Marketingtalks@google - David kord murray

>> Welcome to Authors@Google and MarketingTalks@Google. Today, we're proud to present Dave Murray. He is a scientist and entrepreneur and all around a pretty cool guy who's come to share his insights. In the past, he's worked in marketing. He has worked as a rocket scientist and he's been the head of--innovation, excuse me, at Intuit. So, I'm proud to present David Murray and his book: Borrowing Brilliance. >> MURRAY: Thank you. Thanks. It's good to be here. There were two questions that I asked myself that led to the writing of this book. The first question was "Can you teach creativity?" The second question was "Is innovation a definable process?" And the answers to those questions were "Yeah, I actually believe that you can teach creativity" and the answer to the second question is "Maybe as far as innovation being a definable process." So, what I'd like to talk you about is about answering those two questions maybe teach you a little bit about what I learned about creative thinking, I mean, then, how you can apply it in your business. The title of the book is Borrowing Brilliance. And I named it that because I wanted the title to reflect the primary premise of the book. And what I did is like Effie [ph] said that I was the head of innovation at Intuit and it was in that job that I first started thinking about creative thinking as a subject itself and it's kind of a strange subject. So, what I did is I started studying creative thinkers, creative processes. But most importantly, what I did is I studied creative ideas themselves, and I asked myself, "You know, what makes a creative idea? What – how do you construct a creative idea?" And in that course, you know, I studied scientific ideas. I mean, I looked at Einstein and Darwin and Newton. I studied business people: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Google guys. And in that process of looking at that, I realized that creative ideas are made out of existing ideas, always. I mean, I could always, as you dug deeper in you could always see the roots of an original idea and an existing idea and that's why I say that brilliance is borrowed. I think it's why Einstein said, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." So, I was at--like I said, at the time I was working at Intuit, so, Intuit was run by GE people. GE people were process people. So, they were like, "Dave, you've got to make a process out of this." But I'm not sure it really was a process, you know, and I'm not sure that creative thinking, you can actually define it in this series of steps, but I took that challenge and I started thinking about it. And these are what I came up with; these were the six--when I called the six steps to innovation. And I think about them, I break them into separate parts and I think of two different metaphors to describe them; the first one being the origin of an idea. An idea is like constructing a house, that's kind of a metaphor that I use to think about that. The second part is the evolution of a creative idea and I have to separate them and I had to have two different metaphors because the first metaphor which is, which I thought it was very powerful to the origin of an idea, the construction metaphor, doesn't extend to the process itself, because the process is a trial-and–error process. So, that's why I switched metaphors and the book is actually broken into two separate sections. So, let's talk about the origin of an idea and those three steps. And again, it's a construction metaphor that I use and I think it's very helpful to think about it this way. The problem is the foundation of that house. You build your ideas on a well-defined problem. Borrowing then provides the materials to build the solution to your problem. And then you take the pieces and you make something new out of them, you combine, you combine the materials that you've grabbed. Let me give you an example, I don't know if we have any engineers in the house, but Isaac Newton dabbled in Mathematics and he created Calculus, and what he did is first he defined the problem. He actually defined two problems. Does anybody remember what those problems are? It was--no? The area under a curve and the tangent to a curve. And then he went out and he borrowed some materials to solve that problem. In this case, he borrowed--he went to Algebra, Trig, Analytical Geometry and Infinitesimals, and he combined that stuff in a unique way that nobody else had done and created a solution to the problems that he had defined, and that's how he created the Calculus. And there's an interesting side note about that; Isaac Newton was, after he came out with Calculus, he was accused of plagiarism, which isn't unusual for creative thinkers. And he actually had to defend himself in a court of law because somebody else in another part of the world had created Calculus at the same time. And it was during his defense that Isaac Newton said, "Yes, if I've seen farther, I've stood on the shoulders of giants." And when he was talking about the shoulders that he was standing on were the creators of Algebra, Trigonometry, Infinitesimals. So, I think it works in both very complex idea creations like Calculus, Physics, scientific, a lot of the problems that you, guys, work on and it in works in very simple problems too, very simple business problems, marketing problems. The second part of innovation and creativity is the evolution of ideas. Ideas need time to evolve. I break this into four steps, I mean, three steps. There is incubation, that's where the subconscious mind--the subconscious mind, all creative thinkers are subconscious thinkers. The subconscious is really good of doing the first three steps, at defining, borrowing, combining and that's kind of what's going on. You need to put your ideas away, let them incubate. Then, you need to pass judgment on your ideas. You know, I don't know if you guys have a formal brain storming process here at Google but, my experience is that brainstorming such as don't work so good because they lack judgment, and you need strong judgment of an idea to figure out what's wrong with an idea so you can evolve it. Judgment is like, you know, it's like the fight for survival in Darwin's theory of evolution. And then finally, the sixth step is the enhancement step, and that's trial and error, just keep doing it over and over and sometimes it's just restructuring the materials that you have. In 1820, Hans Austred [ph], he did an experiment and he noticed that with wires, magnets and a compass, and he noticed that when he passed a current through the comp--when you pass the current through the wire, the compass went, went haywire. He created a magnetic field, that was an interesting idea, but 20 years later Michael Faraday took that idea and restructured it and when he did is he passed the magnets around the wire and created the current. Now, that was a huge innovation, I mean that's how power plants work now like in a hydroelect--in a hydroelectric plant. A turbine spins magnets around the wire and that's how it creates current. The point being is when you get to that last step, sometimes you just take the materials that you have restructure them, move them around. So, I was just thinking—sorry, I lost that. Give me just a second you, guys, I'm sorry. Let's take in and talk about the six steps in a more depth. There's the problem step. You know, my experience is that were we have a lot--we're very good at solving problems but we're not necessarily very good at defining problems, and there's three parts to, or to, to the problem step. There's the identification of a problem. There's the understanding of the problem which is finding out the root cause, and then, the third one is describing the problem, and sometimes it's just changing the description of the problem a little bit that will lead to in innovation. Let me give you an example, I was working with the Fortune 500 company and the CEO called me in and there was a marketing group and he's like, "You know, I keep giving these guys the same problem and they keep coming back with the same answer. We need to get them, you know, we need to get innovations out of there" and I was like "What we really need to do is change the problem." Henry Ford, back in the 1920s, he had, he defined his problem as building the least expensive car and he was very successful with it, and all of his ideas were built off building the least expensive car. William Durant over General Motors then took that problem and kind of redefined it just a little bit. He said, "Let's build a car that people can afford" and that just by, just by changing the, the definition of the problem just a little bit led to a huge innovation which was GMAC. And so what they did is they solved the problem, they built more expensive cars but people can afford them through monthly payments. The--so when I work with a conceptual development team, what you guys need to do is keep going back to that problem and keep trying, just subtle differences and how you define it, it can change how you solve it. The next step is the borrowing step, and this is where you gather the materials. And I think of this--imagine thinking the--of this as on a continuum and what you want to do is the way that you define the problem will determine where you look for your solution, and this works, again, in both a simple--in both simple problems and complex problems. You know, for example, my daughter is studying fashion right now, so she bought a book on Coco Chanel, and Coco Chanel was--she was named one of the Time magazine--excuse me--one of the most influential people of the, of the 20th century, and what she did is she defined the problem. She wanted to liberate women and that was the problem that she defined. And when she defined it, she, she said, "Okay, if I'm going to liberate women, where am I going to look for solutions?" and where she looked was men's clothing. So she combined men's clothing with women's clothing and that solved her problem. John Nash, the economist from the movie A Beautiful Mind. You know, he--well, the way that he developed his ideas is he, he defined the problem and then went to--he didn't noticed that the problem--and his problem was the looking at or making decisions with incomplete information and he--he noticed that; well, that's the same problem that people that have in a poker game. So what he did is he borrowed poker game strategies and solved economic--he solved economic problems with that. So, what I--what I like to teach is, when you're solving your problems, first, what you do is you start close to home. If you're a software engineer and you've got a navigation problem, then I would look at how other software engineers solve that navigation problem. Then, I would take this a step away, and I would look at maybe web designers, how do they solve that problem? And I'll borrow ideas from there and then I would take a step outside of business. How do sailors, truck drivers, search and rescue teams--how do they solve their navigation problems, and then combine all that. And, again, that leads to the third step which is the combination step. You take all these materials and then you combine them to form a new solution. Combination is really the essence of creativity. You know, it's taking two existing things and making a new thing. It's funny, and this was a big "aha" moment for me as I was thinking about this and thinking about creative thinking. And I was like, you know, is it really that simple, is creativity, is it--is it a new idea or just two existing ideas and I think it is, and I sort of thinking about that. And as--I was in a meeting, actually, at Intuit and across from the table was sitting a friend of mine, and I guess I kept glancing at her, and staring at her. Subconsciously, I didn't realize it until she kind of mouthed the words, "What the hell are you looking at?" And, then I've realized why I was staring at her, because I kept asking myself the question--well, actually, let me take a step back--I was asking myself the question, what is the most important or the biggest idea in the history of the human race? You know and I was thinking is it Einstein's idea, is it Darwin's, is it--I don't know, is it Star Wars. And that's when I started glancing at my friend, and then I realized why I was staring at her, because she was pregnant. And I went, "aha," I go, that's the answer to the question, that's probably the most creative thing, the most important idea, is a new human being. And what is a new human being? It's a combination of two existing human beings. The fifth step--or, I'm sorry, the fourth step is incubation, that's when you bring the subconscious mind into it. And, I think the--you need to--most creative, or all creative thinkers have a very strong relationship to the subconscious mind. And I work hard with myself to try to establish that relationship, and I do three things, and I think about it three ways. It's input to the subconscious mind, so that's when I tell my subconscious, "Okay these are--this is my problem, these are some of the borrowings that I have, and then here's some interesting unique combinations." The--and then, I just put it away and give it time. The subconscious mind is kind of like a parallel processing computer, and it can make all these combinations behind the scene. The third part, and this is probably the most critical part, and maybe the hardest part, and that's output; listening to the subconscious mind. You know, as I discuss this with a lot of people, and does everybody have the shower experience, the "aha" moment in the shower? And I wondered that's kind of weird that everyone is having that same experience. And then I realized why, the subcon--I mean, the morning shower is one of the few times of the day when your conscious mind isn't like aflutter with information. You're kind of relax, it's in the morning, so, in other words, you're not thinking at all and that gives the subconscious time to have something to say. The ideas pop in, and I think that's why the ideas keep popping in, and the book I talk about, how you can kind of simulate that shower experience. The fifth step is the judging step. Judgment is so critical because without it, your ideas are going to be frivolous and useless. I think I--what I do is, is I separate my judgment into two, maybe three areas, but two primary areas: the positive judgment and negative judgment, and I use the problem as a criterion. And, I think it's not judgment of whether you like the idea or not, it's judgment, what do I like about the idea and what don't I like about the idea? And there's a magnificent side effect that you get when you start doing that, and it's creative intuition, because what you get, as you start--as these ideas start flowing and you start passing judgment, positive and negative, you start being able to describe an idea that doesn't exist. It has these attributes from your positive judgments and it doesn't have this other attributes from your negatives. Steve Jobs, who--if anything that--or probably his greatest creative attribute is his creative intuition. He knows a good idea when he sees it. And, he's also notorious for having a contra--a contrary personality, in other words, he's really positive one moment, and really negative the next moment, and I think that's what gives him the creative intuition. He's able to say, "I really like these points, and I really don't like those points." Now, you and I are never going to be Steve Jobs. I think it's innate in his thinking, but if you start doing it consciously, making those two different positives and negatives, you'll start to develop it too and then, as you're going through like your work and stuff, you'll see an idea and you'll be like, oh, my God that's the idea that I was looking for. And then finally, there's enhancement, the enhancement step. The creative process is a trial and error process, and ideas need to evolve, products need to evolve, you know. In the enhancement process you're basically going back and you've redefined your problem, you re-borrow materials, you re-combine and re-structure and you come up with the next iteration of the idea. And I think Facebook is probably a good example. Facebook started out--the original conception of Facebook was basically borrowing the Hot or Not site, at, Mark Zuckerberg was a freshman at Harvard University and he started the Hot or Not site, where you would rank the incoming Harvard freshman. He borrowed the name Facebook from--that's what they called, they actually printed a yearbook where you can look at the faces of the incoming freshman. And now, but if you look at the evolution--so that's where they started with the idea, and now they're like, you know, 250 million users; they've just passed MySpace. They just keep evolving, they keep working it, they keep redefining, keep restructuring their problems and their solutions to the problems. So, there is--you know—any, yeah, any questions? You know, I think, we've got some books in the back, I'd appreciate anybody would like to buy--oh, you have a question... >> All right. Well... >> MURRAY: Okay. >> Well, first of all, thank you very much for spending with us today; it's a very, very awesome talk. I'm in, in the creativity research and the literature, you know, the two big questions that that come to my mind or like, first, how you can sort of, you know, create--creativity like I envision somebody telling me, like, be creative and then that's kind of difficult. And then also, I was wondering if you could comment on the role between, you know, similarly between creativity and control. Like how, how, you know, how like, how it should ramp in instead of like instead of blue sky in order to make forward progress? >> MURRAY: Right. >> Thanks. >> MURRAY: Well, yeah and that's an interesting point. I think there was a paradoxical intention to creativity. That thing were, you know, do it and then, I think, that's because we use our subconscious minds to come up with ideas. And when you demand something from your subconscious mind, it'll tend to like, you know, shut you off. The way that I think that you come over that is you start doing things consciously. In other words, when you can't come up with an idea, you go back and you say, okay, what problem am I working on? All right. There is a problem. Okay. What materials do I have to--and you start doing it consciously, and then your subconscious then will pick up on it, does that makes sense? Okay. >> So, again, thank you so much for coming. Another question for you--when you've mentioned these different areas that people have borrowed from, they tend to be--well, they somehow seem very different from the area in which they're trying to solve the problem. Like, the poker, example, can you talk a little bit about tips perhaps to get people thinking in sort of broader ways without just going, again, off the deep end. >> MURRAY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, it all comes back to the problem. You define the problem and then you look for places with the similar problem. The reason John Nash went to the poker game is because he recognized that poker players were making decisions with the incomplete information. And he's like, wait a minute, that's the same, that's the same problem that people in the economy have, and once he recognized the same problem then he was able to borrow from it. So that's, I think, the key to it is how you define a problem and then you go to places, and actually think of it on the continuum, I start this at home then I do something similar and then I look really far away. So, you know, if I'm, if I'm a business person, I'm looking to science. How does scientist solve a problem like this, and then I borrow ideas from there. You know if I'm a scientist, I might look to business, say how they solve it and kind of swap it out. >> Hey. >> MURRAY: Yeah. >> Thank you as well. Kind of a related question... >> MURRAY: Yeah. >> I remember BMW or like other car manufacturers looking at biology and nature to improve their products. For instance, wires for their tires, they look at, you know, frogs' hands and see why, why are they sticking so well to, to objects? If I think now, I mean, I'm working in marketing and if I would think to looking at, you know, the nature or problems in the nature, it's such a huge area, how would you define the, I mean, the process or some kind of, of way of approaching such a broad area to improve your own problems to work on it? >> MURRAY: Right, right. And I think the answer to that question is, again, it comes back to the problem. There's a whole branch of engineering called bionics, and they look at, you know, I think, I think, people studied the lotus flower because it repels water, so then with sci--what the scientists, what the business people did was they said, what's going on there? And, took ideas from that and created products out of it. So, again, it really comes back to, this all comes back to the problem. How you define it will determine where you look, does that make sense? It's just not random places out there that you borrow. You borrow from similar places with the same problem. >> Thank you for the talk; extremely interesting. So, your slides relates to an individual. It's supposed to process... >> MURRAY: Yeah. >> You know like in, in going in a creative direction, put it that way. But, could you expand a little bit, you know, like, you know, in a typical corporate setup. How would each one of these steps... >> MURRAY: Yeah. >> Be supported by say, a larger organization? >> MURRAY: Right. >> Could you give in like, what do you need to do, what do you need to put in place for individuals to actually be able to sort of have less friction in going through these six steps? >> MURRAY: Yeah, yeah. So, let me make a couple, a response to that in a couple ways. So I believe the creative process does take place in your mind. The ideas are going to come from your mind and that's really what my book is about. It's--the book is a personal book and I tell personal stories and I get into my own mind. Now with that said, understanding the creative process and how it works does translate into how you would create processes at your company. So, for example, I would separate these, I mean, I would, when I brainstorm or when I'm in a concept development team, we will separate and we'll just work on the problem, and we won't brainstorm, we won't talk anything about solutions, it's just pure, okay, defining problems and a hierarchy of problems. I mean, problems don't exist in isolation. There's high problems, low problems, there's a whole bunch--you have internal problems, external problems so, I'd separate that. I'd look at the problems, then I would do another meeting where I'd like, okay, I've picked out a couple problems and it say, let's send everybody out and find places outside of our business that are solving these kind of problems, and we would send like the whole organization out to look at that. People would come back in and then present back here's, so they, you know, we would do the second step. Now, then, we would do brainstorming, and then maybe even in a separate meeting, we would do judgment where we'd bring in some, you know, usually the top, the top managers are usually really good at judgment, at telling you why your idea doesn't work, and telling you why your idea might work. So, you know, the incubation thing, that is, that's a real personal thing, but it also means that, you know what, we have to understand that our ideas are going to take a little bit of time, we need to work on them a little bit, so. Any other questions? Cool. Well, thank you, guys.