...self-reported opinion leaders are less interested in what others are doing...'I know I'm important. I don't need to care about what other people are doing.' "

As stated in the article, "...just because people think they're important doesn't mean it's true." I'll keep my eyes open for the second study to see if it still plays out the way it did in the first one.

Luxury Versus The Empowered Consumer

Here's a link to an article on the Marketing Daily site written by Greg Furman. I posted a response that's shown at the bottom and thought I'd add a little more here. What I alluded to in my comment on the article but I'll say more boldly here is this: most luxury brands just plain don't have a clue.

Why? They look at the world only through a lens of how they perceive themselves; they are the center of the universe. Greg tells us not to worry, that this universe is safe and, at worst, just inconvenienced by the economic turmoil everywhere; if you're a luxury brand, just keep doing what you're doing and the world will come back around.

Some other thoughts:

• If I have a closet full of Armani suits, are they luxuries? Or just my clothes?
• If I spend $2500 a year on new golf clubs because I'm passionate and competitive about the game, is that a luxury or a necessity?
• If I spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a Tesla, a brand that's been around for only a couple of years, how important is heritage?
• By this definition, ''the best that the mind of man can imagine and the most sophisticated hand of the virtuoso craftsman can achieve", is Juicy Couture a luxury brand?

In short, I think luxury brands is a misnomer; what we really have are products and services that people are willing to spend a premium or super-premium price on in order to get some level of satisfaction, gratification, enjoyment or experience from. But that is in the eye of the beholder not the purveyor.