We heard a lot about 3M in our time at Babson - a company that grew from an accidental discovery of a weak adhesive, too weak for anything but temporarily fixing small squares of paper to things. What could be more useless than that, eh? Well, as you can see from the photo, my attempts to be more organizationally adept owe a lot to that accidental innovation! And I'd be happy to call it a small step of genius to spot that there was a real need that could be met with this weak adhesive. One of those things where it's really difficult to imagine that initial flash of inspiration! I use them to try and manage when my brain isn't being as disciplined as I would like; to capture a thought and move on, rather than get distracted.  There's also something strangely compelling about peeling off each note - a mini achievement in itself!

Speaking of customer experience, read a very interesting piece from Forrester on designing customer experiences, starting with the customer. Not a revolutionary concept you would have thought, but it's amazing when you look around to see how many companies did exactly the opposite. Why should the customer care that 3M have got a new product that they're desperately trying to get off the ground? But maybe they'd be interested in hearing about how you could capture ideas as they occur, without having to go to the trouble of finding a piece of paper that will then fall off the desk and under the fax machine? And, more relevantly to my project, why should the customer care that a call center (apologies, American spelling throughtout) is extremely busy and can't take their call? But wouldn't they be happy if you told them that rather than keeping them waiting for an unknown period of time you'd prefer to arrange a convenient time to call them back. Forrester tell you to start with understanding what your customer is like, then understand what their goal is (if they're browsing your store, maybe they just want to try on the pair of shoes before they order them from the internet?), then figure how you can better help them achieve that goal (how about terminals in the store so the customer can order from your website?). Simple, but a bit of an epiphany for me.

Ian