This New Year: Don't Enervate. Leap.

In beginning Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, "What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations?"

A great word, enervate. It means the opposite of what it sounds like. It means: deplete.

What fails for Thoreau is the flaccidity of thought in his world. Once, for him, it meant that: "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

That same flaccidity of thought is what affects current consumer product thinking about innovation. Every CPG company worth its salt or soap or detergent or food or cosmetic touts its Innovation Initiatives.

Thousands of employees are marched through innovation processes and told they too possesses the innovative capabilities that led Edison to invent the light bulb or DaVinci to codify his many inventions or took Franklin out into a rainstorm of brilliance with a kite and a key.

What flattery. What brilliant chest-beating. But now here's a true innovator's dilemma. No, not what Prof. Christensen described as the pressure for continual innovation. This innovation dilemma is more insidious. It is enervating because it really depletes the ability and the desire and the realization of true innovation. It pays lip service to progress and only results in incremental activities.

Here is how Thoreau characterized the innovation processes used by so many companies today: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

In all too many instances, the results of these innovations are, in reality, merely line extensions of existing brands or services. Nothing truly novel. But gosh it really feels good to sit for hours with colleagues, playing games, free-associating and dreaming up the Simple Pleasures of Tide detergent.

Now Vanilla & Lavender Scented Tide laundry detergent probably sounded novel in that innovation session in Cincinnati. But Europeans have putting those scents in their pockets ever since they wanted to hide the fact that they were suffering from Plague. (Remember the Ring Around A-Rosy rhyme? What do you think those pockets full of posies were for?)

No, the real innovation was the discovery of Tide itself and synthetic laundry detergent in 1946 when P&G scientists added sodium tripolyphosphate. We end 60 years later with a scented line extension.

So, for beginning the new year, let's make a promise. No more innovation, if innovation only means progress by increments. Let's try and make this year and every year, a leap year, wherein we make "a sudden lively movement" that means real progress and real growth.

Hot Tip: Clean Your iPod with Dove Soap

My Body = My Software

Here is how I think about these products.

I go to Planet Fitness. I climb on the elliptical trainer, preparing for a journey of miles while staying in the spot. I put my white earphones on. Then I'm off on Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Somewhere past U2's Where The Streets Have No Name and Soul Asylum's Runaway Train, I look around and I see that the vast majority of my sweating, straining, traveling compatriots are wearing the same white earphones.

But they are listening to the Beatles or Bach or Blige.

Each of us is doing the same thing on the exact same hardware but, for each of us, the music of our journey is unique to us because, for each of us, our tastes, our emotions, our desires and dreams fill our individual worlds.

From the Dove Soap web site: Dove believes that beauty comes in different shapes, sizes, and colors and that real beauty can be genuinely stunning.

The soap (great soap!) is the same for everyone. But what Dove realizes is that this mass market product cleans and moisturizes a world of individual beauties.

The hardware is the same. It is the application of that software that makes each consumer's use of and appreciation for that product special to them.

Are the products you use or make special to someone else? Are you capturing that specialness?

Excuse me, it's time to get back the trainer.

A Rose By Any Other Word Is My Cellphone

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."
- Juliet, Romeo and Juliet

"A rose is a rose is a rose."
- Gertrude Stein

What do you call that battery-operated device you carry around in your hand that lets you talk to other people, listen to music, watch videos, locate yourself and your friends, watch televised media and pay for your lunch?

Here's the flash: Whatever you call it, Motorola has sold in the last two years, 50 million Razr units almost EQUAL to the number of Ipods sold by Apple.

In the December 4 Business Week article on Upward Mobility, Motorla calls it the "device formerly known as a cellphone." Nokia calls it a "multimedia computer." Samsung says they are "mobile information terminals."

This is a lot like Adam, who, in the book Does G-d Have A Big Toe?, called a bear that "big, brown, furry two-eyed big-clawed, loud, scary beast." And he used that term only after he realized that he couldn't just assign a number to each of the animals in the world. Hmmmmnnnnnnn, kind of sounds like the electronics industry. And Adam called the bear a bear after the bear told him what he wanted to be called.

Do we really need a Carolus Linnaeus of nomenclature to figure out what to call one of the most potentially useful and profitable devices created by man? Maybe it is easier to name G-d's creatures than it is to name Man's devices.

And we all know what happens to Man when he is left up to his own devices.

This is the kind of mistake that is made by many technical industries. You get breath-taking technical breakthroughs but it takes years for the breakthroughs and consumers to catch up with each other.

Remember the billions that European wireless carriers paid to purchase G3 bandwidths?

Basically, it comes down to three simple things: Talk, See, Buy.

Within those dynamics, a myriad of permutations and services will be developed and offered to consumers -- and the risk, the huge risk, is continuing confusion that will force developers to under-deliver.

If you can't name it simply, then how can you simply use it? This where I would spend a lot of time and conversation upfront talking to consumers, understanding their needs and desires and price parameters -- and this has to be done holistically. If each developer only looks at what they are developing, they are missing the bigger picture of the choices that consumers can make and what their competition is offering. It isn't easy. And it is certainly a bear of a problem. But if you can't tell the difference between a bear and a rose upfront, you run the risk of either being a beauty or someone's supper.