In 2005, Google introduced 77 new services. How did your company do?
Now, not every company has 4,980 employees, nor quarterly revenues of $1.578 billion to play with. But...the way in which we create our creative and work on our work has just evolved over the years. It's efficient, it's effective and it's so...2002. Having worked at three of the other biggest Direct Response shops in town, I know that their processes have also evolved slowly, if not glacially. With all due respect to the late Mr.Charles Darwin, it's not good enough. Evolution won't help if your customers are changing faster than you are. If their reading habits, spending patterns, buying channels and contact preferences are evolving faster than you can research them.
So I decided to see what we could unearth. An invitation to join '77' was iCal-ed around. 70% of the company responded. 3 pages of truly useful and inventive ideas emerged in just a few hours. Some were actually rather revolutionary. I'll share more details and examples about them soon, but here's a taste:
• we identified 18 Sacred Cows worthy of sacrificing to the Gods of Irrelevance & Unnecessaryness
• We scratched 22 annoying Itches in our 'Scratchathon'
• we spotlighted 14 easy tweaks to everything from our Knowledge Bank to Priority Post-Its.
Net result: a real hunger for change, for improvement and for newness. Glacial evolution be damned.
In 2005, Google introduced 77 new services. How did your company do?
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