If you are seeking creative ideas go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.”
– Raymond Inmon, as quoted by Roy H. Williams in a recent Monday Morning Memo
There are times when the best way to find something is to look for nothing.
“The commute” has come to mean the time we spend getting from home to work, and from work to home. With more and more people either not working, working from home (WFH) or working from “anywhere” it might be a good time to re-evaluate the commute and reassess its value.
I started my career in radio advertising sales. “Drivetime,” the commercial blocks sold during most people’s commutes, were the most expensive ads one could buy, because (allegedly) more people would hear them.
The key to standing out in those ads was creativity – lest you sound like all the other ads and fade into the drone of the road noise.
One thing missing in these times is creativity. Never before have more lemmings been incented to become more lemming-like, and that’s not a fertile environment for creative ideas. As Immon says, and as The Wizard quoted in the MMM — angels whisper to us when we go for a walk.
This week’s DD’s will come through the filter of an extraordinary commute. Later on Monday, we’ll begin a 1,400-mile commute with The Tallest of The Three. His embarkation on a college journey will affect other commutes – one less driver for The Youngest She of The Three, fewer drivers to break up longer trips — and more importantly, one more topic to ponder whenever we’re out walking about: “How’s he doing?” Two of The Three are now “adulting,” or at least “college-ing” — and while it’s a stage we’ve long considered, planned for, and dreamed about, it is, in fact, a change.
In Heston House, these are times of great change.
In our businesses, yours, mine, and everyone else’s, these are times of great change — and times in need of creative ideas.
Let’s use our commutes — whether from home to work, from home to campus, from home to the grocery store or wherever we may wander — to listen for the angels who will whisper to us, if only we’ll listen. And let’s deploy the ideas we have from those whispers to make a difference, in our homes, on campuses, and in our businesses.
Leave a Reply