Jeremy Utley > Quotes

“To arrive at a single successful product, 2,000 ideas become 100 working prototypes. Those 100 prototypes become 5 commercial products. Of the final 5, 1 will succeed. To truly grasp the implications of 2,000:100:5:1, however, forget the fact that we’re talking about toys, or even products in general. What we’ve found working with innovators of every kind is that the scale of this approach applies universally.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Once you’ve assembled a set of observations, create a new frame to inspire ideas you can test: “How might we use brutal honesty the way a barber does to build trust with new customers?” That’s a much richer and more interesting prompt than “How can we build trust quickly?” ~”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked. —DAVID OGILVY”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“In the shower, while making breakfast, on your morning run—during any lightly distracting physical activity, noodle on the problem in a relaxed manner. Then, before leaving for work, spend a few minutes jotting down possible solutions. Aim for a minimum of ten but count all iterations and variations. If you’re coming up with colors for a new logo, for instance, aquamarine and cornflower blue both count.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Browse. Go to Wikipedia.org and click “Random article” to be taken to one of the site’s millions of crowdsourced entries—then pretend it wasn’t random at all. What is Wikipedia trying to tell you? (Other online tools will send you to random websites, videos, and so on.)”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“If people aren’t aware of the correlation between quantity and quality, persisting past the first good idea can be interpreted as perfectionism. Wasteful. People get annoyed when one contributor keeps throwing out new ideas when the majority is forming a consensus.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“It’s worth repeating: for quantity to soar, relax expectations around quality. As you’re learning from your Idea Quota, generating lots of ideas requires a no-judgment zone.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“The secret to doing good research,” Tversky once said, “is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Creators ranging from Ludwig van Beethoven to Salvador Dalí to Thomas Edison have relied on naps to refresh their minds and spark insights. (Edison napped in what he called his “thinking chair.”) While sleeping at your office may still be frowned upon where you work, more and more leaders are catching on to the value of this tool.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“THE DISCIPLINE OF DOCUMENTATION At the d.school, we have a saying: “If you don’t capture it, it didn’t happen.” Memory isn’t as reliable as you might think. People chronically underestimate how much they’ll remember about something after even a few minutes have passed. This is even more true of our own ideas than simple facts like where we parked the car, or what our spouse wants from the take-out place.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Yet, as that perceptive seventh-grader put it at the very beginning of this book, creativity is “doing more than the first thing that comes to your mind.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“If the right starting number isn’t six but the far side of six hundred, how do we bridge the gap between what people think they need and the scale of output that drives world-class results? It would help to use all the time available, for one thing. In our work at Stanford, we’ve found that even professional creatives tend to stop generating ideas before the allotted time. In most cases, people anchor on the first good idea the moment it’s been suggested and, once that happens, the energy in the room changes. The group spends the rest of the time effectively reassuring itself that the idea they’ve latched on to is a good one. I really think we’ve got ourselves a winner here, folks!”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Don’t let perfectionism get in the way of rapid learning. Releasing a low-fidelity version of an idea into the world can be especially painful for a company with a commitment to quality.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“An old saying goes, “The faintest ink is better than the sharpest memory.” But that’s not true if you never go back to read what you wrote.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Organizations from Google to Zappos to Ben & Jerry’s to NASA make dedicated nap rooms available to their employees.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress. —RICHARD FEYNMAN”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“As Charles Eames once said, “The first question of design is not how it should look, but if it should even be.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved. —JOHN DEWEY”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Is walking essential to creativity? Many great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs throughout history, from Aristotle to Giacomo Puccini to, yes, Steve Jobs, would probably have agreed.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“From now on, you will feed your brain high-importance problems, pointing it toward areas where new thinking will contribute meaningfully to your goals.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Most of the time, the problem is the problem.” If you’re not willing to reframe the problem to explore a more productive avenue, you’ll end up spinning your tires.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“When the answers run dry, ask a better question.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Performing an Idea Quota is a simple, three-S process: Seed. Select a problem and study it. Sleep. Let the unconscious mind process the problem. Solve. Flood the problem with ideas.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“So much advice around innovation and creativity amounts to more: more methods, more habits, more techniques. If we don’t simultaneously carve away less important uses of our time to create space for reflection and contemplation—distance from the problem at hand—we only undermine the effort to boost ideaflow. Caught up in the day-to-day, our imaginations become blocked, just as David Ogilvy warned at the top of this chapter. To escape “the tyranny of reason,” we must be as tactical about withdrawing from a losing battle as we are about gathering divergent inputs or vigorously testing our ideas. The “Father of Advertising” was an ace at the mental game of creative output. He intuitively understood that generating more ideas required doing a little less.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Test before you invest, not once but at every stage. Testing is forecasting. It’s how you see your success before you achieve it.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Never put what you can do (feasibility) ahead of what the market wants (desirability”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Leveraging the brain’s extraordinary capacity to pan for gold comes down to asking it questions that attract its interest and activate its attention.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Expectations. What are you taking for granted about the problem? For this dial, it can be helpful to make a list of all the assumptions you’re making about how the product should work or how the solution should otherwise function. Then swap each assumption with its opposite. How might we share ice cream without a cone or a cup? How might we make ice cream hot? How might we make ice cream the appetizer rather than the dessert? How might we eliminate the post-ice-cream sugar crash?”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Most of the seeds fail,” Darrell says, “but they don’t go away until I give up on them.” Likewise, Darrell makes sure to “trim trees regularly.” When this happens, Darrell celebrates failure by giving people a bonus and promoting them into other seeds, plants, or trees. “We never want association with a seed to appear to be a career-limiting move,” he told us.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“THE IDEA QUOTA Loosening up your stiff creative muscles every morning helps you make the crucial flip from a mindset of quality to one of quantity when it’s time to come up with ideas. Making the following Idea Quota a part of your day will lighten the subconscious pressure for perfection that stymies creative exploration.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters