Management guru Tom Peters is famous for exhorting everyone to challenge convention, to dream big, and to create WOW (his all caps) projects. In the many conference innovation sessions I've facilitated recently, I've found participants nodding their heads when we talk about the need for ongoing innovation and the value of wowing customers and stakeholders. Unfortunately, their good intentions don't often translate into meaningful action.

After some heavy-duty reflection and conversation, I think I've discovered why.

The pursuit of Wow has been replaced by the demands of Now. While that's not a particularly new or brilliant insight, there's a lot of truth to it. Creating the future while managing the present has always been a challenge, as the daily demands on our time create a quite powerful inertia. But we get into trouble when we treat this as an either/or proposition: I can either attend to the Now or I can pursue the Wow.

Leadership requires replacing the either/or perspective with an "and" mindset. If we are going to be successful, to deliver value and generate loyalty and revenue, we have no choice but to make creating Wow products, services, and experiences a part of our daily Now efforts. In his recent book, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, author Geoffrey A. Moore makes a similar assertion: "Evolution requires us to continually refresh our competitive advantage, sometimes in dribs and drabs, sometimes in major cataclysms, but always with some part of our business portfolio at risk and in play. To innovate forever, in other words, is not an aspiration; it is a design specification. It is not a strategy, it is a requirement."

Making the pursuit of Wow part of our daily repertoire requires we adopt the same strategy that most changes in life require: We begin by changing our habits with a series of small, doable modifications. Here are two simple practices I believe you might find helpful in your pursuit of Wow.

1. The "Plus-One" Approach - When you think you've made something as great as it can be, try to ratchet it up one more level. It's the difference between settling for the B+ on a term paper when just a little more effort will earn the A-. If you can instill a plus-one mindset in your colleagues, the cumulative effect will result in a significant amount of progress without overtaxing any individual or the system as a whole.

2. The Scheduled Maintenance System - Just as keeping your car in great shape for the long haul requires some periodic scheduled maintenance, it makes sense to periodically take one of your major programs or meetings into the shop to check under its hood, whether it is every quarter, every six months, or once a year. What parts need replacing, where is some fine-tuning necessary, and how can you inject some major Wow into what you're doing? Completing such efforts on a regular cycle makes these more time-consuming reviews a manageable part of your routine.

Not everyone reading this column will be old enough to remember good ol' Clara Peller, who captured national attention by uttering "Where's the beef?" in Wendy's television commercials during the 1980s. We're drowning in a sea of sameness and blandness at too many meetings and conferences. It's time to start asking, "Where's the Wow?" of everyone who is involved in planning events.

Jeffrey Cufaude is a former higher education administrator, meeting planner, and association executive. He currently writes, speaks, and facilitates on a variety of individual and organizational leadership issues. Learn more about his work at www.ideaarchitects.org. To submit topic ideas and feedback on the Leading Learning column, e-mail jeffrey@ideaarchitects.org. Convene's Leading Learning series is sponsored by AVW TELAV. Visit its Web site at www.avwtelav.com.