FIVE Lessons the Mouse Taught Me About Idea Management - Kehinde Bademosi

I wrote this on Monday, 26 November 2012 to teach the Personal Branding Workshops at Orange. It's surprising how relevant the lessons are for today's creators and ideas people. Kehinde Bademosi

I caught a mouse in my trap last night, and it begged me for a minute or two before throwing it into the trash. It wanted to teach me some life lessons. Squeaking and rolling its eyes in the pains of the booby traps, the mouse needed to leave me with 5 major lessons that provoked me to write this piece.?

LESSON 1. Mice know how to invade new territories.?INVADE

Think again if you ever wonder how a mouse found its way into your well-locked apartment. These creatures look for little cracks in the walls, and together, they burrow them further, bringing in their kin one at a time. You are not ready for business if you are not ready to drill a hole in the competition. Steve Jobs's Apple drilled a hole in the IBM concept to launch the Lisa in 1984. Also, in 1984, Richard Branson took on the almighty BA by bringing 'Virginness' into an industry plagued by dullness. Mice smell opportunities in distant places and launch an offensive.

If you are entering an industry with the same offering convention, why would anyone do business with you? You have to leave some holes in the walls so they can notice you and literarily smell a rat.?

?Lesson 2.?Mice know how to litter the place. They are very fertile.?CREATE

There is almost no other way to build your personal branding without producing what we can see. And number matters here. How many articles have you written in your area of expertise? How many Blogs have you contributed to? How many papers have you submitted to the local institutions in your city? Every 4 weeks, a mouse is ready to produce a new litter. You are laughing at the other lady whose work is almost everywhere online, right? Well, you need to laugh at yourself. Revolutionists write their thoughts down. They produce prototypes of their works. They keep doing it. You are as good as your last job four weeks ago.

Don't tell us you know how to change an industry. Please write it down. Post it online. That's littering.

LESSON 3.?Mice can Infect your precious little ones.?Be INFECTIOUS?

When a mouse pee on it, you better leave it. It's called the power of infectiousness. Don't do things for doing things' sake. Leave them with an infectious message or style. To be infectious is to start something that can go places.

What's more viral than a mouse? Don't just update your Facebook page; leave it with poison. Tweet with some infectious words and see the world at your doorstep. Learn the power of contagious messaging. Learn how to tell a story that can be retold. Check your area of influence on your marketplace. Are you being infectious, or are you just a sweet little something that leaves no bite?

Pee on that industry and let people smell it from afar. Don't strive to litter for litter's sake. Make sure your works have a bite to it.

The Little Black Dress by Coco Channel was a revolution that has never left womenfolk's closets. Prior to 192O's, no one would touch a black dress except they were mourning. Coco tapped into the World War 1 fatalities and created sexy dresses women could wear anywhere. That's infectious. Smelling the opportunity and turning it into some magic. People can't get over it; many women still keep a little black dress. Infectious works create movements, cool cultures, and counter cultures. They help us make sense of our world without providing an absolute answer to our many questions. They are deeply layered, leaving us wanting more.

LESSON 4.?Mice can adapt to a new environment relatively faster than fast, making them one of the animals you find anywhere on Earth.?ADAPT OR DIE

Like Darwin said. Only the creature that adapts in the circle of life indeed survives. Things change all around us. Economies change. Consuming patterns change. Industries change. From diskette to CD, from CD to flash drives, from flash drives to clouds. Things are bound to change, and you don't just stand there crying foul and blaming your stepmom for your misfortunes. There was a time we clutched our Encyclopedia in the form of books and CD-ROMs. Today, Wikipedia has changed all of that.

What do you do? Change. Yea, you heard me. Change. Change your operational model. Change your office.

Who needs that over-decorated reception when most of your prospects are online? Change. Change the way you see work hours for your staff. The cities are getting overpopulated. Transportations are barely enough for all.

Do people have to come to work from 8 to 5 pm when they can get most jobs done on their computers at home? Change.?

LESSON 5.?Mice are lab rats. Experiment.?EXPERIMENT WITH FAILURE.

Do you know that popular saying about the lab rat? It's not a legend. Most laboratories of human science today have to thank the mice for allowing themselves to go through such gruesome exercises in the lab. Mice embrace experiments. So should you.

You can't know if it will work if you don't experiment with it.

Historically, Thomas Edison tried a thousand times before he got the light bulb right. After many experiments with platinum and other filaments, Thomas Edison returned to Carbon filament to give the world a long-lasting bulb.?

PS:?This piece was written in 2012, and so much has happened to our world. How are you doing?

Peace.