Nobel Prize Winners Know What They Need to Know

Nobel prizes are won by people who know what they are looking for! Yes, they are certainly smart, but they are also better-informed about what they need to know. How many of the rest of us can say that with any degree of assuredness?

Merely being "smarter" is not the same as being "better-informed,"  and that is something that all of us have a professional responsibility to strive for. After all, the only real sustainable competitive advantage that most of our organizations can hope for is in the realm of being able to count on having better ideas than our competitors have; ideas about: customers, offerings, processes, talent, markets, business models,  etc., etc.; or the ability of being able to work with such new ideas faster and more effectively than others are. There is good news on this front! Our work on Idea Hunting has found that "the smartest guys in the room" are often not the most effectively smartest in terms of how they work with new ideas and their ability to move organizations on the basis of these ideas. Even better,  we have also found that working effectively with new ideas has less to do with brain cells than with behaviors! The absolute prerequisite is neither about school grades nor even about the schools attended, but, rather, it's about knowing what you need to know.

It's sort of amazing how few people really understand what it is that they should be looking for when it comes to ideas. Most of us are too busy getting through the day, or the quarter, to take the time to reflect on what we need to know... instead, we sort of take whatever comes along. It's a bad way to run a career! Jim Koch, the founder and Chairman of Boston Beer Company (maker of Sam Adams beers), told us "My sense was that once I started looking for business ideas, they were everywhere. It's sort of like a radio frequency. You're surrounded by radio waves, but if you're not tuning into them, you're not going to receive them." The trick is figuring out what frequency to tune your antenna to.

The essential argument is that great Idea Hunters have figured out that it's a much better idea-strategy to figure out what you need to know, and to be interested in the ideas of others, than it is to be consumed with how interesting you, yourself, are. Recently, I've been working with a number of executives on trying to become more aware of what they need to know if they are to be better at getting new ideas. We have arrived at a three step formulation that seems to work well in creating the sort of "tuner" that Jim Koch refers to above. The three questions that need to be addressed are:

1. What is strategically vital for our organization to be a leader in in the future? This links the choices that we might pursue to issues that are "critically" important to our organization at a strategic level.
2. What are we already good at? This recognizes that we should always consider our established strengths whenever we are moving into a new realm of knowledge.
3. What do we want to be known for over the next two years? Here, I think that two years is a good choice given the acceleration of change in our society, and the pronoun employed can be either "I" [as a leader] or "We" [as a team].

If we take these three questions and array them in a Venn diagram, following the very useful approaches of my Forbes.com colleague Jessica Hagy, we arrive at a target (or, rather a choice between two targets) to aim at:

Target A builds upon what we're already good at, and invites us to "deepen" our knowledge of what else we might be able to accomplish based upon our established competencies. Target B takes us into learning more about things that we're not presently good at; perhaps broadening our competencies in the future? With either choice, the exercise of being more precise in what we need to know inevitably raises our awareness of what we need to know more about, and also inevitably it "hones" our sensitivity to the wealth of ideas around us which are abundantly available in the form of other industry's experiences. This is Jim Koch's tuner in action!

In the spirit of the Nobel season, the exercise above of learning what you need to know also follows the advice of DNA co-discoverer and Nobel laureate James D. Watson, who included among his collected  lessons of a lifetime:

1. Choose an objective apparently ahead of its time
2. Work on problems only when you feel tangible success may come in several years
3. Never be the brightest person in a room

as well as following the observations of a co-discoverer of "the nature of cellular immune defence" and Nobel laureate, Peter Doherty, who included the following advice among his recommendations in   "The Beginner's Guide To Winning a Nobel prize":

1. Try to solve major problems and make really big discoveries
2. Be realistic and play to your strengths
3. Focus and don't be a dilettante

Being smart matters, but knowing what you need to know may ultimately be more important.

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Bill Fischer is the co-author (with Andy Boynton & Bill Bole) of The Idea Hunter (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Bill Fischer can be followed on Twitter at @bill_fischer

The photo accompanying this posting is a terracotta figure, made in Corinth ~450 B.C.. It is presently in the British Museum.