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April 21, 2009

Defining 99%: Part Two

Business Etiquette Rules

Summary

You can read Part One of our Defining 99% recap here

You can read Part One of our Defining 99% recap here.

Recently, Behance held its first annual 99% conference, a gathering of business and creative leaders that was specifically devoted to mining best practices for “making ideas happen.” As speakers like Obama’s Design Director for New Media Scott Thomas, influential writer Seth Godin, and Echoing Green President Cheryl Dorsey took the stage, a slew of insights emerged, and we’re sharing them in this recap series. So, without further ado…

1. “Thrash at the beginning.”

Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin devoted his compelling presentation to talking about “thrashing,” aka the primal fear/rebellion that any client, writer, programmer, designer, etc ,goes through before shipping a product. This is the deadly period when the manager who hasn’t paid attention to the project for six months jumps back into the mix demanding new features long after signoff, throwing into motion an agonizing process of backtracking, ill-considered revisions, and so forth. Sound familiar?

Godin’s advice is to front-load your thrashing. Assume that everyone needs to be at the table initially as you lay out a product feature set or assemble design wire frames, and that you must hash out anything and everything up front. Then, get everyone’s signoff and carve it in stone. When they try to thrash at the end (and they will!), revisit that signoff document and don’t back down. 

2. “Become an asset-based thinker.”

Cheryl Dorsey is the President of Echoing Green, an organization that has helped to launch game-changing programs and businesses – Teach for America, City Year, and the Freelancer’s Union, for example – by awarding seed funding to promising social entrepreneurs. Having given roughly $27 million to over 450 entrepreneurs, Echoing Green decided to analyze the personalities of the folks they had funded, and see if they could distill a set of common traits.

It turns out this select group of highly successful leaders did in fact have a common set of characteristics, and one of the most intriguing was the notion of “asset-based thinking.” Echoing Green found that these entrepreneurs were hard-wired, in a sense, for positive thinking and action – where others see problems, they see opportunities. Rather than focusing on the assets they don’t have, they focus on what can be done with the assets they do have. No surprise, they get more done. 

3. “Feed your professional growth with personal projects.”

We’ve all probably been in a position where we experience impediments to realizing truly innovative projects in our professional lives. Ji Lee, now the Creative Director of Google Creative Lab, described his frustrations when he was working in the agency world: Due to certain constraints, most often risk-averse clients, he wasn’t able to complete projects that really nourished his creativity.

Sick of being disgruntled, Ji decided to launch a personal project that he could execute exactly the way that he wanted to. After a substantive amount of off-hours work, his graffiti-inspired, crowd-sourcing Bubble Project ended up taking off, garnering coverage from major players in the blogosphere and on television. Perhaps more importantly, though, the challenges of the project taught him how to engage a community with his work and how to generate publicity. Ultimately, he carried this knowledge back to his work environment, and it helped fuel his professional advancement. 

You can read Part One of our Defining 99% recap here.


***The Behance team researches productivity and leadership in the creative world. These entries are adapted and edited by Jocelyn K. Glei from the Behance team's past articles and research. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network, the Action Method project management application, the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.