I spent some time the other day with an incredible innovator, and new product “guru”–I was going to say genius but that would have embarrassed him.

 Bob Worrell has an incredibly cool company that helps mostly bigger companies create new products.  He has done work for Guidant, Lipton-Pepsi and even Jobdig.   Does he have success?  86% of his products are successful vs. the national average of whatever-happened-to-that-idea-we-had?

For people who know, Bob is someone they know.

Anyway, he has developed a system for helping developing new products.  Basically, his system helps businesses discover those features, characteristics in a new product that customer might not expect, but love.  One of his examples is a device he made for Guidant, some kind of an IPOD-sized thing that older people with pacemakers can use to place over their chest to check on the equipment.  It can even send a shock to the device, er, message, so it can re-start the program.  Bob’s process discovered a feature that no one had thought of, a voice message system built in to calmly direct the patient.  Such ‘delights’ are the difference between a product that is OK, and one that wins big in the marketplace.

Books, of course, have been written about this ‘Wow’ factor, or providing customer delight moments—in new products, customer service, etc. 

What became obvious to me, however, was that employees, not just new products, have the ability to provide these moments  every day. 

In designing a new product, Bob says, there are certain basics you have to have in order to ‘play.’  If you are building a new car,for example,  you need to make sure the brakes work, but no one has ever bought a car because of the fantastic brakes.  You assume they work.

Same with employees.  People assume that employees will do certain things.  Show up on time.  Be relatively positive, at least non-Postal.  Have skills.  The basics.

Trouble is, a lot of people make the mistake in assuming that these basics are what the job is all about. They coast.   In fact, your current job is a platform on which you can build a better job and future.  Most jobs are bigger than you think, I said sometime ago.  I still think that is true. 

How can you re-create yourself into an Employee Delight?  What are the features of this new employee?  Maybe these new features will help make your name in the marketplace too.