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By Josh Linkner
We know that embracing innovation is the only way to grow and win over the long term, but it sure can feel risky and overwhelming. This is often because we overemphasize idea generation while skipping the most important step in the process: experimentation. Most of us think: Step 1: Generate an idea Step 2: Widespread implementation Step 3: Grit our teeth and hope it works, or horrible stuff will happen No wonder we’re scared of trying new things when the stakes are that high. If an untested idea doesn’t manifest perfectly, we could sink our company, lose our job, or tank our career. That level of risk is just bonkers! Luckily, there’s an easy fix: crude experimentation. After initial ideas are conceived, we can drastically reduce risk by building a test plan. Instead of wild, swing-for-the-fences moonshots, start by exploring how cheap and fast you could test your idea. Could you build a prototype out of Play-Doh? Could you test with a single customer for 15 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon? These early, crude, low-fidelity experiments can quickly tell you if your idea has merit or if it should be tossed. If an experiment shows promise, just expand the size and scope of the experiment and try again. At each pass, you’ll likely tweak and refine your idea so by the time you get to a more lifelike (high-fidelity) experiment, the odds are already in your favor. And when it’s time to launch, your probability of success is 1000 times higher. Here’s a far better process: Step 1: Generate a bunch of ideas Step 2: Select a few ideas to test Step 3: Crude experiments (cheap and fast). Quickly discard ideas that flop Step 4: Refine ideas that show promise, test again. With each test, increase the scope, scale, and fidelity of the experiment Step 5: Widespread implementation, only after your experiment results are stable and predictable Step 6: Sit back with confidence and enjoy the fruits of your creativity With this new model, you only go big once the evidence supports it. In other words, you’ve now radically reduced the risk factor. This approach works for products, marketing, processes, sales strategies, safety measures, recruiting techniques, and just about everything else we care about (including getting your five-year-old twins to finish their vegetables, which I know firsthand). The experimentation mindset will help you get it right and get there faster. Realizing that every single new idea won’t work out, we might as well have the misfires occur during a small test rather than with your most important customer. Test constantly… cheap and fast. Crude prototypes and experiments are the most pragmatic way to drive widespread innovation with a high success rate. Experiment Constantly. Fail Small. Win Big. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success!
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By Josh Linkner
In these competitive and uncertain times, most of us long for that bold, fresh idea that will shake things up and drive meaningful progress. Yet great new ideas can feel harder to find than a five-leaf clover. We stare at the same problem – with the same set of eyes and the same perspective – and then wonder why our ideas fall short. To shake things up, I love using a simple technique that I simply call The Different Lens. As the name suggests, the tactic involves generating solutions from the perspective of someone else. Let’s say you’re a Realtor trying to drum up new clients. It’s a crowded and competitive field, so your first instinct may be to study the best practices of other Realtors. The problem is that we can get caught in our industry’s echo-chamber, with originality suffering as a result. Using The Different Lens, you might ask how a Hollywood agent might solve the problem? How about a hotel manager? Or a tech billionaire? The best new way to snag homebuyers may actually arrive from the most unlikely perspective. If you’re looking for fresh inspiration, think how other people in different fields or roles might approach the situation. Here are some fun ones to take for a test drive:
The notion of looking at the problem you’re trying to solve from a different lens can quickly unlock fresh thinking and bold creativity. Not to mention, it gives you a hall pass for any responsibility. After all, that crazy idea didn’t come from YOU… it came from a celebrity chef with an Eastern European accent. Next time you’re frustrated with ho-hum ideas, get unstuck by looking at the situation with a different lens. You’ll be blown away at just how different your results will be. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! By Josh Linkner
In our professional lives, our days consist of delivering value in one form or another. Depending on your craft, your deliverables may take the form of a research report, sales presentation, prospecting outreach, email response, customer interaction, financial model or legal brief. Or maybe you build handmade wooden furniture, corned beef sandwiches, or industrial drill presses. Regardless of chosen profession, we’re all in the business of delivering work-product of one kind or another. With the stakes high and competition fierce, how do we optimize performance? Enter Rule 105, a remarkably simple approach to enjoying sustainable and meaningful results. Rule 105: Consistently deliver 105% on expectations in every unit of work you ship. This simple habit unlocks massive rewards because of two basic facets of human nature: Surprise and delight – With under-delivery being the norm, your customers, colleagues, or investors will be blown away if you regularly deliver more than expected. It doesn’t have to be 500% over-delivery, just a puny 5% will do the job quite nicely. That 5% could be finishing the job 5% ahead of schedule, delivering 5% more of whatever you promised in the first place, coming in 5% under budget, or adding 5% better service. Rule 105 will catapult you above the competitive pack and help you shine in a big way. Relationship currency – Think of each 5% over-delivery as a deposit into a relationship bank account. Later, when a mistake or setback inevitably occurs, you’ve already built sufficient reserves so that your client, boss, or colleague will quickly understand and forgive. If your favorite restaurant that always blows you away has one bad night, you let it go and have no problem returning. On the other hand, if they fell 5% short several times without ever beating your expectations, you might be on the hunt for a new taco joint. You’ve already developed the skills, landed the job, and are doing the work, so the extra 5% really doesn’t take that much more effort. But Rule 105 delivers a disproportionate return in the form of customer loyalty, competitive advantage, and sustainable growth. Simply put, that extra little something makes a gigantic difference. Before you hit send on your next email, make your next presentation, or ship your next product, ask yourself what a 5% over-delivery might be. If you make Rule 105 a consistent habit, you’ll be amazed how your relationships and business will transform. This habit will help you get promoted, grow key customer relationships, delight colleagues, and stand out as a top performer. Rule 105 also applies in your personal life. Consistently beating expectations by 5% with your spouse, kids, community, health, friends and family will drive positive change in a meaningful way. The rule is simple and accessible to us all. Challenge yourself to add a small dose of something extra, and you’ll enjoy oversized success as a result. Now that’s a rule worth following. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! By Josh Linkner
Words like ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’ can feel overwhelming and out of reach. Too often, we think an idea must change the world or have a billion-dollar value in order to count. Instead of establishing an impossibly high minimum threshold, let’s think of innovation more like fresh, delicious salsa: mild, medium, and spicy. A flavor option for each of us. Let’s start with the spicy version – INNOVATION (all caps). This is the big stuff, the world-changing inventions we celebrate in the media. Inventing the electric guitar was an INNOVATION. Digging the Panama Canal, INNOVATION. The combustion engine? Yep. INNOVATION. We’re talking life-altering, history-making, legendary innovation. Movable type. Penicillin. Wireless communications. But something doesn’t need to reshape history to be innovative. One double-click beneath INNOVATION is Innovation (capital I). Think of this as your medium-spicy salsa – important ideas that each of us may discover once or twice a year, not once in one hundred lifetimes. Maybe it’s a new product offering that helps boost revenue 28 percent in just six months. Or a new production process that creates a 13 percent cost savings. Capital I Innovations are juicy and meaningful even though they may not have books written about them by future generations. And then there’s the mild-flavored, often-bullied innovation (all lower case). I refer to these micro-innovations as Big Little Breakthroughs. While I adore these petite powerhouses, lowercase innovation can be dismissed as not valuable or potent enough. A lowercase innovation might be reimagining the way you conduct a job interview, refining the process to submit an expense report, or discovering a faster route to work. Small but mighty, it turns out that 72% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product comes from these Big Little Breakthroughs, from everyday people creating everyday innovations. As the most overlooked and underutilized of the innovation family, these bite-sized sparks are the pound-for-pound champions. They are less risky, easier to discover, and faster to implement. They cost less and are accessible to us all. They stack nicely and build upon each other, adding up to large wins over time. And if you really want to develop an all-caps INNOVATION, the best way to get there is to hone your skills through practice on a large number of lowercase innovations. Let’s stop thinking of ourselves as lacking innovation simply because we haven’t patented 193 inventions or launched a billion-dollar company. And let’s not fall into the trap of thinking we aren’t creative because our first attempt at art didn’t rival Frida Kahlo or Salvador Dalí. Instead, let’s celebrate all levels of creativity and innovation, realizing that the more we cultivate little ideas, the greater our breakthroughs will become. Great innovation — just like great salsa — comes in many flavors and varieties. The more we expand our palate to enjoy each style, the more we’ll savor the delicious outcomes we seek. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! By Josh Linkner
Jaws dropped in the beginning of the summer when readers devoured The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO compensation report. Despite the pandemic-savaged economy, Paycom Software founder and CEO Chad Richison hauled in a whopping $211 million in 2020. Robert Kotick, CEO of the video game maker Activision Blizzard, came in second place with $155 million, while Regeneron CEO Leonard Schleifer scored $135 million. From global titans to fast-growing startups, those at the helm enjoy outsized rewards. Besides admiring the hard-charging leaders who drive growth, impact, and sustainable success, I’ve long been curious as to what makes the most successful leaders tick. It turns out that the most effective executives have something in common. A simple question that they ask themselves on repeat that separates them from their chief lieutenants. The simple and powerful question that drives performance: “What needs to happen next?” The most successful CEOs don’t just put their heads down and crank out the work. Instead, they prioritize heads-up time where they look toward longer-term objectives and determine what needs to happen right now to manifest those goals. We can ask the same question in different ways, including “what’s currently missing that could derail my objectives?” or “outside of the current directives, what additional steps can we take to ensure the win?” Simply put, they’re more focused on what needs to be added to the mix than just executing the current plan. Titans of industry recognize that turbulent times create changing conditions and that the core of leadership is to adapt, pivot, rethink, and reinvent. Rather than dogged persistence or an unwavering commitment to an existing plan, they remain open-minded to new and better alternatives. They take the initiative to question what’s already in place and to discover what’s missing. Whether you currently have a CEO title or not, the true definition of a leader is someone who can craft a strategy rather than simply follow one. We can learn from the most effective CEOs that a core part of the gig is to question the plan each day, challenging existing models while inventing new ones. If you’re looking to drive growth and sustainable success, borrow this simple question and repeat until it feels like a worn-out baseball mitt. What needs to happen next? Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! By Josh Linkner
Behind only water, concrete is the second-most used material on our planet. It’s low cost, durable, and beneficial in a variety of construction applications. As our population continues to swell, demand is expected to skyrocket. But there’s a problem. As useful as concrete may be, the production of this sturdy material is responsible for eight percent of the world’s total emissions. To make matters worse, the water needed to make concrete each year is enough to fill a million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Yet with the obvious environmental concerns of polluting the atmosphere and consuming too much fresh water, concrete has been made about the same way since the Roman Empire. Enter an everyday innovator named Vahit Atakan. Sitting at the bar having a beer one day, Vahit was mesmerized by the fizzy beverage. Those bubbles got him thinking: If CO2 works in beer and soda, what if it could be used in place of water in the concrete manufacturing process? Vahit got to work, eventually co-founding a company called Solidia Technologies. He swapped out water for CO2 which reduced emissions dramatically. In layperson’s terms, he created carbon eating concrete while reducing the demand for fresh water. This substitution is so effective, it can reduce carbon emissions by up to 70%. If Vahit’s technology was applied to the entire concrete industry, it could reduce annual worldwide emissions by over 5%. That’s the equivalent of removing all the emissions from the UK, Italy, France, Poland, and Mexico combined. Talk about a breakthrough innovation! Yet words like ‘breakthrough innovation’ can seem overwhelming, risky, and out of reach. We all want and need fresh ideas but discovering them is often elusive. As someone who is fascinated with human creativity, I’ve searched high and low for simple ways to demystify the creative process to make it far more accessible to us all. Vahit used one of my favorite approaches: swapping. It involves deconstructing a product, system, process, or approach into its core components and then substituting one thing for another. He swapped water for CO2, but you could exchange any compound for another in your own field. Maybe you swap team members’ job responsibilities, or the order in which a technique is performed. Physical or procedural, swapping one component for another is a simple way to open your mind to fresh possibilities. Coca-Cola swapped out sugar to create the wildly popular Diet Coke. DoorDash swapped the idea of a customer driving to pick up carryout tacos for having them delivered from a mobile app. Tesla swapped out a combustion engine for an electric one, and Disney+ swapped paying one-at-a-time for movies to a monthly subscription. In our highly competitive business environment, we must find new ways to deliver value. Try swapping out old components for new ones, and you’ll be well on your way to the breakthroughs you seek. If you’re looking to innovate, swapping is certainly a ‘concrete’ approach. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! By Josh Linkner
Getting someone to take a chance on you is one of the most important steps to achieving success in both business and life. Yet mastering the art of persuasion is often overlooked and misunderstood. Alexander Fleming, the inventor of penicillin, was especially bad at communicating his discovery, despite it being one of the most important scientific advances in history. As a result, over 10 years were wasted and millions of lives lost because Fleming lacked the skills of persuasion. In contrast, the nefarious founder of the Fyre Festival, Billy McFarland, was masterful at getting people to back his idea, which turned out to be a giant fraud. Why do some ideas get backed and others bounced? And how can we become better at getting people to take a chance on us? That’s the exact topic of author Suneel Gupta’s new book: Backable – The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You. Gupta researched the science of persuasion and deconstructed thousands of backable moments — from tech startups landing major funding to movie deals getting the green light — to illuminate the core principles of becoming backable. Most of us aren’t raising startup capital, but all of us can benefit from becoming more backable. For some, it’s scoring a long-overdue promotion at work. For others, it’s convincing your church or synagogue to embrace your new idea to grow membership. Being backable helps win the hearts and minds of clients, colleagues, business partners, investors, the media, neighbors, and even romantic partners. It turns out that being backable isn’t a unique genetic quirk but rather a learnable skill. Gupta goes on to share a specific methodology that any of us can embrace to become backable. Some of my favorite insights include:
Crucially, when we become more backable, we improve the outcomes of the things we care about the most. Before presenting your next big idea, first develop a concrete strategy to ensure you are backable. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! By Josh Linkner
We effortlessly perform the same morning ritual – rushing the kids off to school, gulping down the usual coffee, taking the standard route to work. When visiting our favorite restaurants, we gravitate toward the same menu items instead of trying something new. We listen to our favorite musical artists on repeat and then binge-watch our favorite shows. Following proven (and safe) routines is only natural. In fact, our brains are hard-wired to stick to the tried-and-true. When our ancestors discovered a safe route to find berries without getting eaten by a tiger, it made sense to stick to that plan instead of taking a dangerous risk for the sake of novelty. But today, our repetitive patterns can rob us of our creative potential… and even our happiness. Two weeks after buying that new car, you barely notice the aspects that once made your heart thump with excitement. Psychologists call this phenomenon hedonic adaptation. It’s the principle that our enthusiasm for something new (location, food, purchase, relationship, etc.) reverts back to the previous baseline once we get accustomed to it. As routine sets in, happiness wanes. The same forces can weigh down our creativity. The first day in a new office is loaded with fresh stimuli, electrifying our creative energy to new heights. But sit at the same desk for years, and the creative voltage can easily dissipate. This is why people often have their best ideas in the shower, on vacation, in nature, or enjoying live music … When we break free from our normal surroundings, we unlock creativity. While a change of venue can help, switching the scenery isn’t the only worthy approach. In fact, you’ll experience a direct creative boost when you do things in fresh, unexpected ways. To this end, try wearing your watch on the opposite wrist. For dinner, eat your dessert first and your salad last. Try a new genre of music or pick up a magazine that you’d ordinarily never consider. Even the smallest changes can elevate your creative output. In a recent study, researchers split a group of 68 participants into two groups. Each group was instructed to slowly eat a bag of popcorn, but one group was asked to do so using chopsticks. At the end of the experiment, the chopsticks-using group reported a significantly higher level of enjoyment than their traditional counterparts. The simple change in procedure yielded a big boost to their happiness. Musician and poet Tuli Kupferberg famously said, “When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” So let’s change up our routines in order to unlock both creativity and happiness. Brush your teeth with the opposite hand. Reverse the order of your daily chores. Watch a brand-new TV show. Order something new from the menu. …And don’t forget the chopsticks. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! By Josh Linkner
We’ve all suffered through the misery of a typical brainstorm session. Flat, mediocre ideas tend to carry the day as the breakthroughs remain elusive. An incremental idea here. An obvious cliché idea there. Short on inspiration, the suggestions lack originality and potency. The culprit of bad brainstorm sessions is the deadly cocktail of fear mixed with historical anchoring. We’re afraid to share our whacky ideas, unwilling to risk the appearance of foolishness or an admonishment from the boss. In an effort to play it safe, we look backwards for a reference of what worked in the past rather than forging new ground for changing circumstances. In a nutshell, most ideation sessions revolve around what we ‘should’ do. At the risk of sounding cheesy, should is the enemy of good. ‘Should’ ideas are rooted in fear instead of imagination, thereby restricting our best thinking. As an alternative, swap out ‘should’ with ‘could’. This single vocab shift will unlock creative potential faster than a bank robber can crack a bike lock. When you focus on ‘could’, several things immediately change. First, you’re no longer responsible for the idea. You’re simply saying what might happen while providing no personal endorsement. You’re now absolved from any executional hurdles, funding challenges, or how the idea might be received by senior leadership. The pressure is off when you’re merely pondering. In addition, you now shift the reference point from the past to the future. From what was to what’s possible. When the anchor of the past is hoisted off the ground, your imagination is able to soar. The goal of any good ideation session is to push the boundaries of creativity, and the simple shift from ‘should’ to ‘could’ can push your thinking to the next level. What could be done if you had unlimited resources? What could happen if you could use technology that hasn’t yet been invented? What ideas could make you grow 500% in the next 24 months? Start with that beautiful, unrestricted ‘could’ and the ‘how’ will become apparent as you progress. Marconi wondered if wireless communication could happen. Picasso imagined what could be done to advance fine art. Lady Gaga just knew she could be a star, and let her vision guide her actions each step of the way. The history makers are firmly rooted in could. This week, let’s ditch the should in favor of the could. Let’s stretch our imagination beyond our norms to discover a fresh path forward. In today’s hyper-competitive environment… we really should could. Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event a success! |
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