Don’t Believe Me? Just Watch!

Grammy Award winner Bruno Mars has a great line in his hit song “Uptown Funk.” The line is “Don’t Believe Me? Just Watch!” This line makes me think of all the people who have been counted out, disregarded or marginalized because they didn’t follow the “established set of rules.” They have been called names like strange, odd, different, or a little off. A kinder statement is they are a free spirit.

Well many of these free spirits create their own path, dance to their own music, trust and follow their own set beliefs. They are confident, not arrogant, in their ability; they are risk takers, but not reckless. They see a problem or as many free spirits call it, an opportunity. They study and research why there is an issue with the current method, collaborate with other like-minded people to determine if and how a different approach will improve the situation and then most importantly, they take action. These free spirits are entrepreneurs or a new term, designers in the truest sense of the word.

I love the term designers. I recently read “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans who wrote:

Designers imagine things that don’t yet exist, and then they build them and the world changes. Designers believe in radical collaboration which works on the principle that people with very different backgrounds will bring their idiosyncratic technical and human experiences to the team. This increases the chance that the team will have empathy for those who will use what they are designing, and that the collision of different background will generate truly unique solutions.

In other words, they are not afraid to do what hasn’t be done or design a completely new way to drastically improve a process or industry. They look at the established best practice and often say, “That’s OK, but what if we did this?” Don’t believe me, look at Starbucks, Apple, Google, Amazon. They didn’t invent coffee shops, or technology, or search engines or logistics. What they did was design a better and more intuitive customer experience. They changed the world.

Designers aren’t afraid of failure; in fact, they view what most of us call failure as one step closer to success. They start the project, test and challenge the progress, make adjustments and keep moving forward. They don’t worry about perfection, because perfection never happens. Instead they focus on continuous improvement. Unlike many major corporation or established organizations, they don’t milk their product or solution. Why is this important? I have been involved with far too many people or organizations that once they find initial success, they get lazy. They turn their focus to attacking their competitors or hyping themselves with marketing/branding propaganda.

Our free-spirited entrepreneurs/designers continue to make their product or solution better to the point where there is no other viable alternative. Their solutions are not just what the customers do or buy it is what they are. For example, Harley Davidson customers are Harley Davidson. They will wait longer and pay more because they are Harley Davidson. There is no other option. The same is true with Apple from MACs to iPhones, to iPods to “iEverything.”

We have all heard the saying: There are people that make things happen; people that watch things happen; and people that wonder what the hell happened. These free spirited, entrepreneur/designers are the people who make a major impact in the world or their industry. You know what and who I am talking about, in fact I may very well be talking about you.

If you want to follow an up and coming organization, keep your eye on Scratch and its CEO Astor West. She is about to drastically improve the retail and digital commerce world. Don’t believe her? Just watch!