Jennifer L. Aaker and Andy Smith: An interview by Bob Morris

Jennifer Aaker

Co–authors of The Dragonfly Effect, Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith live in Lafayette, California, with their three children. A social psychologist and marketer, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research spans time, money and happiness. She focuses on questions such as: What actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think make them happy? How do small acts create significant change, and how can those effects be fueled by social media? She is widely published in the leading scholarly journals in psychology and marketing, and her work has been featured in a variety of media including The Economist, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CBS MoneyWatch, NPR, Science, Inc, and Cosmopolitan.

Andy Smith

Andy Smith is a Principal of Vonavona Ventures where he advises and bootstraps technical and social ventures. Over the past 20 years, he has served as an executive in the high tech industry leading teams at Dolby Labs, BIGWORDS, LiquidWit, Intel, Analysis Group, Polaroid, Integral Inc. and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. As a guest speaker at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Smith speaks on social technology, engineering virality, and brand building, with a focus on applying technology to address real problems. He is a contributor to GOOD magazine, where he writes on businesses that embrace and integrate a social mission. He has also spoken at The Web 2.0 Expo (#w2e), The 140 Characters Conference (#140conf), World 50, Marketing Week, Intel, TechCore and Interbrand, and appeared on Bloomberg TV and NBC’s Press:Here. He is also on the boards of The Glue Network, 140 Proof, ProFounder, LIF Brands, and One Family One Meal.

Morris: Looking ahead, let’s say, to the next decade, what do you think will be the single most exciting business opportunity?

Smith: Social technologies allow even small organizations to reach more people than they ever have before. While these technologies and how we use them will constantly evolve, this is an incredible opportunity for anyone with a mission and an Internet connection to go out there and be heard.

Morris: Now please shift your attention to The Dragonfly Effect. When and why did you decide to collaborate on writing it?

Aaker: I was deeply skeptical of social media and its potential for impact; but Andy has been a fan for a long time. The opportunity to write this book together helped us assimilate these two perspectives, and also lay the groundwork for a model and set of stories that would hopefully inspire our kids.  We are incredibly proud to have all three of them running little businesses (e.g., selling lemonade, cartoon books, DVDs) et cetera, that

a)   have a single focused goal (in their case the model is nonprofit, so they pick their favorite charities for the net proceeds),
b)   grab attention (through good branding),
c)    tell a story and
d)    enable other customers to spread their business.

In the last three years, they have collectively made over $5K donated to three discrete charities.

Morris: Which specific talents, skills, and experience did each of you bring to the collaboration?

Smith: I’m a former teenage entrepreneur that’s grown up in marketing. I understand high tech and saw the social media revolution begin. Often people talk about the Internet in a purely business sense, but Jennifer’s students showed us that social media can bring about real change when it is used strategically and well.

Aaker: I bring ideas and research.  And a jargon-filled writing style, which – frankly – is often not pleasurable to read.

Morris: For those who have not already read this book, written with Carlye Adler, please explain “the dragonfly effect.”

Aaker: The dragonfly effect refers to the idea that small acts can create big change, when the core of the act is deeply meaningful and when the four wings are ‘beating’ in concert in sync.

Smith: There are four parts to the dragonfly effect: create a single, focused goal, grab attention, engage others, and take action. It is these four parts that must work together to create big change.

Dave Stewart on “How to Be an Ideas Factory: Loosen Your Grip on Your Creations”

Dave Stewart

Here is an interview of Dave Stewart by Ian Sanders featured by BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

Dave Stewart is best known as a Grammy-winning musician and producer — he was Annie Lennox’s bandmate in the Eurythmics and has collaborated with the likes of Bob Dylan and Bono. But when companies like British Telecom and the ad agency Interbrand started inviting him to speak, a hidden talent came to light: Stewart is a polymath who can connect the dots between disparate subjects, generating brave new ideas. The business world was hungry for his way of thinking, and soon he took on roles as U.S. creative director of the global ad shop the Law Firm and “change agent” for Nokia. His company Weapons of Mass Entertainment, an “ideas factory” based in Los Angeles, works with partners including HBO and Virgin Comics on projects in film, television, publishing, theater, and interactive gaming.

Last month Stewart and Mark Simmons, the author of Punk Marketing, published The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide [click here], a guide to creativity and brainstorming that introduces the straight-laced world of business to an artist’s approach to innovation. I spoke with him recently about how to present an idea, why it’s better to relinquish control over your ideas, and how businesses can create better environments for innovation.

You’ve got your hand in a lot of projects. How do you deal with the challenge of implementing all your different ideas?

Years ago, when I would have ideas it used to do my head in, because I was trying to make them work by myself. I thought, “I’ve got to own it 100 percent, so I have to build everything about it.” But as I got older I realized, “No, I’m an ideas person.” I can take an idea through prototype. If it’s a TV series, I can shoot a little bit, give it a great title, and write a draft. Now, I’m not going to try and make that series; I’m going to meet with a company that makes TV shows in that genre. And I’m just going to retain a small amount of ownership, because I want to do other things. Before, I’d get tangled up in the making of the thing. It took six months out of my life. Now we have partnerships.

The best thing, in the end, is to relinquish a lot of control. Because that allows you to be free thinking. I’d rather have 10 percent of something that took off than 100 percent of something that’s still on the table. When you’ve got a whole ideas factory, then you’ve got 10 percent or 15 percent of 50 different things. They can all be happening at once, but we’re not worrying about that because we’re not the ones making them.

What do you do with an idea once you’ve hatched it? How do you find partners to work with?

I’ve created a TV series called “Malibu Country.” When we first presented it to the producer, the presentation was a wooden box that looked like an apple box. When you opened it up, there was a “Malibu Country” shirt, music on a CD, the script treatment on a brown piece of paper. It looked like a country store. Because in my mind, it will be a store: It’ll be “Malibu Country” store, and it’ll be full of all the lifestyle feeling that the TV show is about. That’s all laid out in the presentation. When you go to someone with this, they either like it or they don’t, but they can see that you’re going to do this. Somebody is going to produce it. So they go, “Oh shit, I better not make a mistake in my decision here. This might be a huge hit!” It’s very different than just walking in and saying, “I’ve got an idea.”

You say your ideas are born out of chaos. But a lot of people in business are scared by not being in control. When you’re working with businesses like Nokia, how are you getting them to change their habits?

The creative process is chaotic. I’m not saying that when you’re executing an idea as a business that it has to be chaotic, too, but there needs to be a playroom where you can throw paint about. That should exist in all businesses, really. Because if everybody’s just sitting around analyzing everything — “Oh, we’re going to make this widget a bit smaller this year” — someone else is going to slam them from the side, and they’ll be wiped out. You see that happen all the time.

Nokia, and all the device companies, are now realizing, “We’re at the distribution point of all this content and media, and that thing in your pocket is almost like a remote control to your world.” They had tons of people on staff designing phones and all the stuff you need to make a great device company. But now it’s like, “Well, we wouldn’t mind creating content that drew people toward our devices. What is a real game-changing thing we could do with our devices?” I worked with Tim Kring on one that just hit Britain in June. [Conspiracy for Good, a massive multi-player entertainment property that blends gaming, story telling, and projects for social good.] It’s a real interesting blindside to the whole way gaming, television, networking, everything works. I’ve just created something else, a prime-time Saturday-night television show, and I brought that to Nokia. It’s another diverse way of creating content that’s on your TV, but there’s extra content on Ovi, which is Nokia’s cloud-computing site.

Another thing I like from your book is the idea of having a 48-hour business plan, not a 5-year plan. Weapons of Mass Entertainment can’t really have a strategic plan. So how do you lead a group of people through that kind of uncertainty?

I look at it a bit like sailing a ship. You always have somebody awake on deck with the binoculars, looking out. Businesses often don’t do that; they’re all down below, working away.

I want to be a new media company for a new age. What does that mean? Well, one thing I know is it relies on creating very interesting content and being able to deliver it in all sorts of ways for many platforms. Years ago, if you were making a musical, you’d make the musical, and then people queued up and bought tickets for it. It was marketed in the New York Times or on Broadway. Now it’s like, “Well hang on, you’ve got to have an app, and inside that app are four free songs and insights into the world of the musical, and guess what? You just press that button, and you’ve bought your ticket.” Fifty years ago, you never would have thought of all this stuff. Some kid would just be selling tickets out on the street.

Photo of Dave Stewart by John Attwell

Watch video clips from this interview:

How to Run an Ideas Factory Click here.

Putting Ideas Into Action Click here.