Every company has a powder keg, that person who is emotionally volatile and prone to explosions without notice. Powder kegs tend to act irrationally, sometimes with only a limited understanding of the subject matter. They are the embodiment of knee-jerk. You don’t invite powder kegs to meetings, do you? Not if you can avoid it.

But guess what? You need powder kegs. You need to learn how to deal with them. And if you don’t have a single powder keg in your place of employment, you need to become one.

I talk a lot in this blog about the things that drive innovation. I don’t think I talk enough about the things that stall it. The biggest stalling agent to innovation might surprise you. It’s not our fear of the unknown, or organizational inefficiencies, or even ridiculously stupid legislative action. It’s our aversion to people we consider to be “unknown quantities.”

That’s a silly phrase, isn’t it? As if the sum total of any of a person’s traits – even only those related to her business acumen – could ever be known or quantified. As if a person’s predictability somehow correlates to the caliber of work that person is capable of producing. A known quantity? Forget desirable; is that even feasible?

A meeting filled with known quantities is likely to be a very boring meeting. And I’ll take it one step further: every memorable meeting that you’ve ever had was memorable because something unexpected happened. And that unexpected thing was likely facilitated by someone you consider to be an “unknown quantity” – a powder keg.

Powder kegs are disruptive. They approach logical issues with emotion. They become frustrated when they don’t understand what’s going on – and they will kill off procedural inefficiencies until they get what they need. They are blunt and brusque, and put things in a language that everyone can understand. And until their work satisfies their expectations, they’ll let everyone in a five mile radius know that they think the work they’re doing sucks.

Yes, they’re over the top sometimes. But here’s what you need to imagine. Your business is a sculptor. It has a whole lot of tools for carving stone – chisels, hammers, and awls of various descriptions, and so on – but none of them help free a chunk of marble from a quarry. The thing that makes a 9-foot marble statue possible is a strategically placed stick of dynamite that liberates a 10-foot hunk of rock from the ground. Is a stick of dynamite over the top sometimes? If you’re trying to carve fine details into your sculpture, yes. If you’re trying to get a 4-ton rock out of the ground, it’s the right tool for the job.

So you want to execute a great concept? You need to liberate a great concept from the brains of your so-called “known quantities,” who would otherwise hack at it with chisels. Your powder kegs will help with that.

Dealing with powder kegs is hardly an enviable task. But it’s manageable if you think about the nature of a powder keg:

• Generally, a powder keg sees things through a highly polarized lens. Things are right or wrong, good or bad, easy or impossible. Anything that falls in the middle of this spectrum must be broken down to its fundamental elements, which can each be evaluated as a binary value.
• If a powder keg senses something is wrong, they will not stop being upset about it until it is made right. Even if the work goes on to win awards, the powder keg will always speak derisively about it if at any point it failed to meet her standards. If the work is taking a different tack than what the powder keg demands, don’t try to get the powder keg to “suck it up” – she never will. Instead, try to use her logic to arrive at the conclusion that this direction is the right one.
• Powder kegs tend to have sizeable egos. Anything you can do to make them feel like the best ideas are their ideas, do it. The more influential the powder keg perceives herself to be, the happier and more manageable she will be.

That’s all well and good. But what if you don’t have a powder keg? How do you become one?

That, I’m afraid, is a question with no good answer. Not to pat myself on the back, but reading this blog is probably a good start. I also recommend finding people who are disruptive and asking what they read. Learn what disruption looks like. Then, when you see an opportunity for innovation, emulate the disruptors. Think to yourself, “What would Steve Jobs do in this situation?” That’s really the best advice I can give you (though perhaps some of my loyal readers will help me out with some tips on being disruptive? I’ll be your best friend forever).

As for me, I’m proud to be a powder keg. And I fully intend to keep on exploding big ol’ rocks from the ground.

Kablammingly yours,

–MS

Once upon a time there was a little Idea. It resided in the brain of a younger woman, just cutting her teeth at a gigantic company. And while the idea was perfectly content to be just a little Idea stored quietly in the recesses of an otherwise very active mind, it wondered – as all little Ideas do – what it might be like to be a really big Idea. A game-changer.

And so that little Idea started to put out its little anthropomorphic feelers to discover ways to be bigger. It started latching itself on to new information as it passed through the young woman’s brain, looking for that one perfect little speck of data – a trend, a statistic, an innovation, anything – that would give the little Idea purpose; a sense of direction. And because it was a steadfast little Idea, it wasn’t long before it had found a perfect piece of new information that it could latch onto and begin down the road to becoming a really big Idea.

That road wasn’t easy, of course. The little Idea had direction, but now it needed to scour the brain for as much relevant information as it could find to justify itself. Every new piece of information was carefully analyzed as it entered the brain, some of it added to the cause and some of it simply discarded. After a while, the little Idea began to notice that many of the items it had discarded were being tucked into the dark nether-regions of the brain, and the ones the Idea had deemed worthy were constantly active, combining with other pieces of information to spark new Ideas. These new micro Ideas all joined the little Idea’s cause. The brain was consumed with the little Idea, and little Idea was growing bigger every day!

The young woman who happened to own the brain that the little Idea called home eventually worked up the courage to present the Idea to her boss. Her boss, being somewhat older and a good bit more experienced, helped her to reshape her Idea, making it stronger. After a few months of collaboration, the Idea had changed significantly – it was more worldly, better informed, and extremely well informed. It had the support of her colleagues, who all loved the Idea and wanted to know how they could help. The little Idea had become a very big Idea indeed!

Now to put it to action. The young woman took her big Idea and turned it into a persuasive pitch. She thought her client would be crazy not to fall in love with the big Idea, and that they would want to throw scads of money at it for the privilege of calling it theirs. The whole thing made perfect sense, after all: the client hired the young woman’s agency to be innovative, and the big Idea was certainly that. Innovative and creative and never-been-done-before. It was a clear winner.

But when the client heard the pitch, their reaction wasn’t at all what the young woman had anticipated. They liked the idea, they said, but they didn’t think it was practical. In fact, they had a number of other pitches that maybe weren’t as big, but which were easier to put into motion. They were more familiar. They were safer Ideas. We’re sorry, the clients said, but this idea is too big for us.

The little Idea – which was not so little anymore – felt like the life had been sucked from it. It was angry and sad and confused. It kicked itself for being so big, or for not being big enough. It felt itself start to fade into the recesses of the young woman’s memory, replaced by disappointment and the sense that no idea would ever be as great, and no idea would ever be good enough to sell.

A year went by. The little Idea still hadn’t faded away entirely, but it had largely been forgotten. The young woman still worked at the same agency, and with the same client, though she hadn’t pitched another big Idea to them. But in that year, something had changed. The client took a good hard look at its competitors, and realized that its edict to enact only the practical ideas had given its competitors an edge. They called the agency in for a big meeting, and the young woman – though still relatively junior – was invited.

In the meeting, the company said that they had made a mistake. They hadn’t availed themselves of the young woman and her remarkable Idea, and now they were paying the price for it. They wanted to hear about the Idea again!

Of course, the Idea hadn’t remained sedentary this whole time. After all, it had been in the habit of scouring the brain for relevant bits of information, and old habits die hard. Having collected relevant data for a year, the Idea was in fact stronger than ever – and thankfully had not yet been thought up by a competitor already. The young woman presented her idea to the client a number of times over the course of the next month, each time to someone more senior than the last, until she was standing in front of the CEO himself, explaining the various intricacies and benefits the Idea had to offer.

This time, the company bought in. They threw money at the Idea by the handful. And when the Idea finally launched, it didn’t just change things for the company. It changed things for the whole world.

The moral: There is always a time for innovation, and that time is always right now. But if you are unable to innovate right now, for whatever reason, don’t let your idea die. Keep adding to it, growing it, distilling it, reshaping it, reframing it, and expanding it. You never know when you’re going to need it again.

As part of my day job, I get the opportunity to meet with some of the brightest young people this fine state of mine has to offer. Some of them are brilliant analysts, some are spectacular project planners, some I’m convinced could write code that would achieve world peace, if only they had the time. But I’ve noticed something about the brilliant set of my peer group, something almost all of them have in common: they’re all exceptionally good at something practical.

That’s kind of a big deal. A brilliant analyst is brilliant because she sees things in numbers that no one else sees. A brilliant project planner is brilliant because she’s exceptionally good at making people adhere to a strict schedule. A brilliant developer is brilliant because her code makes computers do crazy awesome things. Almost every brilliant youth that I’ve had the exceptional pleasure of meeting has been brilliant because they do something brilliantly.

Almost all of them.

Now me, I’m a big-picture kind of guy. (Stop rolling your eyes.) I’m the kind of guy whose particular area of expertise is pushing people to think bigger than they’re already thinking. I say things like “what if” and “what else”. And at an agency like mine, that’s a very good skill to have. But it’s not a skill the agency is lacking – they expect everyone they hire to have that kind of ability. Fortunately for me, I also happen to know a lot about social media, which is what got me the job.

I think young people today are at a disadvantage. I think we’re encouraged throughout our lives to be big-picture thinkers, only to graduate and realize that you can’t put “I want to push the envelope” on your resume. If I interview a candidate and have to justify hiring her to my boss, the conversation can’t be about how willing she is to learn – it has to be about what she can do brilliantly.

That’s kind of sad, in a way. Obviously the agency has an interest in hiring people who do great work; but what about the people who push others to turn great work into legendary work? The people who can’t draw for the life of them, but who know great design when they see it? The ones who don’t know what a project plan is, but can intuitively root out and eliminate inefficiencies? The ones who don’t know how to code, but who have ideas about how to make web applications more awesome?

What do those people put on their resumes?

So I have two pieces of advice. One is for young people who have graduated recently (or who will graduate in the near future), and one is for companies looking to hire smart young people.

For Young People: You all need to find one practical thing that you’re really good at. If you can walk into an interview and say confidently, “I’m better than 90% of my peers at _______,” you’re off to a better start than 90% of your peers. I know a lot of you are graduating with Bachelor’s degrees in marketing and English and journalism and liberal arts (the “impractical sciences,” as I call them), so what I want you to do is find one of the skills you learned in your studies and become an expert in it. Become the most proficient person you know in that field. Then start writing your resume.

For Businesses: Look, young people are unknown quantities. They’re also the future of your business, so you have to get smarter about hiring them. What you should do is create environments where entry-level folk are encouraged to share their ideas without feeling the need to wow you with their undoubtedly inadequate experience. Don’t focus on what students have done in their previous internships, focus on what they’ve learned. Here’s what I’d do if I was looking for a new hire right now. I’d hold a job fair and instruct applicants to bring a handful of calling cards and a Big Idea, not a resume. Then I’d have employees sit down with each of the applicants and ask four non-standard questions:

• What are you passionate about?
• What do you do better than anyone else in this room?
• In the next twelve months, what new skills are you going to have that will make us want to give you a raise and a promotion?
• What’s your Big Idea?

And if the employee interviewing them likes their ideas, they’ll take their card. If not, they’ll give the same advice I gave above – go become an expert in something, and call us in six months.

Anyone who knows me knows I have a passion for really good, really interesting, really off-the-beaten-path beer. The kind of stuff brewed with ingredients you’ve never heard of, aged in old wooden barrels, inoculated with strange bacteria (the harmless kind), and put in a dark cellar for a decade or so before consumed. That’s the good stuff, right there.

And I’ve been consuming that kind of beer – we call it “craft” beer, though there’s a lot of pretty pedestrian stuff that falls into that category for one reason or another – since I was, ahem, of legal drinking age. In fact, it used to be my job to write about it. (And if that job paid the bills, you can bet your sweet wort that I would have never set foot inside of an advertising agency.) I used to work in the basement of the second-highest rated liquor store in the world. I tasted beers that only a very minute percentage of the world’s population has ever tasted. It was one of the best professional experiences of my life.

And I am writing this with a completely straight face. I learned more about myself when I worked in the alcohol industry than I had at any point in my life. Here are some of the most important things:

Know who you aren’t

One of my fondest beer-related memories was sitting at The Dive Bar in Worcester, MA with a couple of my work friends, talking to the owner and then-bartender Alec Lopez, when a group of college-aged kids came walking in on a bar crawl. They looked at the beer menu – which is spectacular – for a moment before one of them stepped up and ordered a Coors Light. Alec turned his head and said simply, “We don’t serve that crap here.” The party left the bar in short order, and we went back to our beers. Our world was back in balance.

The lesson: Believe in something, and be steadfast in that belief. Don’t ever apologize for defying expectations in the pursuit of something better.

You are never the only one

It’s easy to think sometimes that you’re the only one who likes the work that you’re doing. Imagine being the first person to make a triple-IPA – a beer three times more bitter than the average IPA, which is itself the most aggressively-hopped beer style on the market. You’d have to seriously love hops to enjoy that kind of beer. The average beer drinker – even the average craft beer drinker – finds triple-IPAs unpalatable. So if you were the guy who first had the bright idea to brew one of these monsters, you’d be in some pretty sparse company. But people made these beers, and slowly, the hop-heads came out of the woodwork to consume them. Shortly thereafter, the craft beer scene saw an explosion in overly-hopped beers. And that first triple-IPA brewer was likely left scratching his head, wondering where all these like-minded hopheads came from.

The lesson: You’re never the only crazy one. Sometimes you just have to dig a little deeper to find the other crazies.

Accept competition, and embrace the undecided

Everyone in the world should go to a beer festival of some description at least once in their lives. It’s amazing. In a single room are gathered dozens of companies who are selling products that are remarkably similar – made on the same equipment from the same ingredients, all competing for the same small (but growing) slice of market share – and yet not a single one of those companies is thinking about stealing customers from another brand. Why? Because craft brewers understand what other industries are unable to express: that everyone in the room, vendors and consumers alike, are all there because they love beer. Plain and simple. They are united in their passion, and that spirit of unity has given life to one of the most amazing consumer communities that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

The lesson: Your customers don’t see your competition as competition. You stand to gain absolutely nothing by trying to tear your competitors down.

You are what you like

People who like craft beer wear it like a favorite tee-shirt. They own their passion for good beer. You can see it when they order beers, when they pair beers with their meals, when they forego dessert in lieu of a good imperial stout – or when they order water when all that is available are beers that are described as the “coldest tasting” beer in the world. (Please pause to reflect on how stupid the phrase “coldest tasting” is, for a moment. I’ll wait.) Craft beer drinkers will proudly identify themselves as such when asked. And not, as I mentioned, loyal to any particular brand (though they have favorites) – just fans of good beer. It’s truly amazing.

The lesson: Create something that people love, and the people will become part of that thing. Your products and your community are inseparable. Your product is your community.

People care about the craft

Craft breweries are tourist destinations. Some breweries require you to make reservations before you visit to help stem overcrowding. People come in droves to see how their favorite beers are made, and are happy to meet the good people who take the time to stir the mash tuns with giant paddles, who pack the boxes and load the pallets, who pour the beers at the brewpubs. There is art in good craft beer, and people want to know more about it. If a tourist asks what the SRM on a particular beer is, not only will the tour guide be able to answer the question, but a good chunk of the people on the tour will know what the hell was being discussed. (For the uninitiated, SRM is a measure of the color of a beer.) Technical questions are embraced in the craft beer industry, and people who care about craft beer tend to care about the technical aspects of its creation, too. Amazing stuff.

The lesson: If you care about what you do, others will care about how you do it. Do not underestimate how deeply your biggest advocates care.

You can’t compete on price alone

The craft beer industry is successful because it stopped trying to be cheaper than Bud Light. Craft beer is made with more raw materials, and on a smaller scale, and on less efficient machinery. Craft brewers usually don’t own the barley, wheat or hop crops that they buy. They don’t have sophisticated national supply chain infrastructure. There’s no way they could possibly compete on price. Besides, have you ever had a beer that was cheaper than Bud Light? It’s utter swill, for the most part. So craft beer changed the game. They made their beers as affordable as they could, but they made it several orders of magnitude more flavorful than the gigantic macrobreweries did. You’ll pay more, but you’ll get more.

The lesson: There are two variables in the Value equation: the amount paid out, and the amount paid back. If you can’t be cheaper, be worlds better.

Life is too short to drink bad beer

That one’s kind of self-explanatory.

–MS