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Winning the Race to Market:
The Case for Creativity Coaching

www.blairmiller.com

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Chicago, IL (November 15, 2007) In a business world where everyone knows they need “innovation,” but no one’s quite sure how to get it or how to make it pay, Chicago-based creativity consultancy Blair Miller & Associates is delivering million-dollar results to its Fortune 500 clients.

“Naturally, being experts in innovation, we do a lot of training and consulting for people in marketing, new product and R&D,” says Miller, president BMA, “But the surprise hit has been working with manufacturing, procurement and productivity. The results are amazing.” Over the last 10 years, Miller, who holds a Master of Science in Creativity and Change Leadership, has worked closely with experts in and out of corporations and developed a methodology that helps clients squeeze millions of dollars out of their costs. “It’s opened our eyes to a whole new application of creativity technology,” says Miller.

This year, it caught the eye of an east coast Fortune 100 company. In January, Miller got a call from a client charged with reducing her division’s costs by $12MM. No ideas were in the pipeline. Over the next few weeks, Miller and his team helped the group compile a “Fact Book” which chronicles every input, output and expense of the operation. “It’s like a perfect snapshot of the business,” says Miller. Before the session, he asked the leaders to name their blue-sky goal for the ideation. They put their figure at $14MM. Over the next two days, Miller’s team helped them identify potential productivity gains of $164MM. The whole division was electrified.”

Of course, $164MM worth of ideas on post-it notes is one thing. Money in the bank is another. But in June, the client wrote back with an update: by April close, her group had delivered $6.6MM against the $12MM goal. In October, she emailed again, saying they’d called the year. As of October 1, 2007, they had identified, verified and delivered $11,750,000 in savings. She said by year’s end, she thought the actual savings might top $13MM. Already the 2008 pipeline was full of ideas, and they had $4MM of ideas in reserve for 2009. “It’s a credit to her vision and tenacity that she and her team delivered those results,” says Miller.

For a billion-dollar company, $13MM may be chump change, but you’ve got to remember what Miller’s partner, productivity expert Don Lynch, calls “the multiplier effect.” “Basically, a dollar saved is roughly equivalent to $15 of top line sales,” says Lynch. “Different industries have different multipliers, but do the math, and you’re starting to look at some impressive numbers.” Lynch, an ex-Kraft employee, says he saw the payoff happen over time at Kraft, where he and Miller first met and began to collaborate on this creativity/productivity hybrid. “Success in one division would breed interest and action in other divisions,” says Lynch. “Pretty soon, we were talking about really big numbers.”

All this has been gratifying news to Miller, who often finds himself talking about these results to disbelieving audiences. “At a meeting last week, I was pitching our creativity training and consulting work to a new client, and I just mentioned this work we do in productivity. The manager of Global Innovation Efforts looked at me and said, ‘I’ve never heard of people in the innovation and creativity field even knowing about operational costs and expenses. That’s what we worry about and wrestle with, but you really did that? Wow!’” Miller smiles. “If you’re going to be in the innovation field, you’ve got to innovate.”