In business we are told to listen to our customers. Be customer-centric. In city building we are told to listen to the community. Be community-focused. And there’s no question that these mantras exist for a reason. They are paramount.

But when should you not listen?

I watched a Chef’s Table documentary last night on Massimo Bottura (pictured above), who is the owner and operator of Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. Osteria Francescana is a 3 star Michelin restaurant and widely ranked as one of the best restaurants in the world.

But it wasn’t easy for Massimo at the beginning. His goal was to bring the Italian kitchen into the 21st century and so his plates are often creative takes on classic Italian dishes. His restaurant blends the old and new; food and contemporary art.

This approach upset a lot of people at the outset. Massimo was seen almost as a traitor who was turning his back on traditional Italian cooking within provincial Modena. Don’t mess with centuries of tradition they would say. Grandma knew best, son.

Because of this, his restaurant sat empty in the early years, to that point that he was ready to close its doors. The only reason he kept it open was because his wife encouraged him to give it one more year. She said: This is the kind of food you want to make. If you don’t try, you’ll regret it.

So he gave it another year and luckily he got a few breaks, including a glowing review by a well known food critic from out of town. Once this hit, the Modenese started to quickly rethink their distaste for Massimo’s idiosyncratic dishes. Before long, his restaurant was full.

So what changed? It wasn’t the dishes. It was perception. The out of town critics and positive reviews gave people permission to like the dishes. This is critical because nobody needs permission to like tradition. It’s tradition, after all. There’s little risk in that.

But there’s risk in liking something new that hasn’t been done before. Change creates uncertainty. And if Massimo’s wife hadn’t encouraged him to stick with it just a bit longer and ignore the naysayers, the world may not have one of its top restaurants.

Sometimes we don’t know what we like and want until we are shown.

Image: Osteria Francescana 

I would like to do a follow-up to yesterday’s post about innovators and creators, because I recently stumbled up the following quote:

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

It is taken from a Slate article called: Inside the Box – People don’t actually like creativity. And it’s supported by a bunch of research, including a 2010 study conducted by professors at Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina.

The key finding was that people generally hold a bias against creativity, and it’s activated when we become motivated to reduce uncertainty. This might be because we fear rejection or because we’ve come to learn that reducing uncertainty and promoting the status quo is often better for career advancement. 

There’s less perceived risk.

But here’s the thing: celebrating creativity after the fact is meaningless. There’s no genius in that. Everyone now knows this truth. The heroics come into play when you’re both willing to be misunderstood and willing to be dead wrong.

Of course, talk is cheap. 

Here are 5 suggestions for promoting greater creativity at your company taken from Tom Tunguz’s blog, who himself is borrowing from Barry Staw (author quoted above):

1. Hire people who’s skills aren’t precise matches for the needs of the company.
2. Encourage employees not to listen blindly to corporate policy and conventional wisdom; not all to speak with the same voice.
3. Those in power should go as far as possible to encourage active opposition to ideas. (Similar to Drucker’s obligation to dissent).
4. Optimize for adaptiveness. Have extra labor capacity and explore side projects. (How many creative companies started or were reinvigorated by side projects? Twitter and Slack are two that immediately come to mind).
5. Lead rather than follow. Take risks.

I find the topic of pricing incredibly interesting. How much is someone willing to pay for item X? I’ve said this before, but pricing was one of my favorite classes in business school.

Here is a line that I really liked from a recent blog post by Tomasz Tunguz’s on price anchoring:

“Relative pricing comparisons are among the most common method of price rationalization.”

The topic of his post may not be all that interesting to this audience – it’s about software as service platforms – but the principles should be. 

In Tomasz’s post he talks about how companies building SaaS products aimed at salespeople will often have their pricing compared to that of Salesforce. In other words, people might say to themselves: Salesforce costs $X per seat. Is this other product worth half of $X? Salesforce is the anchor.

I can tell you that I do this all the time. (Do you?) I’ll say to myself, condos of this build quality are selling for $Y in this neighborhood. Is this other neighborhood better or worse? If better, how much of a premium might someone apply to it?

So if you’re in the business of pricing products, you may want to give some thought to how your customers might be anchored when assessing your offering. Relative pricing comparisons allow us to rationalize dollars in our mind.