Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
Jack’s Notebook author Gregg Fraley is the type of person who would ask a Starbucks barista – one he didn’t know – “What is your dream?” When he started researching Jack’s Notebook, he did just that. And, he said in a recent interview, “Not a single person said ‘Oh, I really want to be a waiter’ – they’d say ‘I’d like to start a business,’ or ‘I’d like to be involved in this industry.’
Jack’s Notebook, according to Fraley, is intended for people like that Starbucks barista – people who are starting a business or are new to business world. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have business relevance – Jack’s Notebook would resonate with anyone who needs to deal with change in their lives or their business (which is to say pretty much anyone). Fraley’s examples: Anybody who’s thinking about a career change; anybody who wants to do a better job of problem solving in their business.
Jack’s Notebook is a novel, a business fable inspired formatically by the works of Patrick Lenicioni and Eliyahu Goldratt. Said Fraley, “Narrative brings an emotional component, and when there’s an emotional component, people learn better. Stories are a very human way to learn. People see themselves in the characters…they think, oh, it could happen to me – or thank God that hasn’t happened to me!”
Jack’s Notebook is an elegant balance of imagination and analysis. The imagination reaches out and takes hold of the reader, while the accompanying analysis, which could bog down the story, instead feeds the reader’s curiosity about what the power that this CPS creative problem solving process seems to have. The analysis also could be somewhat comforting for readers who are more likely to be analytical than imaginative.
“It’s the natural tendency of people who are raised in the ‘one right answer’ to focus on analysis,” said Fraley. “We are not trained to be more imaginative. We don’t practice it. We might do art every other Friday if it’s raining – arts and music are all being left behind in favor of other things.
“But you need both imagination and analysis. Business people end up in those jobs because they are great at analysis. But, it’s like Dr. Spock and Captain Kirk – it wasn’t Spock who was the genius with great ideas, it was usually Kirk. You can’t analyze your way to a great idea – you can only see the path in retrospect. I would hope people would spend time developing their imaginative side to complement their analytical side.”
Jack’s Notebook is notable also for presenting the CPS process in a concrete and easy-to-grasp way. A meta-model for thinking and problem-solving that’s been around for about 50 years, CPS has always been considered something that you don’t pick up immediately. It’s complex and requires practice and the very melding of imagination and analytics that Fraley talks about. While there are many consultants offering CPS training and variations thereof, CPS training is most commonly taught at the CPSI conferences put on by the Creative Education Foundation. There, the basic “Springboard” training is usually at least three days long. (Disclaimer: I went through Springboard training at CPSI four years ago, and my company offers a training workshop based on a variation of CPS.)
Fraley, who has led Springboard training at CPSI for many years (though he was not my class leader), sees Jack’s Notebook as similar to Springboard because the characters in Jack’s Notebook go over and through the CPS process many times in solving problems that are critical to their lives. This is much the way Springboard works – small groups go over and over CPS in many iterations solving real-world problems that come out of the group. “Springboard is effective because it’s an emotional experience,” said Fraley.
Some reviewers have commented that in Jack’s Notebook, Fraley deviates from CPS for the sake of the more fast-moving narrative in the last third or so of the book. Not so, says he – the specific CPS model that he relies on is a fairly recent one modeled by Gerard Puccio of the International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY Buffalo State. “In Creative Leadership, Puccio classifies the steps in the CPS process in a slightly different way,” said Fraley. “He adds a diagnostic step.”
This diagnostic step involves determining exactly which part of the CPS process (Identifying the Challenge, Idea Generation, or Solution Development) you need to be in to handle the specific problem you are dealing with. Fraley’s version of the diagnostic step is what he calls in Jack’s Notebook a “Challenge Triage.” As the plot progresses and Jack becomes more fluent in CPS, he shows a corresponding fluidity with the Challenge Triage (which, like all the CPS principles Jack learns to use, is fully explained in the CPS Quick Reference Guide at the end of the book).
Fraley said he hopes that Jack’s Notebook will “take CPS to a whole new group of people. If you are a product manager, you’ve heard about this, these methods are not unheard of. The barista at Starbucks hasn’t heard of it. They don’t know that they need a better creative process – they only know that they’re stuck behind the bar....I was awestruck by how powerful CPS could be, but I was already 37 when I found out about it. Wouldn’t it be great to know a method for deliberate creativity when you’re young?”
A good metaphor is hard to resist, but a bad one is hard to forgive. We’ve all read those metaphor-based business books before and been burned when the metaphor breaks down after three chapters. So I did not want to like Andy Cohen’s Follow The Other Hand – the “innovation as magic” metaphor seemed just too good to hold up.
The metaphor comes directly out of Cohen’s experience as a young boy hanging around his magician great-uncle and the uncle’s circle of magician friends. Yet when I spoke with him recently, Cohen recalled that he was uncertain that the “magic as innovation” metaphor would hold up if he tried to apply it in a book.
“I was concerned that people would have to get over the obstacle of negative connotations…[of] magic as something that misrepresents, that shifts.”
He worked on the metaphor for a year before writing the book, and it “kept surprising me along the way….because the metaphor is different and unique in its own way, and I make it pay out.”
The way it pays out is that Cohen equates “follow the other hand” with the not-uncommon innovation advice that one should challenge assumptions. And he offers magic as a concrete way readers can test the value of challenging assumptions.
The irresistible part of the metaphor is the part where he also talks about both magic and innovation as processes that make possible something that is seemingly impossible.
In showing the reader a little of how magic makes possible the seemingly impossible, Cohen lays out a structure for not just doing magic, but figuring out how to do it.
There’s an important distinction there. Think of it as accepting that innovation doesn’t just happen, but is a process. That’s what Cohen is saying about magic -- it doesn’t just happen, it’s a deliberate process. He goes one step further and lays out exactly what that process is:
1. The first thing to do in creating an illusion is to identify an effect that you want to achieve.
2. Next, challenge assumptions – the main assumption being challenged, of course, is that the effect can’t be done. In the process of challenging that assumption, you are forced to look at the possibilities.
3. Then you figure out a method.
4. And then, at the very last, you figure out the performance – that’s the part where it *looks* like magic.
Cohen said his next project involves “exploring a straitjacket routine” which of course leads to an exploration of how we restrain ourselves. Now that I know Andy Cohen knows his way around a metaphor, I can’t wait for that one!
This is a hefty book -- 265 pages -- chock full of exercises that can be used for teambuilding, ice breakers, energizers, and to stimulate creativity, to teach teams to work through change, think strategically, and collaborate more effectively. I downloaded it, printed it out, and had it comb-bound, and now my copy is now is full of sticky notes on exercises I've vowed to try for various client projects and training sessions.
Those who have to defend the use of the arts in business will find a lot of help here as well. The first part of the book lays out th authors' argument that the arts are just what business needs today. A sample:
"Businesses today want to break away from their limitations, aim higher, and be a creative force for good in the world. We need the transformative experiences that the arts give us to thrive in a world of change."
This section includes interviews with luminaries such as John Seely Brown, and case studies from companies such as the World Bank and Lexis-Nexis.
Van Gundy and Naiman did not make up every single exercise -- approximately 35 others contributed exercises as well. The resulting variety is a welcome breath of air after the shelves of books available that set forth a theory for creativity and then offer exercises that don't vary much. In addition to many exercises, the authors' contribution is in the extremely useful and clear presentation of these exercises. They're divided into section according to the art form used -- music, drawing, painting, collage, storytelling, improv, poetry, and others. And each one includes a clear statement of the objectives, the uses (team-building, change management, etc.), the time required and materials needed.
Bottom line -- this is well worth the $48.99. I have spent many times that amount to go to week-long conferences that didn't give me anywhere near this much useful information that I could take back to my work.
Yes, I had noticed that Seth Godin has a new book out called Free Prize Inside, which he says is a "practical hands-on vision of where, when, and how to find a Purple Cow." However, I had not, until now, noticed that when Seth says "free prize" he is talking about innovation.
As per Seth's own condensed version of Free Prize Inside, the two ways companies grow are through big ads and big innovation. He posits a third method of growth -- soft innovation -- "the clever, insightful, useful small ideas that just about anyone in an organization can think up...that make your product into a Purple Cow." Seth calls this kind of innovation a "free prize" because "the revenue associated with it is far greater than the cost of implementing it."
If this interests you, the excellent Brand Autopsy blog has been running a discussion on it. I found out about the discussion because they thoughtfully posted a link to IdeaFlow as part of the comments to a post on how Seth Godin gets his ideas.
Disclaimer: I haven't yet read Free Prize Inside. Just passing the word along.
Bob Edwards (NPR's Morning Edition) interviewed Randall Rothenberg, editor-in-chief of strategy+business this morning. Rothenberg said that he considered fellow blogger Henry Chesbrough's book Open Innovation to be the top book of the year in the field of innovation.
Congratulations, Hank!
I agree with Rothenberg's assessment, and thinking about some of the insights in Open Innovation prompts me to come up with a few insights of my own. I'll post them when I've constructed a coherent formulation!
In previous chapters, The Innovator’s Solution authors Christensen and Raynor explored a disruptive strategy of “competing against nonconsumption.” But in so doing, companies are faced with the immediate challenge of how to find and sell to the nonconsumers who can become your customers.A case study with which many of us are familiar — how Sony scored numerous times with disruptions such as the transistor radio and the Walkman — illustrates the point perfectly.
The Sony case also illustrates another point made in this chapter, which is that disruptive products often require disruptive channels for sales and distribution.This point is even more pertinent when you use the broader definition of channels that the authors are using: “A company’s channel includes no just wholesale distributors and retail stores, but any entity that adds value to or creates value around the company’s product as it wends its way toward the hands of the end user.” Example: computer makers such as IBM and Compaq are the channels through which Intel’s microprocessors and Microsoft’s operating system reach the end-use customer.
So if a disruptive strategy of “competing against nonconsumption” makes so much sense, the authors point out, why do incumbent companies do the opposite, which is “trying to stretch the disruptive innovation to compete against — and ultimately supplant — established products sold by well-entrenched competitors in large, obvious market applications”? The answer has to do with resource allocation.
Mistake No. 1 is to frame the disruption as an opportunity. Christensen and Raynor’s theory (much of which they credit to HBS professor Clark Gilbert) is that the disruption should be framed not as a potential opportunity for further growth, but as a threat to existing business that cannot be overlooked.Framing the disruption as a threat allows for top-level resource commitments. Then the disruptive technology should be developed by an “autonomous organization” (another division, a spin-off company) that can frame it as an opportunity.
Mistake No. 2 is to promise big numbers in the future in exchange for resources in the present. “The very effort of trying to articulate a convincing case for resources actually forces the entrepreneurs to cram the innovation as a sustaining technology in the existing market,” because the biggest markets whose size can be substantiated are those that already exist. Then when the results fall short of the promised numbers – because the market of nonconsumers is not being effectively targeted – resources are cut.
The authors suggest that companies that try new-market disruption establish a parallel process in which to evaluate potentially disruptive opportunities, a process in which the go/no go decisions are made based not on numerical rules but on how well they fit the pattern for disruption already explicated by the authors. And even then, the best that can be predicted is that “the initial conditions are conducive to successful growth.”
Back to Innovator’s Solution – Chapter 3, “What Products Will Customers Want To Buy?” is one that hits close to home for me, considering the business my team is in (and our company). But there’s a disappointment on the first page of the chapter: “Over 60% of new product efforts are scuttled before they ever reach the market, and of the 40% that do see the light of day, 40% fail to become profitable and are withdrawn from the market,” says Christensen. The disappointment isn’t just that the failure rate is high, but that the numbers are sourced (in one of those wonderful endnotes!) from a 1996 publication – the book Wellsprings of Knowledge by Dorothy Leonard (actually, the endnote says the book was published in 1996; Amazon says the hardback came out in January 1995 and a paperback version in 1998). In client presentations we’ve been using similar numbers that we’ve sourced from a 1998 Dun & Bradstreet study, but it’s disappointing to find even older numbers in a hot-off-the-press book.
In any case, Christensen points out that though the new-product failure rate is high, “failures are not really random.” They are a result of the difficulty of the task: How to connect disruptive innovations with the right customers to create a foothold in the market, then grow profitably along the sustaining trajectory. And identifying those disruptive footholds means “connecting with specific jobs your customers are trying to get done in their lives.”
Interesting discussion about market segmentation, which he defines as the “categorization stage of theory building.” And here’s correlation vs causation again – according to Christensen, “attribute-based categorization of either/both products or customers can reveal correlations between attributes and outcomes…but only…circumstance-based categorization (ie., segmentation schemes) tell causality – what features, functions, and positioning will cause customers to buy a product.
In other words, customers “hire” products to do specific “jobs,” so it’s best to segment the markets to mirror the way customers experience life. The critical unit of analysis is the circumstance, not the customer, which to me suggests qualitative, not quantitative, research. My instincts tell me this is right. And it actually also “fits” with the way we already structure our ideation projects, so that makes me all the happier about it!
Bottom line: One disruptive strategy is to compete against “nonconsumption” for “nonconsumers.” Traditional quantitative market research won’t identify these folks or the jobs they are trying to do. The best way to determine this market is to observe what people seem to be trying to do, then ask them about it. And only after you have identified those needs would you then move into quantitative research to determine the size of the market. Until you know what’s needed, you can’t figure out how many people might have that need.
I'm still reading, still thinking, still writing....will pick back up again with Chapter 3 shortly. Meanwhile, I've just now updated the Innovator's Solutionresources list. My sincere thanks go to Chuck Frey of the Innovation Tools site (including a blog), who's jumped on board, sending me source links to include to what has truly become a collaborative effort between our blogs.
A lengthy power outage at my hotel today kept me away from blogging, but it's been resolved now, and so on to Chapter 2, which I read on the plane yesterday.
Here's another one of those counterintuitive statements that, once you think about it, seems perfectly obvious -- "Few technologies or business ideas are intrinsically sustaining or disruptive in character. Rather, their disruptive impact must be molded into strategy as managers shape the idea into a plan and then implement it." Those who would argue for a process view of innovation already understand this. Innovation is relative to the context in which it occurs.
And even the type of innovation is contextually relative -- "an idea that is disruptive for one business may be sustaining to another."
This chapter also introduces a third contextual dimension to the disruptive innovation model introduced in Dilemma. In this dimension lie the contexts of consumption and competition that give rise to two different kinds of disruptions -- new-market disruptions in which the new technology, service, or product is aimed at introducing new people into the market, and low-end disruptions that attack the least-profitable and most overserved customers.
I still love the endnotes in this book. Check this out from page 70, in a long note pointing out how wrong people were who complained that Dilemma was flawed because sometimes an industry leader manages to avoid being killed by a disruptive competitor. The authors' response: "When we see an airplane fly, it does not disprove the law of gravity."
Actually, I totally agree that "business people who attempt to adopt his [Christensen's] principles as gospel do so at their peril." I believe this is true of *any* set of principles. There is *no* business gospel. That's why I spend so much time reading, reading, reading.
You also say that "predictability does not necessarily come from well-researched theory if the process itself is non-deterministic and chaotic." Assume that you are right, and that the processes by which disruptive innovation happens *are* by and large non-deterministic and chaotic. So do we then throw up our hands and say the process -- what's in what Christensen calls the "black box" of innovation -- just cannot be controlled, so let chaos rule? What do we do then?
This is addressed by Christensen in this endnote to Chapter 1 (p. 25): "Ultimately, innovators must judge what they will work on and how they will do it -- and what they should consider when making those decisions is what is in the black box. The acceptance of randomness in innovation then, is not a stepping-stone on the way to greater understanding; it is a barrier." I'm reading that to say *not* that there is no randomness in innovation -- but that to focus a study on innovation on that randomness isn't productive.
You also say, "The outcome of a process is often an emergent property; Murphy's Law (and its many corollories) have almost become business axioms in a complex environment in which predictable determinism has been obsolesced by our increasing understanding of the nature of complexity." To my mind, there's a lot of space between "predictability" and "determinism," and it's in this space that Christensen and Raynor's theorizing fits.
Finally, you say "It is awareness, and not theory or predictions, that are the key to business success." Awareness of what, actually? Surely awareness of that which can be known codified and categorized about the innovation process is a helpful thing. This can be studied, and in fact is what Christensen seems to me to be trying to do. I'd say we need that in addition to, not instead of, an awareness that there are some things about the innovation process that cannot be predicted. We need both for business success.
Renee: I've got the new Clayton Christensen…Anybody seen it? I'll be posting on it soon, so if you've read it or know the authors, feel free to weigh in.
Joyce: Renee, I'm in the process of digesting and figuring out how to share info about Innovator's Solution ... which I think is MUST reading ... however, it will probably also be fairly overwhelming to most folks because it has so much counterintuitive material ... and there's so much that could only be implemented or changed at very senior levels.
Leslie: Joyce, I agree with you that so much can only be implemented at very senior levels. It was interesting to me to see that, a year ago, a lot of the engineers at Dell were reading Innovator's Dilemma. And yet, at Dell, the innovation is in the supply chain and the manufacturing, not in the software and hardware that goes out the door (these were software engineers). Those folks certainly did face a dilemma. They could not do anything about what they could see.
John: Yeah, totally.
So let’s take a deep breath and start. I can tell you that the first chapter deserves careful attention and savoring. Last night I settled down at a local Starbucks with a cup of Tazo Zen tea and The Innovator’s Solution. Place was quiet except for Lucinda Williams’ CD, World Without Tears, playing on the sound system. I began to read, underline, make check marks, scrawl notes in the margins.
How do I love this book? Let me count the ways: the carefully rendered statement of the thesis, the placement of the starting point for the argument -- and, oh boy, the footnotes!
It begins, of course, with the now-familiar Innovator’s Dilemma: Once a company matures, growth through innovation is a very risky undertaking at which few companies succeed – because the very fact that the strategies used to run a successful, mature company are wildly at odds with the strategies needed to sustain disruptive innovation.
Pretty quickly Christensen dispenses with the top two reasons for this failure – bad management, risk-averse management – and zeroes in on this one: the widely held belief that growth is so hard to achieve “repeatedly and well” because “creating new-growth businesses is simply unpredictable.” The process, he says, looks unpredictable because its results are unpredictable. But “you cannot say, just by looking at the results of the process, whether the process that created those results is capable of generating predictable output. You must understand the process itself.” And predictability, he explains, comes from well-researched theory.
In effect he’s starting out 10 paces behind where most business books start. He’s laying out all the basis on which he’s going to build a theory, not just laying out a theory. And these couple of pages that expound on what makes a theory good and solid are written so elegantly that, like the rest of the chapter, they seem almost buoyant, not nearly as weighty as it sounds when I describe it.
This elegance I attribute partly to the skillful use of footnotes (actually, they are chapter endnotes). These are big, solid, meaty footnotes, filled with arguments that if put in the chapter itself would just bog it down. Yet they are there at the end of the chapter if you want them.
The endnotes are well worth the time it takes to read them. They go off in fascinating directions – reasoned criticism of management research, a collection of references to articles and books on theory-building, a short discourse on the need for anomaly-seeking (as opposed to anomaly-avoiding) research.
I half expected that note to include a reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time (“when something is unusable for some purpose, then the assignment becomes explicit”). Or to semiotics – after all, an anomaly – phenomena the existing theory cannot explain -- could be considered a break in the “code” (the theory). And to a semiotician it is the places where the code breaks in which the meaning of the code itself is laid bare.
So maybe this is going to turn out to be a semiotics of innovation? I suspect not, but it was fun to sit back after reading Chapter One and spend a little time sipping green tea and meditating on the logical difference between correlation and causality. And looking forward to the next chapter.
Pushing further into the book How Breakthroughs Happen......here’s my favorite quote I think from the entire book: “The pursuit of innovation changes dramatically when the goal shifts from invention to inventive recombination, from pushing people to think outside of the box to helping them think in other boxes.”
What are these boxes that we are all so famously trying to get out of? They are our small worlds that shape all we see and understand. Hargadon wants us to understand how we can work with those boxy, fragmented network structures instead of pushing against them. This is kind of like innovation aikido -- instead of expending a lot of energy in pursuing “out of the box” thinking, instead you would make sure technology brokers are available to aid the flow of ideas from box to box to box, picking up connections all along the way and back again.
In Hargadon’s words: “Technology brokers connect otherwise disconnected worlds [so inventive recombination can happen more easily]. Rather than being strongly tied to a single community [box], these brokers are weakly tied to a number of different ones.”
Seth Godin reports that his new eBook, 99 Cows (an accompaniment to the newly released hardcover version of his Purple Cow), has been downloaded or passed along by email nearly 40,000 times. That number’s about to go up, as I am passing along the free download info to you: go to http://www.fastcompany.com/secret (user name: top - password: sirloin).
So what is this 99 Cows? It’s 99 (actually, 100) short examples of what Godin calls “purple cows” –- people and businesses remarkable enough to sneeze about. Includes many interesting examples of creativity and innovation in action; well worth a read.
My apologies for the recent silence; I'm in LA holding a couple of creativity training workshops, and not finding much time to post!
Thanks to reader S.E. August for his kind comments about IdeaFlow and for these two book recommendations (comments about the books are mine):
How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day by Michael Gelb - I've read this one before, and it is a good one. It's more along personal-growth lines, as it isolates seven Da Vinci-like characteristics that can help people become more innovative.
At Work With Thomas Edison: 10 Business Lessons from America's Greatest Innovator by Blaine McCormick - I haven't read this one, so I looked at Amazon's description. It's another "narrative" approach, and it looks like there's a lot to learn from the many parts of Edison's story we didn't learn in school. One interesting comment I picked up from one of the Amazon consumer reviewers:
Edison's lab was the first innovation factory and in many ways a precursor to Silicon Valley. The lab had no rules (pet bear, pipe organ, and pranks) and was a true meritocracy. Edison's lab had a basic apprenticeship program and Edition worked with many, many people on the innovation teams that worked on projects. The electric light bulb team was over 75 people.
I didn't realize that Edison wasn't a "lone" inventor, either, and this interests me because working with our panel I've seen firsthand the power of teamwork when it comes to generating ideas.
What I am after is primarily books on the nature of creativity. In software development, with statistics showing that more than half of the projects either fail or are over budget, the tendency is to strive for order and meticulous planning, accompanied by huge efforts to document everything, every unforeseen change, with specifications of the impact of these changes, and so on -- all very defensive and, in my opinion, not very creative. I want to learn more about the nature of creativity, so I can show how this approach doesn't go with human creativity at all.
In no particular order, these are the titles I sent Peter, and why. Comments and additions welcome!
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from Ideo, America's Leading Design Firm by Tom Kelley, et al - Because the true guts of the creative process really becomes visible in the narrative back-stories behind such new products as the Palm Pilot.
Handbook of Creativity ed. by Robert J. Sternberg - Because it contains contributions from many different thinkers in the field and offers an overview of current (last 50 years or so) thinking on the subject.
The Courage to Create by Rollo May - Because it's stood the test of time as am examination of the personal aspects of the creative process.
New Ideas About New Ideas by Shira P. White - Because, although I have not yet read it myself, it seems to tell about the process of innovation and creation from a narrative point of view (interviews with creators and innovators), and I believe this is the best way to understand creativity.
Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity by Teresa M. Amabile, et al - Because, though I'm just now reading this myself, it's damn impressive in its discussion of the environments that best encourage creativity.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Because, like the book above, it's about the environment within which creativity happens.
The Deviant's Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets by Ryan Mathews, Watts Wacker - Because it's fun and new, and because its entire premise is built around a classic, central concept of creativity - the "jump" (when something new is created out of the covergence of two formerly separate products, ideas, concepts....whatever).
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is 
author 
by Andy Cohen turned out to be of the irresistible sort. 
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