thank you for coming this morning my objective is to have you leave here
thinking differently about what you do and how you do it in terms of your idea
work now coming to Silicon Valley and Stanford when I was at imd in
Switzerland we brought our executive MBAs here every year for a few weeks and
visited firms some of the firms in the room and it is probably the most idea
rich area in the world many would argue so this is a little bit like preaching
to the choir but the teacher and the professor is going to come out in me now
and I hope you leave this session thinking differently so I have an
objective and now you're stuck here I want to enjoy breakfast enjoy this talk
and I'm going to blast through the presentation give you the basic ideas in
the book and then we'll have time for Question and Answer fair enough so the
idea Hunter an idea hunter is an individual a professional who searches
for ideas and unique places unusual places who has mastered the skills of
finding ideas to kind of advance their professional their company's interest
and is a voracious and as a voracious appetite for learning so that's an idea
hunter and we'll talk about how to be a hunter more effectively but before we do
that I'd like to talk about the notion of an idea and why this concept of an
idea is so powerful and is the basis for this as individuals all right and ideas
essentially fuel our future they fuel our future in a neta macro sense in an
economic sense and this work that will influence me 10-15 years ago I started
reading the work of Paul Romer who for a while was an economist at Stanford but
Romer came up with a theory of economic growth based on the power of ideas now
what do I mean by ideas drive our future all right well if we think about this
idea the idea of mass production all right Ford wanted to create
transportation that everybody could afford that was his mission that was his
objective and what he ended up with was this idea the assembly line use of
interchangeable parts and everything that goes into it and there's a set of
ideas here that didn't just allow Ford to create this massive automobile firm
but also these ideas influence our society and huge ways in service
manufacturing industries for many years and still do now where did Ford
get some of these ideas just to interesting side stories one he was in
Chicago meatpacking plants visiting kind of with friends and other owners of
these firms and he saw the carcasses of beef moving down the assembly line and
he said you know wait a minute if they're moving thousand pound carcasses
of beef across and they're getting sliced and diced up I can move
automobiles the same way masses of machinery that's where he got some of
the basic ideas from moving the automobiles instead of the people moving
another another area he got an idea he was in France he was a an automobile
race of fiction auto so he's in France there was a major accident on the on the
track he went over he was looking around the debris on the ground he picked some
up it was a very light material and he looked he said what's this no one had an
answer he brought it back he gave it to engineers and he said find out what this
is they found out what it was with a highly unusual alloy and it was strong
enough and light enough to handle the cars in the assembly line without that
discovery without him going over to that debris of material they never could have
built that assembly line that alloy allowed them to put it into the Model T
Ford so Ford had some ideas but a lot of what he found out was from unusual
places so that idea drove economic progress another is this I some truths
are self-evident and those truths are ideas in which this society is based
other societies around the world so when Jefferson wrote this he didn't sit in
some corner and think of this he got his ideas from the Netherlands he got his
ideas from France and he put these ideas into a document that have affected all
of us and still do so the power of ideas are enormous McDonald's America's was
exploding people were moving down the highway was a 1950's post-world War two
crock said you know how can I take advantage of this new mobile society
well if I can have a lot of clean bathrooms on those I ways i can sell
something he ended up selling fast food he put mcdonald's there so this this
notion has been replicated over and over finally google named the world wide web
the idea how do we perfect search I talked to some people last night I did
this for Boston College alum up San Francisco and they discussed how
they do something to promote the hunting for ideas in Google because this talk is
aimed at us as individuals but firms have to think how can we in fact instill
and invigorate and energize our firm so everybody is hunting for ideas maybe we
can discuss that in QA so these are big ideas I just discussed and they go on
and on but it's not just big ideas at fuel progress it's small ideas now this
is a small idea it's a coffee cup with a lid and essentially at one point I think
was ten fifteen years ago someone had the idea that different sized coffee
cups could be you could use one size lid for small medium and large you don't
need many lids so they perfected it with the materials and now in many coffee
shops around the world you have one size lid and multiple size cups and a lot of
you're saying who cares all right well you think about that it saves material
it's a setup time in the coffee shop it saves the customer from going through
and figuring out which size lid and making sure those things are stocked in
the morning small little time savings customer convenience that's an idea that
drives progress so it's the big ideas medical ideas process ideas product
ideas that fuel our future as well as the millions of ideas that affect all of
us right in Romer talks about how societies that are ID intensive have a
bigger advantage over those who aren't but let's get personal here now let's
talk about ideas and us all right because I would argue ideas drive our
personal or professional progress all right and if we think about two things
to two elements of what we need to be successful we have objects and we have
ideas and what objects do we need to be successful well we need our our digital
our blackberry our Apple iPhone whatever we have we need computers we need
software which is really codified ideas but we need software we need an
automobile we need a nice desk we need certain things so we need objects to be
successful no doubt we also need ideas how we can do our job better how can we
deliver customer service how can we how can we focus on the things that really
matter for our firm for our own professional career
so we need ideas and we need objects what's more important how many people
here need more objects to be successful how many need more things and so if we
think about this this is a picture of a gap in the Grand Canyon think about your
object gap in your idea gap and I would argue for me certainly as dean of a
business school I have a lot more focus and a lot more energy and efforts spent
on finding great ideas to move Boston College forward how do we do certain
things with the undergraduates the NBA is the faculty on and on and on