Take responsibility for your work. Create positive outcomes that reach beyond the near and now. Practice good design. Be a genius.
Rule 42
BUILD SUPPORT METHODICALLY
It’s one thing to be brilliant. It’s another to convince people around you that your brilliance is viable. Of course, you can’t blame them for shying away from risk. They may understand that every big idea starts out crazy, but they also know that every crazy idea doesn’t end up big. They’ve seen what can happen when enthusiasm triumphs over caution.
Picture this scene: You bring an ingenious plan to your boss and say, “Sit down, boss. I’ve got a great new idea.” You explain your plan in breathless detail. Your boss says, “Well, that certainly is a new idea. Who else has done this?”
“No one,” you say. “That’s the beauty of it!”
“Hardly,” he says. “That’s the danger of it. If we enact this plan, we could lose everything. Our business could disappear, we’ll both be out of a job, and our company will be the laughingstock of the industry.”
What went wrong here? Simple. You made the naïve assumption that your epiphany will be an epiphany to anyone else who hears about it. What you neglected to consider was that it took you weeks of thought, research, design, and redesign to arrive at your conclusion. In addition, you have years of experience and knowledge in your special discipline. Expecting your boss to “get it” without the same knowledge is unrealistic.
Imagine being shown a map of the world, only upside down, and being told that this is how all maps will be displayed in the future. Even though you know it’s the same map you’ve seen a thousand times, it suddenly seems unfamiliar. It feels wrong. It takes a bit of effort to accept the idea that Australia is “up over” instead of “down under.”
Now imagine being presented with an idea that’s guaranteed to turn your actual world upside down. It could be a radical new business initiative, a sweeping organizational change, or an offer of relocation to another country. Your first reaction might be resistance. You might cast around for logical arguments against it. Your whole body might be urging fight or flight.
A prerequisite for selling a new idea is to understand what geneticist J.B.S. Haldane knew when he charted the four stages of acceptance. Whenever a game-changing idea is presented, the first impulse of colleagues is to reject it as “worthless nonsense.” As it starts to get traction, the same colleagues label it “interesting, but perverse.” Later, when the idea is all but proven, they admit that “it’s true, but unimportant.” Finally, when success is assured, they claim “I always said so.”
The trick is to condense the four stages into a shorter time span. If you can take your audience on the journey from “worthless nonsense” to “I always said so” in a matter of days instead of months, you may be able to keep the integrity of your idea as you gather broad support. The best way to condense the journey is with a story. The story can take the form of a fable, a comic strip, a children’s book, or any other narrative vehicle. It can be illustrated with photos, drawings, charts, or videos. The main thing is to keep it simple. A deluge of facts will not win hearts and minds.
When you lead people from what is to what could be with a simple story, they can more easily imagine themselves playing a role. And if you give them a clear illustration of the happily-ever-after moment, they’ll carry it in their minds as they go forward. Where there’s a way, there’s often a will.
Rule 43
DON’T BLAME OTHERS
Since the road to innovation is paved with mistakes, it’s sometimes tempting to place the blame on others. Don’t do it. Avoid pointing the finger, even when the problem is clearly not your fault. Take as much responsibility as you can.
By the same token, when you’re working in a group, don’t offload responsibility to others by “leaving the ball in their court.” Try to keep the ball in your own court where you have control over it. And when you do send it over the net, follow it up to make sure it comes back.
There’s something empowering about taking responsibility. You can make sure things are done right while averting delays and misunderstandings.
Let’s look at two examples. In our first example,
Jason works in a group tasked with reimagining the customer experience for his company. He asks his subordinate Mark to conduct some observational research that they could both present at the next group session. Three days before the meeting, he learns that Mark’s research won’t be ready. John, now facing a disappointed group, explains that Mark has been late with his materials. The leader of the group reluctantly replaces both John and Mark with another team.
In our second example, at a broadcast company, Jennifer is working furiously to finalize a story for the evening news. Her computer crashes, erasing all her work. Earlier that day she had begged IT for help, but the technician never appeared. She calls her boss and sincerely apologizes for her embarrassing failure. Then she quickly locates an archived story to fill the scheduling hole, and sets about re-creating her story for a later program. A year later when her boss moves up to VP, Jennifer steps into her boss’s role.
A benefit of taking responsibility is that you place yourself in a position of strength. People will tend to see you as a leader. They’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and the freedom to set things right.
Rule 44
JOIN A NETWORK
You can be a genius all by yourself, but a genius without a community is not as powerful as a genius within a latticework of kindred spirits. As with any kind of lattice, whether physical, chemical, or social, it’s the connections between the parts that determine the collective power of the whole—and therefore its value to the parts. In a social network, how you connect is everything.
There are two main ways to connect in a social network: bonding and bridging. Bonding is making friends with like-minded people—people of the same profession, the same political party, the same religion, the same nationality, or the same age. Bridging is making friends with like-spirited people—people from different backgrounds, but with similar ethics and ambition. Both kinds of connections are necessary to be successful and happy. But bridging is the activity that brings the highest rewards for innovators.
If you’re seeking new information or insights, you’ll need to look beyond your clique, since a clique is a closed system that acts more like a mirror than a window. Open the window. Connect with groups outside your circle. Put yourself in the way of meeting like-spirited people and not only like-minded people. There’s a popular saying that came from a Frank Sinatra song. It goes like this: If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. While this may be true in some cases, for people in creative roles and niche businesses the opposite is more likely to be true: If you can’t make it anywhere else, you can probably make it in New York. Large populations provide the social and business networks that can nurture professional success, especially when the profession is highly specialized or the specialist has rarified skills. You can perform in musicals in the state of Nebraska, but you’ll learn much faster on the stages of New York.
Furthermore, studies show that people are happier in social networks. People near the center of a community tend to grow happier over time than those at the edges. This is because people in networks tend to share more knowledge. When you continually give away what you know, you learn to replenish your knowledge as you go, and you also benefit from the knowledge of others. Those who hoard knowledge don’t get much knowledge back.
Genius is not so much something you have as something you do. You can believe you have genius in private, but you can’t prove it unless you exercise it in public. The facts are clear: Excellence thrives in a network.
Rule 45
BECOME WHO YOU ARE
The arc of human evolution is really the arc of human learning. Our biology keeps improving, but only at a snail’s pace. Our culture evolves much, much faster. The
average IQ has edged upward in the last 50 years, whereas our biological brains have hardly changed at all in the last 50,000 years.
Most of us assume that learning difficult subjects requires a higher IQ, but it’s more likely that a higher IQ comes from confronting difficult subjects. In a way, we don’t solve problems—problems solve us. They help us complete the puzzle of who we are, asking us to stretch beyond our boundaries and confront what we don’t know.
Genius, not evolution, is now the primary driver of progress. A genius is a person who takes creativity to the point of originality while creating better and more beautiful things—tools, objects, experiences, relationships, situations, solutions, and ideas. If the outcome is not beautiful, the maker is not demonstrating genius but mere creativity. Genius works on a higher level. It strives for elegance, ethics, and a level of quality that comes from mastery.
There’s no set route to mastery. You can’t print out a map or follow the instructions of your GPS device. The only voice that really matters is the voice in your head, the one telling you to leap on this opportunity, avoid that trap, wait and see on that situation. In the pursuit of mastery, as in the geometry of nature, there are no straight lines—only curving, broken, sketchy, or tentative ones. The kind of learning that feeds your particular genius requires you take the scenic route, not the shortcut.
That doesn’t mean you’re without resources. A hiker may not know what kind of weather lies ahead, or what kind of terrain to expect, but she can start out with a general plan, be prepared with a backup plan, pack the right equipment, and arm herself with survival skills. Every step or misstep is provisional and correctable, a mini-lesson on the path to genius.
When you teach yourself, your learning is not part of a curriculum. There’s no certificate, no graduation day. Just the satisfaction of following your joy until you become the person you’re capable of being—the kind of person who aspires not just to be yourself but to make more of yourself—through learning, creativity, expression, influence, and love. You become the story you tell about yourself. Your story is your map.
We’re not human beings; we’re human becomings. We’re not the sum of our atoms; we’re the potential of our spirit, our vision, and our talent. We delight in feeling alive, in seeing what’s possible, in putting our mark on the universe.
Rule 46
MAKE NEW RULES
The first rule of genius is to break the rules. The last rule is to replace them with your own rules—variations drawn from your own experience, aligned with your own style of working. Rules are not laws. They’re guidelines, and, as such, they must be seen as provisional.
All true invention, like all true art, is an act of protest, a rebellion against rules that have hardened into laws. Your job is to melt down the laws and recast them as principles that make sense to you, your discipline, and the needs of your work.
The 46 rules in this book are not the complete catalog. There are scores of others to be considered, tested, cherished, discarded, or recast. But these are ones that I’ve found to be most important in my own work, and to me they seem fairly universal. My immodest hope is that they’ll serve as your inspiration as you create your own rules, your own set of tools, forged in the fires of your passion, perfectly balanced and fitted to your own hand.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marty Neumeier is an advocate for creativity—whether in the service of brands, products, services, companies, environments, or communications. His stated professional goal is to bridge the distance between business and design. “Business is a fulcrum for change,” he says. “Improving how business works is the quickest way to improve how the world works.”
His 2003 book, The Brand Gap, redefined a brand as “a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization,” rejecting the widely held view that a brand was a logo or campaign promise. His follow-up book, Zag, introduced “onliness” as the true test of a brand strategy, and was named one of the “100 Best Business Books of All Time.” His third book, The Designful Company, offered leaders a blueprint for building a culture of innovation.
Marty now serves as Director of Transformation for Liquid Agency, an international brand firm whose client list is a Who’s Who of innovators. His vision for business creativity has led to engagements with some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Skype, Twitter, and Patagonia. From these experiences he has drawn the principles he shares in his publications, articles, lectures, and workshops.
In 2013, Marty published Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age. Metaskills, in a departure from his quick-read “whiteboard” books, goes deeply into the future of workplace creativity. It shows why—and how—we need to reeducate ourselves in the face of accelerating innovation. He wrote The 46 Rules of Genius as a “quick start guide” to Metaskills.
When Marty isn’t working on a book or traveling for business, he spends his time in southwest France, where he and his wife keep a petite maison. To his embarrassment, he still has to bring a dictionary to the supermarché.
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