Last weekend, I dedicated a day of my life to considering ideas… I was fortunate enough to have been selected as one of the 100 participants at TEDxOttawa. On this day, Ottawa, so often pigeonholed as a boring government town, brought forth a slate of speakers around the theme of Creative Actions, and enriched that program with a diverse mix of open-minded and truly interesting local citizens as the audience. (I know, I know… who let me in?!)
The day kicked off with a talk from Steve St. Pierre… in my opinion, one of the best of the day, and a hard act to follow. Steve’s idea? The art of doing.
At the heart of his message: Any idea becomes a bad idea if it’s wasted.
Or, in words familiar to everybody thanks to the power of Nike: Just do it.
Steve’s advice is directly applicable to those of us working to bring the voice of the customer into strategic decision making. All too often we get paralyzed by the sheer volume of information available to us, by the number of areas to which we could make improvements, or by the seeming immensity of the task at hand. The result is that our ideas, which are probably good ideas, become bad ideas because we let them languish, rather than just resolving to choose one, and move forward with it, one step at a time until it becomes a reality and the benefits are realized.
So, still running on inspiration sourced by the many ideas shared at TEDxOttawa, I challenge each of you to choose an idea you believe in, and then choose to make it happen. I look forward to hearing great things!
Click here for a full transcript of Steve’s talk, complete with his hummus joke.
