Many companies sell average products to average people. It’s easy to be in the middle. Neither greatly loved nor hated, they just want to get by with enough sales to generate a good profit. They prefer to avoid controversy or the cutting edge of their industry. They don’t generally stand out too much, but instead try to keep the status quo. Comfort is good for them.

But what if you do want to stand out? What if you do want to garner attention and distinguish yourself from among your competition? Then you need to be remarkable. You need to have something about your product that is different enough that people take notice. One way to do this is employ the process of edgecraft.

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s book Free Prize Inside and it has me thinking a lot about edgecraft. What is it? It’s finding the edge of a problem — something that will make your product or service more remarkable. Pushing the limits. Godin mentions that in order to stand out, you can’t just be a restaurant that has moderately good-looking staff. You need to have supermodels or weight lifters or identical twins. Something that stands out.

So think about this in relation to your business. What small tweaks can you make that pushes your product closer to the edge? Something that’s easily implemented, something that you think you can actually do — not just something that sounds good. Where’s the hole in your market? What is your competition missing that you can grab and implement?

Sometimes it’s the small innovations that propel products to the top of consumers’ interest. It’s putting Silk soy milk in the refrigerated section next to the regular milk. It’s making invisible braces or pumping up water with vitamins. Think about it in relation to your product. Take some time to think about the way-out, seemingly crazy ideas and some that are more manageable. Somewhere in there you just might find something that’s right for your business.

Then make it happen. If you want to grow, break free of that comfortable position you find yourself in. Get noticed. Become remarkable. And then come back and tell us about it.

image: morgueFile

When you take a creative idea and add your energy to it, then it becomes innovation. The very term innovation, according to Webster.com, means ”a new idea, method, or device”. So being innovative is when you come up with a new way of thinking or newly developed method, or a newly operational device.

Business owners need to be innovative and full of energy so that they can have create ideas to meet the needs of their customers. Innovation is what we saw when Thomas Edison created the light bulb by not giving up when he faced failure. Instead he continued putting in his energy until his creative idea became an innovation.

The video below encourages business innovation. What are some ways that you are innovative with your business?

PimpYourWork.com

Below is an interesting slideshow entitled “Visual and Creative Thinking: What we’ve learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka”. It has 43 slides that shows us how to be creative in this fast-paced modern world.

I’ve talked about ThinkFree before, and since then have been using it pretty much exclusively over MS Office.  It rocks.  It’s light, responsive, and really has only the things you need to get the job done.

I’ve been using ThinkFree Premium as an online office organizer, I put all the docs related to a project in there, even if TFP doesn’t open them (like images or music).  Why?  Because they will be synced.  I can jump to another computer and get to them.  And if I don’t have TF or MS Office or eve OpenOffice on that machine…no problem, I have the U3 version for my flash drive.  Before I get to the "good stuff" read these excerpts from TJ Kang CEO of ThinkFree’s post on their blog:

…But it was also a serious wake-up call for all of us in the Office 2.0 realm. The reality is that all of us, even the most well-connected, sometimes find ourselves in a disconnected space, a place where there simply is no network we can access. While there’s great freedom in having your docs in the cloud and being able to access them from anywhere and share them with others, if you can’t get into the cloud you’re sunk. No, it’s worse than that; it’s more like being deprived of air. You expect it to be there; you depend on it; and when that connectivity is not there you’re drowning.

[snip]

So this year, while others were talking about form factors of various hardware devices and whether this size screen or that particular screen orientation was more conducive to the mobile worker, I felt obliged to point out that none of that really matters if you can’t get to your files. You need to make it easy for mobile workers to get to their files at any time ― and that means even when disconnected from the network. That means developing software that can elegantly and effortlessly keep whatever device you’re working on synchronized with the files in the cloud ― so that when you wander into those corridors of disconnectivity, whether it’s a hotel room where the WiFi is down or on a plane or wherever, you’ve still got access to your files. You’ve still got that oxygen with you, and nothing will stop you from getting your work done.

[snip]

In the end, though, you really have to experience the elegance of ThinkFree Premium to appreciate it. Ismael Ghalimi, who runs the O2Con show and is the single greatest evangelist for O2.0 gave me a chance to share that experience towards the conclusion of the conference. I stood up before the audience and started presenting on the big screen. I showed the files I had up on the ThinkFree storage site, showed how easy it was to edit them online.

And then I pulled the plug and disconnected my laptop from the network. This year, though, instead of having another Bill Gates moment, I just opened the synchronized copy of the presentation I had been working on, right there on my laptop, and continued presenting to the audience. You could feel everyone else gulping for air on my behalf, but I had my oxygen right there and I just kept on working. Source: ThinkFree Blog » We have Seen the Future, and it is Moving . . . .

This is my presentation done in ThinkFree Show and embedded here with ThinkFree Docs:

You ready to give it a shot?  I have 100 invites into the private beta of ThinkFree Premium.  TF Premium combines TF Online with a downloaded Java client (Windows, Mac and Linux).  Frankly, it’s awesome.  It is light, use it on battery and it doesn’t drain you flat.  It works, and it syncs the files.  Yes, there are more tweaks and features needs…it’s beta…but it is solid enough for everyday work.

If you want in, and I know you do, just e-mail me at tris AT b5media DOT com subject: ThinkFree Invite and I’ll hook you up.

 Yeah this isn’t going to pimp your work anytime soon, but just read this:

Potentially, atomic-level storage or switching could result in incredibly tiny computers. With atomic storage, you could fit a 1,000 trillion bits of information in an iPod, according to IBM estimates. (Editors’ note: This article originally had an incorrect figure for the number of bits–we were off by several zeros. The correct number is indeed 1,000 trillion.) Source: Can data be stored on single atoms? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Yeah that’s a lot.  Is it impossible?  No.  Impractical?  Yes.  But remember so was electricity and computers at one point in time.  The first step is the dream, the second is showing it can be done.  Now we just have to work on really doing it.

When was the last time you were in a meeting or at a conference when less than half of the people in the room had computers with them?  I, honestly, would have to go back probably seven years.  Today laptops in meetings are almost de rigueur, but does that make this a good thing?  I’ve talked a bit on my blog about laptops in the classroom (February 2007: The technology in classrooms debate never seems to end! and March 2006: No laptops in my classroom!) and some of the same discussions apply here.  I caught an article in the NYT featuring Dean Hachamovitch of the IE at MSFT:

Everyone has their own way of handling the laptop question when running a meeting. When it’s me, I may sometimes glance over people’s shoulders to see if their screens look topic-related. Or if I see people buried in their laptops, I may ask for their opinions to see if they’re engaged.

Some speakers start a meeting with “Laptops off, please.” Others might chirp, “Excuse me, we’re having a meeting here,” if people are making more eye contact with their screens than with the speaker. Once, one of my bosses slammed the lid of my PC down in a fury because he thought I wasn’t paying attention.

Tablet PCs — the kind that sit flat on your lap and are used with a stylus instead of a keyboard — seem to be more socially acceptable. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a big dark rectangular barrier that you’re putting up between yourself and the speaker. Maybe it’s because we all grew up taking notes with paper and pen, so it’s more familiar. In any case, you can still do your e-mail, get an I.M. about dinner plans, pay your bills or surf. Source: Minding the Meeting, or Your Computer? - New York Times

I was hard pressed to pick out a nice juicy quote (as you know that is my style after all) … it is a thought-provoking article.  How present are we in class, a meeting, a conference session when we’re madly typing notes or live blogging?  This doesn’t even get into tuning out to listen to the back channel.

There isn’t an easy answer here.  I will state here that it is all in how you use the tool.  I’ve taken wicked good notes in MindManager that became something the team used for a long time later as the core of later strategy documents.  I’ve also frittered away time in boring meetings chatting with friends or reading feeds.  Now, am I making good use of my time or being rude?

Live blogging at conferences, which is something I do a lot of, something that is really hard to do.  So hard in fact that when I’m at Office 2.0 next week, I’m going to try not to.  I’m going to take notes (probably in OneNote) and blog later.  Might might take longer to get posts up, but maybe they will be better.

As kids today become used to using computers in class, I see whole dynamics evolving around how to use laptops well.  Of course back in the day during a boring class I’d spend time doodling in the margins of my paper … so I guess some things never change.

With all the new social media tools out there, you might wonder if I could use stuff like Ning or even Facebook for business.  Well I guess if Twitter could be for business…, Chris Brogan thinks Facebook might just be the ticket…

Chris Brogan: What if you had a completely turnkey solution for managing multi-threaded interactions with teams? What if this application handled scheduling, status updates, RSS feeds from collaborative blogs, group messaging, 1-to-1 messaging, photo and screen capture sharing, and more? What if it permitted secure group communication for people inside and outside of your company? And what if you didn’t have to convince your IT department to install it?

Sounds powerful, right? Sounds useful.

Facebook Does All This Source: An Unlikely FREE Collaboration Management App - lifehack.org

I’m not so sure.  Okay I think I might have some bias here since Facebook was designed for lighter topics, but link the newcomer Pownce, maybe having your social activities and your business activities in the same site might be helpful, maybe more efficient.  I made that point when writing about Pownce on my own blog last night, but as I reflect on it what if you have business people who you add to your network of friends on Facebook (because you’d have to to collaborate) and they start seeing a side of you that you’d rather them not see.

It becomes, perhaps, a question of boundaries.  Not really if Facebook can be a collaboration tool, I’m sure it could, it’s a question of whether it should be used as one.

What do you think?  Facebook for collaboration?  Twitter for business?  Pownce, really cool only because Kevin Rose is involved?

Should there be business versions of these tools?  You tell me.

These last few months, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in medical facilities, mostly working preventive things (nothing scary here; not to worry). There’s been a big change in practice where I go and see my doctor: a whole lot of technology has been added to the workplace.

Instead of paper records, my medical history is not being entered directly into PC’s in the examination room. Upon visiting other areas outside of the doctors office such as the lab, my information is instantly available to the practitioners there.

When longer commentary needs to be done on my medical records, my doctor uses a Treo 650 smartphone to dial up a dictation number where she records what’s needed.

When I need a prescription, the prescription is loaded into the system and automatically faxed to my pharmacy before I ever leave the doctors office.

Yes, it helps the doctors office.

But the additional technology has also helped me.

You must innovate. Your company must innovate. If you don’t innovate, you will be gobbled up in the competitive global marketplace.

Um…maybe not.

Challenging this assumption is Dan Saffer in Business Week’s Outside Shot column (subscription required).

Innovation in and of itself, he contends, is a hollow mantra that will fail in the end because companies are simply after the new and the different - and not the meaningful.

Meeting needs of customers through innovation, not just providing “purple ketchup,” is what will enable innovation to succeed. What we innovate must make our lives or work better — not just be a new and different feature that makes ketchup purple.

When I was enjoying myself in sunny Costa Rica on vacation, the United States East Coast enjoyed one of those great consecutive snow blowouts that snarled traffic, cancelled school, and created general havoc for everyone.

Jet Blue got caught in the crosshair as well, stranding passengers on planes out on the runways for hours, canceling a thousand flights, and estimating their cost to the storm of over $30-million dollars. Much has been made of the service, the mea culpa of Jet Blue’s CEO, and some active discussion about passengers having a Bill of Rights.

The future is hard to predict. Three weeks ago, Jet Blue was sailing along and enjoying the business of business. Who could have foretold that their scheduling systems would get caught in a frenzy, that something this big would hit along all of their routes, and that other failures in the airline passenger system would contribute to their misfortune?

Perhaps good disaster recovery people would have come close. But, in my experience, whatever scenarios people come up with will not be the scenario that actually happens.

You see, we don’t know what we don’t know.

The only thing we can prepare for is to build a disaster recovery process and ruthlessly test it against a variety of scenarios to see where the process can be improved. Process preparation will trump scenario preparation.

Jet Blue can take this real life learning experience and test it against their recovery process and see where things could improve.

How’s your recovery process?