Be Significant!

TedTalk
Daniel Pink’s video today was pretty impressive: you have to be significant. But you have to be significant in addition to being useful. There are so many people out there (and as a blogger, I run into them a lot) who want to throw a lot of the traditional forms of business, invention, production, etc. out the window in favor of right-brain thinking. You can’t do that, however.

Necessary, but not sufficient.

In that phrase (repeated a number of times for us), Daniel gets at the idea that moving to the right brain is an extension, not a substitution. We see this in product development all the time. There are new design features added or elements of the product are streamlined, you can even add a celebrity’s name to it. At the end of the day, however, we just want the product to work.  

I may have talked about this before, but Daniel’s video just underlines a theory I’ve been noodling for a while: business isn’t going to change into being 100% virtual, social, or technological. While those elements may make business better, you still have to be great at production, manufacturing, etc. We still will buy groceries and cell phones are still physical objects. This is more like completing the circle instead of starting a new one.

Personally, I was also inspired by the fact he used quotes from Fortune 100 CEOs. The impression I get from a lot of bloggers out there is that “Big Business” can’t get this design stuff. But look at Apple! They’re huge, and design is their business.

When it comes to changing the way that a company needs to think, there should be inspiration for right-brain thinking, but you need the basics. The video I posted above has a similar theme. You need a little extra in order to play music beautifully, but you also need to be able to play the piano. Enjoy!