FIVE Lessons the Mouse taught me in Idea Management

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 a lesson of my life. 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. It's written to me. And if by chance you are reading this, you may learn one or two things but remember this was straight from the mouse to my own Muse. 

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

If you ever wonder how a mouse found its way into your well-locked apartment, think again. These creatures look for little cracks in the walls and together, they burrow it 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's. Steve Job's Apple drilled a hole in the IBM concept in order to launch the Lisa in 1984. Also in that same 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 coming into an industry with the same convention of offering, why would anyone do business with you? You gotta leave some hole 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 week, a mouse is ready to produce new litters. 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 have an idea of how to change an industy. 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 messaging or style. To be infectious is to start something that can go places. Online, you call it viral. What's more viral than a mouse? Don't just update your Facebook page, leave it with a poison. Tweet with some infectious words and see the world at your doorstep. Learn the power of infectious messaging. Learn how to tell story that can be retold. Check your area of influence on your marketplace. Are you being infectious or you are 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 are mourning. Coco tapped into the World War 1 fatalities and created a sexy dress women could wear to just about anywhere. That's being infectious. Smelling the opportunity and turning it into some magic. People still can't get over it as every woman worth the salt still keeps 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 for more. Above all, they are brutally simple like the LBD. 

LESSON 4. Mice can adapt to a new environment quite 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 truly 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 forms of books and CD-ROM. Today, the 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 5pm when they can get most jobs done on their computers at home? Change. Adaptation is the no 5 rule of the mouse.

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

You know the 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 experiment. So should you. You can't know if it will work if you don't experiment with it. History has it that Thomas Edison tried for 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: I created a workbook out of this to teach the ‘how’ of each lesson. The workbook gives you detailed steps to take. These are techniques gleaned from over thousand best practices in Brand and Idea Management as taught at Orange Academy.  If you want the workbook or you want to attend our next Personal Branding workshop, send a mail to the Program Officer at Orange Academy via info@kennybrandmuse.com or info@cluborangeng.com.

Peace.