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Creative businesses are busy. Many are seeking new employees as they grow. The question is what do you do when they show up? Teach tasks or show culture. Let's talk Herbie, Think Again, Loonshots and video diaries. Original Episode Number: 76 | Original Air Date: 11/23/2021 Links & Resources: Host: Sean Low of The Business of Being Creative Link: Join Sean's Collective of Business Creatives Follow Sean on social media: Instagram: @SeanLow1 | Facebook: Facebook.com/Sean.Low.35 | LinkedIn | Twitter: @SeanLow Have an opinion on Sean's tips and advice? Talk Back!! Email Sean. -- Podcast Network: The Wedding Biz Network Production House: Flint Stone Media Copyright of The Wedding Biz, LLC. 2021.
In this episode, we delve into the question of whether it's better to be first to market... or second. Safi Bahcall, author of "Loonshots," discusses the importance of nurturing big ideas and differentiates between product-type (P-type) and strategy-type (S-type) innovators. Through historical anecdotes and industry examples, we explore whether it's more advantageous to be first or second to market, and how to leverage your strengths for lasting success.Five Key Learnings:First vs. Second to Market:Being first isn't always an advantage. Sometimes being second allows you to learn from the first mover's experiences and refine your approach.Importance of Storytelling:Transformers succeeded partly due to a compelling narrative and superior marketing, emphasizing the power of storytelling in connecting with audiences.Innovative Blind Spots:P-type innovators can miss strategic market shifts, while S-type innovators might overlook technological advancements.Ambidexterity in Innovation:Combining product innovation with strategic innovation can significantly enhance the sustainability and reach of your ideas.Self-Awareness:Understanding your strengths and compensating for your weaknesses through complementary skills is crucial in navigating competitive markets.Get full interviews, daily episodes, guides, Q&A segments, and more at DailyCreative.app.Mentioned in this episode:NEW BOOK! The Brave Habit is available nowRise to important moments in your life and work by developing the habit of bravery. Available in paperback, ebook, or audiobook wherever books are sold. Learn more
It's not easy for huge, breakthrough ideas — the kind that truly change the world — to see the light of day. Here, physicist, entrepreneur and author Safi Bahcall talks in detail about the creativity and determination required, plus the obstacles to overcome, and cites fascinating examples including James Bond, Lipitor, Apple, Airbnb and others.
Get ready for the AI industrial revolution
On this episode I'm speaking with Brent Camp, a VP of Leasing at Asset Living. Brent has worked in the industry for over 14 years across student housing, lease-ups, value-add and repositions, active adult, affordable, and build-to-rent housing. At Asset Living, Brent leads the leasing and marketing initiatives for their conventional portfolio. He drives leasing performance and assists clients and operational leadership in evaluating marketing and sales performance at their communities. He's also a Certified Apartment Manager (CAM) and a member of the Zillow Rentals Product and Marketing Committee. In his past life, Brent was the co-founder and operator of Oaktopia Music Festival, recognized as Dallas' Best Festival in 2015 and 2016. When he's not in the office, Brent enjoys golfing, traveling with his wife and dog, and attending concerts. Related links for this episode: Asset Living - https://www.assetliving.com/ Brent on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-camp/ Asset Living on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/asset-living/ Asset Living on IG - https://www.instagram.com/assetliving/ Loonshots by Safi Bahcall - https://amzn.to/3UnZS0e Be sure to support this podcast by subscribing and reviewing! Get on the list at https://transformingcities.io for future announcements. Brought to you by Authentic: https://authenticff.com © 2024 Authentic Form & Function
Nghe trọn sách nói Loonshots - Từ Lạc Loài Đến Lẫy Lừng trên ứng dụng Fonos: https://fonos.link/PodcastFonos--Về Fonos:Fonos là Ứng dụng âm thanh số - Với hơn 13.000 nội dung gồm Sách nói có bản quyền, Podcast, Ebook, Tóm tắt sách, Thiền định, Truyện ngủ, Nhạc chủ đề, Truyện thiếu nhi. Bạn có thể nghe miễn phí chương 1 của tất cả sách nói trên Fonos. Tải app để trải nghiệm ngay!--Trong cuốn sách này, tác giả sẽ cho bạn thấy khoa học về sự chuyển pha đã gợi ra một cách tư duy mới mẻ, đáng kinh ngạc về thế giới xung quanh chúng ta- Về những bí ẩn của hành vi đám đông. Bạn sẽ thấy tại sao những nhóm tài năng lại giết chết các sang kiến tuyệt vời, tại sao khi rơi vào tình cảnh ngàn cân treo sợi tóc, trí tuệ đám đông lại biến thành bạo ngược đám đông, và tại sao đáp án cho những câu hỏi này lại có thể được tìm thấy trong một ly nước.Những đột phá quan trọng nhất xuất phát từ những “ cú đòn gàn”, tức những ý tưởng thiên hạ bỏ bê, và những người chủ xưởng bị coi là “ gàn dở”.Cần tới những nhóm rất lớn để chuyển đổi những đột phá đó thành các công nghệ giúp chúng ta giành phần thắng trong chiến tranh, tạo ra những sản phẩm cứu được mạng người, hoặc những chiến lược đủ sức biến đổi các ngành nghề, lĩnh vực.Áp dụng khoa học về sự chuyển pha vào hành vi của các đội ngũ, doanh nghiệp hoặc bất cứ nhóm chuyên trách nào cũng mang lại các nguyên tắc thực tiễn, giúp nuôi dưỡng những cú đòn gàn một cách nhanh chóng và hiệu quả hơn.--Tìm hiểu thêm về Fonos: https://fonos.vn/Theo dõi Facebook Fonos: https://www.facebook.com/fonosvietnam/
Bill Carr is the co-author of Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. With a background at Amazon of over 15 years, Bill played a pivotal role in shaping the company's global digital music and video ventures, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an Executive in Residence with Maveron, an early-stage, consumer-only venture capital firm. He later served as the chief operating officer of OfferUp, the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S. Today he's the co-founder of Working Backwards LLC, where he helps companies implement Amazon's time-tested management strategies. In this episode, we discuss:• What exactly “working backwards” is, and how you do it• Why having “single-threaded leaders” is so effective• Inside Amazon's intense product review process• How to actually follow the “disagree and commit” principle• The thinking behind the principle “Leaders are right, a lot”• Input vs. output metrics• Fostering a culture of risk-taking and innovation• The role and responsibilities of a “bar raiser” in your hiring, and how it significantly improves the success rate of new hires—Brought to you by AssemblyAI—Production-ready AI models to transcribe and understand speech | Coda—Meet the evolution of docs | Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/unpacking-amazons-unique-ways-of-working-bill-carr-author-of-working-backwards/—Where to find Bill Carr:• X: https://twitter.com/BillCarr89• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-carr/• Website: https://www.workingbackwards.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Bill's background(04:26) Amazon's workplace evolution(09:54) Amazon's “fitness function”(11:44) Single-threaded leadership(18:07) Implementing a program orientation with single-threaded leadership(20:16) The GM model vs. single-threaded leadership(21:31) Functional countermeasures needed for single-threaded leadership(25:22) Embracing the “disagree and commit” principle(30:22) Understanding disagreements(32:41) Deciphering Amazon's “Leaders are right, a lot” principle(35:25) An explanation of the working backwards framework(41:16) PR FAQ process: Amazon's innovation engine(44:47) Deconstructing the PR FAQ structure(43:49) The concentric circle model for sharing PR FAQs(44:55) The customer problem-solution statement(47:52) Create a product funnel, not a product tunnel(51:19) How Amazon promotes action vs. talk(54:35) Amazon's flywheel and input metrics(1:00:51) Signs you've got a good input metric(1:04:23) How mistakes can still be made with working backwards(1:06:54) Why disagreements aren't necessarily signs products will fail(1:08:02) Examples of failed Amazon projects(1:09:55) Cultivating risk-taking and accepting failure(1:13:57) Amazon's “bar-raiser” practice for hiring(1:18:21) Selecting Amazon's bar raisers(1:20:41) Advice on implementing practices from Working Backwards(1:23:10) Bill's work as an advisor(1:26:05) Lightning round—Referenced:• Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595• Jeff Bezos on X: https://twitter.com/jeffbezos• D.E. Shaw: https://www.deshaw.com/• Eric Ries's website: https://theleanstartup.com/• GM business model: https://fourweekmba.com/general-motors-business-model/• Rick Dalzell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richarddalzell/• The Effective Decision by Peter F. Drucker: https://hbr.org/1967/01/the-effective-decision• Template: Working Backwards PR FAQ: https://www.workingbackwards.com/resources/working-backwards-pr-faq• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996• The Amazon flywheel: https://feedvisor.com/resources/amazon-trends/amazon-flywheel-explained/• Sixsigma: https://www.6sigma.us/• Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries: https://www.amazon.com/Loonshots-Nurture-Diseases-Transform-Industries/dp/1250185963• Andy Jassy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-jassy-8b1615/• Implementing Amazon's Bar Raiser Process in Hiring: A Quick Guide: https://www.barraiser.com/blogs/implementing-amazons-bar-raiser-process-in-hiring• Microspeak: The As-Appropriate (AA) interviewer: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20231017-00/?p=108897• The Practice of Management: https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Management-Peter-F-Drucker/dp/0060878975• The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done: https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Executive-Definitive-Harperbusiness-Essentials/dp/0060833459• Steve Jobs: https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537• Seveneves: https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0062334514• A Gentleman in Moscow: https://www.amazon.com/A-Gentleman-in-Moscow/dp/0143110438• Dune on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Dune-Timoth%C3%A9e-Chalamet/dp/B09LJXY4PH• A Spy Among Friends: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15565872/• Zipp 303 Firecrest tubeless disc brake: https://www.sram.com/en/zipp/models/wh-303-ftld-a1• The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Practice-Learning-Organization/dp/0385517254—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Some ideas are so crazy that “moonshot” doesn't even do them credit. “Loonshot” seems more appropriate. On this episode, physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bachall is here to teach us how to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries with insights from his book Loonshots.This episode is a replay from 2019.
Ever wondered how the world of product development can be viewed through the lens of a physicist? How the future of AI will impact our existence? What a champion poker player has to say about quitting, and what we can learn about product development from an architect? This week, we dive headfirst into those questions with four fascinating reads: 'Loonshots' by Safi Bahcall, 'AI 2041' by Kai Fu Lee and Chen Quifan, 'Quit' by Annie Duke, and 'How Big Things Get Done' by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. These books have reshaped my perspective and I believe they hold interesting insights for you too. We'll explore how these books apply to new product development projects and how they can help us do it better. I also share why I thought some were better together, read in pairs. For those of you who love a good discussion, I'm inviting you to join my virtual book club where we can further unravel these intriguing books. Let me know if you're interested! So, tune in for a conversation that promises to be as enlightening as it is engaging!Visit the podcast blog.Support the show**FREE RESOURCES**Quality during Design engineering and new product development is actionable. It's also a mindset. Subscribe for consistency, inspiration, and ideas at www.qualityduringdesign.com. About meDianna Deeney helps product designers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods. She consults with businesses to incorporate quality within their product development processes. She also coaches individuals in using Quality during Design for their projects.She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.
Guest Bio: Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, sought-after advisor and speaker, and longtime professor at Columbia Business School. Rita is one of the world's top experts on strategy and innovation and is consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50. McGrath's recent book on strategic inflection points is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Rita is the author of four other books, including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Since the onset of the pandemic, Rita has created workshops, strategy sessions and keynotes, applying her tools and frameworks to strategy under high levels of uncertainty to specific issues organizations are facing. As Rui Barbas, the Chief Strategy Officer for Nestle USA said, “You were incredibly insightful and, despite the virtual setting, there was lots of engagement and comments from leaders sharing eye-opening observations and building on your examples throughout. You delivered the inspiration and illustration desired and it was exactly the right focus and challenge for this team. Appreciate your time throughout the process to align on content and delivery. The future-focus theme was the perfect close to our leadership summit.” Rita's work is focused on creating unique insights. She has also founded Valize a companion company, dedicated to turning those insights into actionable capability. You can find out more about Valize at www.valize.com. McGrath received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She is active on all the main social media platforms, such as Twitter @rgmcgrath. For more information, visit RitaMcGrath.com. Social Media/ Websites: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritamcgrath/ Twitter: @rgmcgrath Instagram: @ritamcgrathofficial Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/rgmcgrath Websites: https://ritamcgrath.com and valize.com Rita's Newsletter/ Articles Substack: https://thoughtsparks.substack.com/ Medium: https://rgmcgrath.medium.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/thought-sparks-6787762418471755776/ Books Seeing Around Corners by Rita McGrath https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seeing-Around-Corners-Inflection-Business/dp/0358022339 The Entrepreneurial Mindset by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillian https://www.amazon.co.uk/Entrepreneurial-Mindset-Continuously-Opportunity-Uncertainty/dp/0875848346 The End of Competitive Advantage by Rita Gunther McGrath https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Competitive-Advantage-Strategy-Business/dp/1422172813 Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Disrupt-Yourself-New-Introduction-Relentless/dp/1633698785 Humanocracy by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini https://www.amazon.co.uk/Humanocracy-Creating-Organizations-Amazing-People/dp/1633696022 Reimagining Capitalism by Rebecca Henderson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reimagining-Capitalism-Business-Save-World/dp/0241379660 When More is Not Better by Roger L. Martin https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-More-Not-Better-Overcoming/dp/1647820065/ Being An Adult by Lucy Tobin https://www.amazon.co.uk/Being-Adult-ultimate-getting-together-ebook/dp/B07GQ1KRTC/ Only The Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove https://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Andrew-Grove/dp/1861975139 Ula Ojiaku: My guest today is Dr. Rita McGrath. She's a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker and advisor and consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50. In this episode, Rita talked about the concept of inflection points from her book ‘Seeing Around Corners' and how as leaders, we can train ourselves to spot these inflection points and act on the information we receive. She also talked about making complex things simple for the people we work with. I learnt a lot speaking with Rita and I'm sure you will find this conversation insightful as well. Thank you again for watching! It's an honor to have you on the show, Rita McGrath. Many, many thanks for joining us. Rita McGrath: Well, thank you Ula. It's a pleasure to be here. Ula Ojiaku: Great. Now, can you tell us about yourself? How did the Rita, Dr. Rita McGrath we know today evolve? Rita McGrath: Well, it would have to start with my parents, of course. I mean, all great stories start with your parents. And so, my parents were both scientists. My mother was a Microbiologist, and my father was an Organic Chemist. And so, I grew up in a house where, you know, (if) a question couldn't be answered, you went and got the reference book and figured it out. And both, (had) incredible respect for science and for diligence. And, you know, the house was always full of books and lots of emphasis on learning. I wouldn't say we were, financially all that well-off – we weren't poor by any means. But it was, you know, there wasn't like a lot of money to spare, but there was always money for books, and there was always money for, you know, educational experiences and that kind of thing. So, that's the household I grew up in. So, my parents, when I was born, were both on the staff at the Yale Medical School. So, they were both researchers there. And then my dad in the late 60s, got an offer to go join this upstart, fledgling company that was at the cutting edge of all kinds of things in his field and that was Xerox Corporation. And he was very conflicted about leaving academia, but went off eventually to Xerox. So, we moved the family to Rochester, New York. So that's where I did most of my growing up. And my mother at that time, decided to stay home, more or less. And then she started a scientific translation business. So, she moved into an entrepreneurial career more than her scientific career. And then when it came time to go to college, I went to Barnard College in the City of New York. I'd always thought New York was an amazing place and was accepted there. So, went off to New York, did my Bachelor's and my Master's in Political Science and Public Policy. I was very interested in public policy and matters of social contract and those kinds of things. And then my first job was actually with the City of New York, I ran purchasing systems for government agencies. It doesn't sound very glamorous. But today, we would call it digital transformation. It was the very first wave of companies taking their operations in a digital form. And it was very exciting and I learned a lot. Then I got to the end of… the thing about public service is when you start, there's (this) unlimited sort of growth that can happen for a few years, and then it really just levels off. And you're never going to go beyond that. So, I kind of reached that headroom and decided to do something different. Ula Ojiaku: Was it at that point that you decided to go for your PhD? Rita McGrath: And that was one of the options I was considering. And my husband basically said, ‘look, if you get into a top five school, it's worth doing and if you don't, it's probably not.' But you have to think in that time, MBA programs were just exploding, and there'd been a lot of pressure on the administrators of MBA programs, to put PhD accredited faculty in front of their students. The big knock against the MBA at the time was, oh, they're just trade schools. You know, we've got some guy who ran an entire company comes in and talks and that's not really academically suitable. And so, there was a huge pressure for schools to find PhD accredited people- that still exists (but) the market pressures has changed a lot. But when I was doing my PhD, it was pretty sure I would get a job if I managed to complete the degree. So that that gave me that extra input to do that. Ula Ojiaku: Did you already have like children when you started the PhD? Rita McGrath: Yes Ula Ojiaku: And how did you cope? Rita McGrath: Our son was, how old was he? He would have been nine months old when I started my PhD program. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku: Wow, 9 months old. Rita McGrath: Oh, yeah, it was a real challenge. And I guess everybody manages those kinds of challenges in their own way. But yeah, it was a struggle because, you know, typical day would be you know, get up, get the baby to daycare or wherever and then do school or whatever I had to do that day. And then it was sort of pick them up. By the time I had a second child it was pick them up, get them dinner, get them bedtime, get them story, and then I'll be back at my desk at nine o'clock at night, trying to do what I needed to do. So, it was a new turn. It was tough. It was difficult years. I mean, joyful years though but it was just hard to fit everything in. Ula Ojiaku: I can imagine. I mean, although I'm thinking of starting my PhD (studies), my children aren't that small but I do remember the time (they were), you know, I was still working full time. So, the challenge is you'd go to work and then come back to work. I mean, to another type of work. And then when they go to bed, the work continues. Yeah, it's interesting. Rita McGrath: Quite exhausting. Ula Ojiaku: You can say that. I'm so glad they're not in diapers anymore. So, it's baby steps, we are getting there. So, can we go on to your book, “Seeing Around Corners, How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen”. I'd like to start from an unusual place in the book. I started from the dedication page, and you know, reading everything, and I noticed that, you referred to a conversation, one of the last conversations you had with your mother. Could you tell us about that? Rita McGrath: Oh sure. She was well, at the time, she was quite ill, she had sarcoma in her lung, and she was quite ill. It's a horrible disease, and we haven't got any real treatments for it. So, the recommendation is you do chemo and that really knocks you out. So, she was quite ill and sort of migrating between the chair and the couch and the chair and the couch. And in one of those conversations, she just said ‘I want you to know I'm proud of you. And I've had a good life and I'm prepared for whatever comes next.' And I thought that was lovely of her to say and I thought in that moment to pass it on to all these other women. And you know you bring up motherhood and being a working woman and all those complicated emotions that come with that because there seems to be guilt around every corner you know, if you're not at home full time, oh you're a terrible mom. And if you're not at work full time, you're a terrible worker. I just I think so many of those things are just designed to twist us up into little balls. And when I look at my own mother's experience - she was a working woman… I grew up but I think I'm third or fourth generation working woman so it never even occurred to me that wouldn't be possible. But I think what often is missing is this validation, you know that for women who are trying to you know make their way professionally and be great, responsible parents and do all these other things that often there's a sense of a lack of self-worth you know, ‘oh, I'm not doing enough.' The more I hear that… Ula Ojiaku: I feel like that some… most days I feel like that… Rita McGrath: Believe me, you are doing enough Ula Ojiaku: Sometimes I ask my children, am I a good mom? Rita McGrath: I think part of it too is we, and when I say we, I mean baby boomer mothers and maybe a little younger. We got ourselves all tangled up in this if it's not like organic, hand-processed lima beans with you know, organic succotash, mixed in you know, it's not good baby food. Honestly, Gerber's exists to provide perfectly nutritious food for really young babies and they've been doing it for decades and you can trust that and if it makes your life easier, go with it. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you! Rita McGrath: You know, I think we I think we get ourselves all tossed up in like, what does good mean? I mean, honestly, the kids don't mind you know? I mean, they'd celebrate if it was chicken finger night. Ula Ojiaku: Let's go to the book. You know, because in your book you said you it's about how to spot inflections before they happen in business. Can you give us examples of, you know, businesses that had these inflection points occur, and they failed to recognize it and what was the impact? Rita McGrath: Sure, let's take one that is quite sad to me, which is Intel. And Intel built its, well, Intel went through a major inflection point, in fact, the originator of the concept was Andy Grove, who was their former CEO. And he talked about his inflection points in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, which is really a brilliant, brilliant book. And one of the reasons I wrote my book was that very little had been done since his book on that topic. And Grove built this incredible company, Intel. And they were making microprocessor chips. And they were very, very powerful, very fast chips. And so, the assumptions inside Intel's business model was, what customers were going to pay for was faster, faster, faster, more computation power, more and more powerful. But what they didn't really think about was energy consumption. And as the world went more mobile… so the Intel product is the PC, and the PC, the desktop PC remains firmly plugged into the wall. And then later, we make PC chips that maybe have slightly lower power consumption to power PCs, but it's still that notion of power, you know, and I think the inflection point that caught Intel by surprise, to some extent was, this movement towards mobile, where the vast majority of chips being made were these completely different architecture chips by companies like ARM and you know, and companies like that, which, from their inception, recognized that low power was the way to go. Then they weren't very powerful in the sense of speed, which is what Intel was driving its business towards. But they were powerful in the sense of ubiquitous low power, long battery life, that kind of thing. And I think that's an example of the kind of assumption that can cause a company to get into trouble, when the underlying shift in the business environment says, ‘wait a minute, this thing you've been building all this time may not be what is needed by the marketplace.' Ula Ojiaku: That's interesting. So, it brings me to the point of, the points you made about, you know, the indicators, the early warnings, and you mentioned the concept of you know lagging, current and leading indicators. And there was an emphasis in your book on, you know, leading indicators. Could you tell us a bit about that? Rita McGrath: Sure. Well, so leading indicators are today's information about tomorrow's possibilities. And what we unfortunately rely on a lot in business is lagging indicators - so profits, performance, you know, ROI, all those things are lagging some kind of decision that you made a long time ago. So, the concept of leading indicators is to try to get business leaders to think about what would have to be true, you know, before I was able to make a certain decision, what are the leading indicators? So, an example would be back in the 90s, computer scientists all over the world realized that come the year 2000, from the turn of the millennium, that the way computer programs had been programmed, was only two digits for the year. And so, when the year went to zero-zero, computers, were going to think it was 1900 and this was going to be terrible. Because they all get out of sync, you know, and planes would drop out of the sky. You're gonna become unstable, and you'll all need to move to Montana and stuff … I don't know if you can remember this. Ula Ojiaku: Yeah, the Y2K bug… Rita McGrath: Oh my goodness…! Ula Ojiaku: It was a big sensation. Yeah… Rita McGrath: Apocalyptic – remember?! And yet, when the big moment came the year 2000. What happened? Well, nothing happened. Why did nothing happen? We looked at that early warning, and we said, whoa, if that happens, it's bad. And then so companies, prodded by their accounting firms, prodded by other security considerations invested billions in correcting that flaw. And so, that's an example of an early warning. And there are a couple of things to understand about early warning. So, the first important thing is, the measure of a good early warning is not, did it predict what happened. The measure of a good leading indicator is, did it help you prepare for what might happen? And so, I think that's a really important distinction, because we oftentimes, oh, you that didn't predict this or that. But that's not the point. The point is, did it help you think more broadly about what might happen so that you could be prepared? So, I think that's the first thing. The second thing to remember about leading indicators is they're often not quantitative in the way that we like to think about quantitative things. They're often qualitative. They often take the form of stories. And they often come from what are called unrepresentative parts of your mental ecosystem. So, you know, it's that person on the loading dock (saying to themselves), ‘this is, well, that's weird, a customer never asked for that before', or the person answering the phone, you know, in headquarters going, ‘Well, I don't understand why they need that information…' You know, it's those little anomalies or things that depart from business as usual, that are often the weak signals that you need to be paying attention to. Ula Ojiaku: So, can you give us an example where you mean, I mean, of how we can go about choosing good leading indicators? Rita McGrath: Well, in the book, I describe a technique that I use, which is you take a couple of uncertainties and juxtapose them on each other. And that gives you four or more you can do this for as many as you like, stories from the future, possibly a future that we could live in. And then depending on which one you want to think about, you say, ‘okay, I'm gonna write a headline as if it came from a newspaper story about that scenario. And I'm gonna work backwards and say, what has to be true for that headline to emerge.' So, take an example that's playing out right now, chronic and accelerating decline in birth rates in the United States. People are just deciding not to enlarge their families or not to start their families at all. And for very good reasons, you know, the level of social support for families is very low. Mostly women are bearing the burden. And very often women are the ones that make a large part of the decision about whether the family is going to grow or not. And so, we're facing a real baby bust. Well, if that's true, and we follow that along, well, what are some things that would be early warnings or indicators of what that world will be like? Well, you'll see a decline of working people relative to retired people, or people needing assistance, you'll see, you know, fewer kids with more resources to support them. So, the kind of baby Prince phenomena we saw in China. There are lots of things you can kind of work through. But once you say, ‘okay, I see a world with a million fewer children three years from now, than we would have expected well, okay, what now working backward? What does that tell us we need to be paying attention to today? Ula Ojiaku: Yes, yes. That's a great example. And I wonder, though, so given all, you know, the research that has led to, and your experience as well, consulting with, you know, most of these large organizations, the case studies, you've come to witness and all that, what would you, what would be your advice to leaders of such organizations, you know, in terms of how they can better prepare themselves or equip themselves to recognize these inflection points, and lead effectively? Rita McGrath: Well, I think the first principle is you have to be discovery driven. In other words, you have to be curious about what's going on. And if you're the kind of leader who (when) someone brings you a piece of information, and instead of treating it like a gift, you're like, oh no, you don't understand that's wrong. That's not the way the world works. If you're dismissive of information people are bringing you that's very dangerous. Because the information you need is not going to come from your lieutenants at headquarters, it's going to come from that guy on the loading dock. So, I think you want to think about establishing some kind of information flows, that go directly from where the phenomena are happening to your desk. So, as an example, a company I really admire is the German metal services company Klockner. And their CEO, Gisbert Ruehl was taking them through a digital transformation. And his big concern was not that they meant it, right? But that his lieutenants, his middle manager, cohort, would be so expert, and so experienced at the way business was, that they would just shut down these digital efforts. And he was very, very concerned about that. He said, well, I need some way of making my message heard directly to the people that are on the frontlines and I also need a way of hearing from them what's going on. So, he implemented Yammer, called non-hierarchical communication. And the deal was anybody in the company that had something he needed to know should feel comfortable sending him a note. And I'm told, I don't know this for a fact that I'm told that at headquarters, he had his instance of Yammer set up so that the lower the hierarchical level of the person, the higher it came in his newsfeed. Ula Ojiaku: Oh, wow. Rita McGrath: So, you know, I can talk to my lieutenants, anytime. Information I need is in the, you know, 24-year-old person who's just joined us with an engineering degree, who's looking at our manufacturing process for screwdrivers and saying, ‘Why do you do it that way? There must be a better way of doing this…' That's the information I really need and he set up a whole system to try to get that information to him, to himself. Ula Ojiaku: Would you say there's a typical kind of leader with, you know, some certain characteristics that's best equipped to spot the inflection point, and you know, kind of lead the charge and get the organizations in line? Rita McGrath: You know, I think it's more of the behavior, it's not the characteristics. So, I've seen charismatic, attractive, you know, movie star type CEOs be good at this. I've seen people you look at and you go ‘Really? He looks kind of like he slept in his clothes all night.' I've seen those people be good at it. So, you know, I think the differentiation is this, this hunger for new information, this curiosity, this relentless… ‘tell me again…' and ‘why was that and why was that?' It is this urgent need to really learn what's going on. And then and then putting yourself in the, in the context. So, one of the people I'm working with right now is a brilliant retail CEO, and everything. And one of the things he would do before hiring anybody into his senior team, is he would spend a day or two walking the stores, you know, and in his explanation to me was, ‘I want to see how they react to the stores. I want to see how they treat the people working in stores. I want to see what they notice, you know, I want to see if they notice that there's a thing out of array and I want to see how they are with me, like if they spend their whole two days in store visits, sucking up to me - that's not somebody I need, you know. And so, I think the best leaders along those lines are people who are relentlessly curious, bring people around them who are diverse, you know, you don't just want echo chambers of themselves. Ula Ojiaku: True, true. You don't want ‘yes' men if you really want to make an impact really. Yeah, and how can I, as a person, train myself to also recognize these inflection points. Rita McGrath: Well, it depends what the inflection point is. So, if it's a question of, you've been making nice steady progress in your career, and now you've hit some kind of ceiling and you just feel you're not growing or developing any more, then that choice is really okay, I need to… the way Whitney Johnson would put this, she's written a great book on this, “Disrupt Yourself”, right? You go up this S curve, then you need to make the decision if you're going to take on the J curve, right, which is the part below the S curve before you get into the next round of learning. So, that's a personal decision, really only you can make a decision like that. Then there are the cases where inflection points are thrust upon you. So you lose a job, your spouse has some setback, a family member has an urgent need that makes whatever you were doing before impossible. I mean, there's all kinds of outside things that can happen to you. Ula Ojiaku: Yeah… Rita McGrath: And I think the best way to try to look at those is. ‘is this a slingshot to a better future, potentially?' And you know, how many people have you talked to who got fired, and some years later say, ‘that was the best thing that ever happened to me, it shook me out of my complacency. It made me think differently.' And so, I think a lot of times, you know, we, it's very comfortable (staying) stuck in our ruts. And sometimes it takes a bit of a jolt to get us out of that. Ula Ojiaku: That's a great one. Can I just ask you about so it's not really about your book, Seeing Around Corners, but this one is about the Entrepreneurial Mindset? Just one quick question. Because there's a quote, in your book, that book that says, you know, “the huge part of becoming an entrepreneurial leader is learning to simplify complexity, so that your co-workers can act with self-confidence.” That quote, it made me kind of be more conscious about, am I really making things simpler for my co-workers instead of, you know, rather than to enable us, you know, achieve the best that we could as a group? So why did you, make that quote and associate it with an Entrepreneurial Mindset? Rita McGrath: Well, because if you make things complicated for people, there's maybe three responses, right? One is they'll start on whatever they start on, which is kind of random. And maybe they finish it, and maybe they don't, but it's really now you're leaving it to chance. Because if you give people more to digest than they can manage, you're going to get back some fraction of it. So that's one thing. Second thing that happens is, if it's too complex, a lot of times people will pick what they want to do, not have anything to do with the agenda that you want to set for the organization. And the third thing is there's just a laziness that comes from having things be complex. I know for myself, when I've had to do strategy statements for myself, or my business, it takes a long, long time to get it done into a few simple things. And each word has to mean something. So, as an example, some years back, I started a sister company. It's called Valize. And the strategy really is to its mission, its purpose for me, is to help organizations create innovation and transformation capability as the basis for shared prosperity. And that sounds really simple. That sounds really kind of ‘duh, that's not so grand, but I mean, the hours it took to get to that simplicity of statement. And then once you've got something like that, you can go back and you could say, okay, well, here's the thing that I'm being asked to do or think I'm thinking of, does it build capability? Yes. No. Does it build shared prosperity? Yes, no. Does it help organizations to help themselves? Yes, no. And it sorts out a lot of stuff means a lot of stuff we could do. But there are only a few things that really fit into that sweet spot of shared capability. So, having that simplification allows you to clear out a lot of the …, there are always wonderful options that you got to do things, right? And it's a question of abundance, you've usually got more great options than you could possibly exercise. So, picking the best ones is the challenge. Ula Ojiaku: Wow, wow. I'm going to listen to this part again. You've mentioned some books already, like Andy Grove's, Only the Paranoid, I mean, Only the Paranoid survive. And you've mentioned the book, Disrupt Yourself… In addition to these books, and your wonderful suite of books, what other books would you recommend to the audience that you believe have influenced you that you'd recommend to the listeners that would help them you know, learn more about this topic? Rita McGrath: Oh, that's hard, because there's so many. Well, I love Safi Bahcall's Loonshots. I think that's a brilliant, brilliant book. And it really gets to the heart of how innovation actually happens rather than how we think it happens. I rather like Gary Hamel's and Michele Zanini's book, Humanocracy which has the basic question, you know, if you look at Instagram, or Twitter or any of these social platforms, you see these people who are just brilliant. I mean, they're creating incredibly creative stuff. And then we put them inside companies. And we insist that they do things by the rule, and we block all the creativity out of them. So, why do we do that? You know, I think that's a really great one. I'm very taken with Rebecca Henderson's, Re-imagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. Very, very brilliant. Roger Martin, When More is not Better. Just recently had a Julie Lythcott-Haims on my fireside chat program, which is and she's got a book called Your Turn, How to be an Adult”, which is, on a personal level, absolutely fascinating - really good book. I like Peter Sim's, Little Bets. You know, they're just so many I mean, I wouldn't even know where to where to start. Those are the ones that are sort of top of mind at the moment. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. scribbling away as you're talking, and yeah, these all these would be in the show notes with the links to them. So that's great. Now, how can the audience reach you? If they want to, you know follow your work. Rita McGrath: The best place to start is my website, which is really ritamcgrath.com, that's easy. I have columns that I write for. They're currently going up on substack and medium. If you just search my name and or medium, you'll find me there. I do weekly, LinkedIn post, which goes to subscribers on LinkedIn. Also, that's all sort of good places to start. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Are you on social media? Rita McGrath: Oh, yes. So yes. I'm on Twitter @RGMcGrath. And I'm on LinkedIn. Okay. I'm not on Facebook so much. But I have put things I post there, but I'm not really on it very much. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. All right. That's, I mean, thanks for those. Now, let's wrap up any ask of the audience first? Rita McGrath: I think we're in a remarkable moment, right now, you know, we've had so many of our previous habits and assumptions disrupted, that I think it would be a shame to lose, to lose all that and just go back to the way things were. So, I think it's an opportunity to reflect and to really think about, what kind of future do we want to build now that so many of our assumptions and institutions have been challenged, and we learned whole new tricks, we learned whole new ways to do things. Let's not just snap back to the way it was, let's think about inventing better. Rita McGrath: Really, I think there's going to be great opportunity coming out of this current crisis and those who are thinking ahead will benefit from it. Ula Ojiaku: Okay, great. Well, Rita, thank you so much for your time, and it's been a pleasure again, having you on the show. Rita McGrath: Thank you very much.
Malmö inrättar ett särskilt distrikt för att främja entreprenörskap, men borde inte hela staden göra det? Lunds universitet har ett särskilt institut för att främja vetenskaplig diskussion mellan discipliner, men borde inte hela universitetet göra det? Är det här exempel på institutionella ventiler som bidrar till organisatorisk förnyelse, eller är det bara ett sätt att kapitulera inför organisatorisk stagnation?LÄNKAR: Malmö ska få ett startup district (Pressmeddelande fr Malmö stad)Pufendorfinstitutet, Lunds universitetEricsson GarageEnhetslösningarnas tyranni (A Bergh & O Hallonsten 2021)Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (S. Bahcall 2019)Mine! - How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (M Heller & J Salzman 2022) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ninety percent of children's brains are developed by the age of five - yet around the world, millions of young people are missing out on adequate nutrition, care, and stimulating play, causing them to fall behind, even more they have started school.In this episode of The Impact Room, host Maysa Jalbout discusses the global crisis in early years care and asks what philanthropy and governments can - and should be - doing to fix it.Maysa is joined by Theirworld chair Sarah Brown and preside Justin van Fleet, Hilton Foundation CEO Peter Laugharn, and Sabrina Habib, the founder of nonprofit social enterprise Kidogo. Sarah Brown and Justin van Fleet talk about their charity's new global campaign, Act For Early Years, which is calling for more investment into early years and a UN decade for action on early childhood care, education, and development.Other campaign asks from Theirworld include: investment in a fully-trained, qualified and funded early years workforce; publishing of annual data on government spending on early childhood development; more family-friendly polices such as income support programmes, parental leave and affordable childcare for working parents; and the creation of a more integrated approach to early years interventions across sectors and government.Act for Early Years is being part-funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, whose CEO, Peter Laugharn, outlines to Maysa why the early years matter so much and explains what his foundation is doing in this space.Also appearing on this episode is Sabrina Habib, the co-founder of Kidogo, a nonprofit social enterprise giving give low-income families in Kenya access to affordable and quality childcare while also giving employment to - and empowering - local women. Explaining how she stumbled into the sector after being shown an informal “baby care” centre in Nairobi, Habib makes a passionate appeal to governments to realign their priorities.For more about the #ActforEarlyYears campaign follow @theirworld on social media. The books mentioned on this episode include:"Your Story Matters" by Nikesh Shukla"Wavewalker - Breaking Free" by Suzanne Heywood"The Go-Between" by Osman Yousefzada"Active Hope" by Joanna Macy"Loonshots" by Safi BahcallThe Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. This episode was produced and edited by Louise Redvers. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge
Safi Bahcall is going to come across pretty quickly as someone who is bright. Sharp. Smart. Intelligent. He went to Harvard for undergrad and then went on to get a PhD in Physics from Stanford. He's an academic, a researcher; someone who loves studying science. After he finished up his education, he went on to work for 3 years as a consultant for McKinsey. He then co-founded a bio-technology company where they develop new drugs for cancer treatment. He led their IPO and served as their CEO for many years. In 2008 he was named Ernst & Young New England Bio-Technology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama's Council of Science Advisors on the Future of National Research. In other words, it's not just you or me that's going to notice Safi's intelligence. His book, Loonshots, which is his first book, has been translated into 21 languages and was selected as a Best Business Book of the Year by Amazon, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, The Washington Post, and more. Today, Safi advises CEO's and leadership teams on strategy and innovation, and has delivered keynote presentations at industry conferences, investor events, leadership retreats, medical meetings, and leading academic institutions around the world. Today's conversation we dive into his work, but we also get into his mindset and how he thinks about leadership and how he thinks about invention and innovation. And certainly, he admires people that have come before him, but Safi himself is often thinking about new ways of innovating, new ways of thinking. He loves to try to think about not just how he sees the world, but how people around him see the world and how we can make teams and organizations and groups better instead of just thinking about what's convenient for ourselves. This is an idea that is at the core of his book Loonshots. The book is a lot about learning empathy, learning how to listen, learning how to read a room and read an organization, and then figure out how you can collaborate and work together to make really big things happen. Safi had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include: “You need to be trying a lot of things and failing” (8:30). “Artists are the people who we want to take risks and explore the unknown” (10:55). “The confusion is when you assume artists and innovators are the same” (12:30). “If you're in the managing or leadership position, the number one thing you have to remember is that you're always signaling. Everybody is watching your face constantly” (21:05). “If you favor one side over the other, you're going to sink the ship” (21:30). “You've got to respect both your creative artist scientist-types, your innovators, and your soldiers. And you've got to manage them differently” (26:50). “When you're in artist mode, if you're not failing, if you're not trying and things don't work, you're not pushing yourself enough” (28:10). “Art and science are connected by purpose. The purpose of art is the pursuit of beauty, the purpose of science is the pursuit of truth, and they're very close. There's beauty in truth and there's truth in beauty” (30:15). “[To cultivate curiosity in people], just keep asking why” (32:30). “I don't focus on what did you learn. I focus on what did you ask” (33:20). “What you want to cultivate in yourself and in your kids, if you're raising kids, is asking good questions” (33:30). “The guy with the initial idea is the guy getting the ball from his own goal line to his own five-yard line” (43:00). “What separates the real innovators is how they go about it. Do they keep asking why?” (45:30). “They have courage, curiosity, and commitment. Those are the 3 C's that I've seen across people who are really good at innovating” (46:15). “I had very little idea what I was going to be writing about when I started writing Loonshots” (52:30). “Commit to running an experiment a day” (54:30). “Just using the word ‘experiment' gives you permission to fail” (54:45). “Write FBR early on. Fast, bad, and wrong” (55:45). “That's the key: if and when you're stuck, it's to develop a personal cookie jar… your cookie jar is where you reach into when you're struggling” (1:03:05). Additionally, you can find Safi's website here and connect with him on LinkedIn. Thank you so much to Safi for coming on the podcast! I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers. Thanks for listening.
Is Sugar by Another Name Just as Sweet? Ali Wing and Oobli Are Fermenting Their Way to a Sweet Protein Future We all know that eating too much sugar isn't good for us, but millions of years of evolution led us to love sweet foods. After all, they provide us with a quick boost of energy needed in an ancestral environment where we were largely active throughout the day. Of course, today most people in the developed world are far from being active all day, yet we still crave sugar and eat it in an abundance far greater than what was available to our distant ancestors from whom we descend. There've been plenty of attempts to create sweetness without the negative effects that go along with eating the refined sugars we seem to love so much. From older products like aspartame to newer ones like stevia or allulose, a pot of gold awaits those who can help humanity satiate our sweet tooth without contributing to the health crises we now face. To that end, we're talking today with Oobli CEO Ali Wing about her company's efforts to commercialize the world's first sweet proteins. Yes, you read that right: sweet proteins. In 2022 Oobli closed a $25 million Series B round, bringing the company's total fundraising to date to $40 million. So, how do they create sweet proteins? As you'll hear Ali describe in this episode, some plants naturally produce proteins that happen to be sweet as an evolutionary trick. It'd be difficult to mass produce those plants, but via microbial fermentation, Oobli has figured out how to produce the bioidentical proteins themselves. I had the pleasure of enjoying some of Oobli's pre-market products and I certainly couldn't tell the difference myself. I was especially excited to try the company's chocolate bar which tastes as sweet as a full-sugar bar, but with 70 percent less sugar. It's an exciting way to sweeten the food industry without turning our health sour. I think you'll enjoy hearing Ali tell you the story of how she and her team intend to make your life, and your health, a little bit sweeter. Discussed in this episode Paul recommends Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott Ali recommends Loonshots by Safi Bahcall Ali also recommends John Doerr's books Ali mentions this study about the metabolic impacts of alt-sugars More about Ali Wing A growth CEO, Ali is best known for tackling big consumer problems, brand strategy & building high performing, agile teams. Specializing at the intersection of consumer brands, technology & healthy living, Ali's value creation track record crosses CPG, retail, technology, healthcare & biotech. Ali is currently the CEO & Director of Oobli, Inc., a food technology company leveraging precision fermentation to disrupt sugar. Prior to Oobli, Ali served as the Chief Consumer Officer of Bright Health Group, EVP of Digital/Chief Brand Officer at Ascena Retail Group, Founder/CEO/ Chairwoman of giggle, an EIR for a variety of venture-backed consumer software & technology companies & a Corporate Securities Attorney in the Silicon Valley. Ali launched her career at NIKE in brand leadership & strategy. In addition to her operating role at Oobli, Ali currently serves as an independent director on the boards of Casey's General Stores (NASDAQ: CASY) & Worldwide Orphans (WWO), & acts as an advisor to several growth technology companies. Previously Ali served as an independent director for Bazaarvoice (NASDAQ: BV) until it was sold to Marlin Equity in early 2018. Ali lives in the California with her husband, has an only son in college & holds a dual JD / MBA from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Ali has completed Harvard Business School's 2020/2021 Corporate Governance Certificate Program & was recognized among Women's Inc Top 100 Corporate Board of Directors in 2019.
Take Your Loonshot | Join physicist, entrepreneur, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Safi Bahcall for a conversation about nurturing crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries. Safi outlines the five laws of Loonshots, including Mind the False Fail, Listen to the Suck with Curiosity, and Create an Innovative Structure. Innovate Like A Champion: Learn the real job to be done by identifying four common types of struggle. https://pages.franklincovey.com/2023-Q2-NL-December13_NewsletterToolDownload-Podcast.html Subscribe to the FranklinCovey On Leadership email newsletter and receive weekly videos, tools, articles, and podcasts to help you become a better leader. ow.ly/tH5E30kAxfj
Innovation is a crucial part for organizations to stay ahead of their competitors, adapt to changing circumstances in the environment and create long-lasting businesses. Yet, many big corporations eventually stagnate and become obsolete while a lot of groundbreaking ideas come from small companies.Safi Bahcall is a second-generation physicist, a biotech entrepreneur, former public-company CEO and author of the highly acclaimed book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries”.Safi advises CEOs and leadership teams on strategy and innovation, and has delivered keynote presentations at industry conferences, investor events, leadership retreats, medical meetings, and leading academic institutions around the world.Greg and Safi discuss how organizations can borrow from science to implement systems and incentives that nurture innovation, risk-taking and experimenting which ultimately lead to radical breakthroughs.Episode Quotes:Having a chief incentive officer will help you grow your organizational scale49:29: You have a chief revenue officer whose role is strategic, given a marketing budget. How many dollars can we make? You have a chief technology officer whose role is strategic, given a fixed technology budget. How do we ensure the optimum technology use across the organization? Why don't you have a chief incentive officer? You have a fixed compensation. You try to stick within a fixed budget of cash and options. Why aren't you trying to have someone who's focused on maximizing the return that you get from that? It's pretty obvious. Which would you rather have, a force that has the latest smartphone gadgets or a force that's the most motivated in the industry? I'd rather have the latter.On increasing innovation10:38: If we want to increase innovation, risk-taking, and experimenting, we can't use the same systems. We have to use an opposite system, metrics, and rewards.Two helpful frameworks for every CEO08:19: It's a helpful framework to keep in mind if you're a CEO that addresses real-world topics or leading a group, or even managing a small team; you need to have two phases in your mind. One, we just need to deliver stuff on time, budget and spec consistently with quality to our customers. The other, we need to think of wild, crazy, new ideas on the one we're reducing risk on the one we're increasing risk. Show Links:Guest Profile:Safi Bahcall's WebsiteSafi Bahcall on LinkedInSafi Bahcall on TwitterSafi Bahcall on YoutubeSafi Bahcall on FacebookHis Work:Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
Recommend this show by sharing the link: pod.link/2Pages What skills do you think an entrepreneur requires? I've been mulling it over and I've come up with four things: marketing, selling, a tolerance for risk, and persistence. You're probably thinking what I'm thinking – who wouldn't benefit from building capacity in those four areas? Perhaps we should all consider ourselves entrepreneurs. Asheesh Advani is a friend, a successful entrepreneur, and a social innovator who's led Junior Achievement Worldwide since 2015. Considering that JA Worldwide has been nominated for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, I'd say he's doing okay. Asheesh has come full circle, because he's also an alumnus of JA, and his participation in the group is actually what led him to entrepreneurship early in life. Get book links and resources at https://www.mbs.works/2-pages-podcast/ Asheesh reads two pages from ‘Loonshots' by Safi Bahcall. [reading begins at 12:30] Hear us discuss: “Shifting mindset is easier than shifting skill set.” [9:37] | Innovation on a global scale: “The core of our organization is embracing the fact that true diversity exists.” [16:53] | How to manage and nurture relationships. [21:23] | The balance between control and influence in JA Worldwide: “It's possible that other people know more than you do.” [27:24] | How helping young people become more entrepreneurial can contribute to a more peaceful world. [30:34]
In this week's episode of the podcast, Lauren and Rob sit down with Bullhorn's SVP of Talent Experience & AI, Jason Heilman. The conversation covered all things automation, AI & staffing tech best practices. The group focuses first on demystifying AI for the staffing industry starting with what we actually mean when we talk about AI..(hint) we are predominantly referring to Machine Learning. The terrific trio also discusses:
In today's episode, our host Preethy Padmanabhan got the opportunity to sit down with Guillaume de la Serra, Chief Product Officer of Jellysmack to discuss Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall. Guillaume shared his thoughts on some of the key points in the book—nurturing innovation while balancing franchising, avoiding the moses trap, and the need for loonshots to achieve 10x growth. What are Loonshots? They are deas that seem too crazy to work, but end up changing everything Tune in to listen to the episode and know more about how you foster both the artists and soldiers in your organization, and ultimately set your business to ideate and create the next great thing.
In today's show, Jennie and Davis dive back into the book: Loonshots to discover the story of how cholesterol-lowering medicine was developed. Spoiler, it was a pretty rough road through development. Try ButcherBox! https://bchrbox.co/JennieandDavis The Morning Show with Jennie and Davis: A FUN and POSITIVE way to take your day by storm! The Morning Show with Jennie and Davis is a show about FUN, POSITIVITY, and GROWTH. We share our morning routine with you so we can all start the day on the right foot! Streaming LIVE on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok every weekday morning at 7AM CT. https://www.twitch.tv/jennieanddavis We begin with our favorite segment: “What's in your mug?!” Then we hit some Daily Affirmations and answer a question out of our book of questions. After that, it's time to sharpen our Mind, Body, and Spirit with our daily exercises.
In today's show, Jennie and Davis use tiny mics to run the show from home! We have a new book, Tribe of Mentors by Timothy Ferriss and we're reading it on stream because Davis forgot to grab the Loonshots book by Safi Bachal… Try ButcherBox! https://bchrbox.co/JennieandDavis The Morning Show with Jennie and Davis: A FUN and POSITIVE way to take your day by storm! The Morning Show with Jennie and Davis is a show about FUN, POSITIVITY, and GROWTH. We share our morning routine with you so we can all start the day on the right foot! Streaming LIVE on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok every weekday morning at 7AM CT. https://www.twitch.tv/jennieanddavis We begin with our favorite segment: “What's in your mug?!” Then we hit some Daily Affirmations and answer a question out of our book of questions. After that, it's time to sharpen our Mind, Body, and Spirit with our daily exercises.
In today's show, Jennie and Davis remember why they're running a furniture business. We read our new book (Loonshots), answer some questions about the weather, and do our morning routine! Try ButcherBox! https://bchrbox.co/JennieandDavis The Morning Show with Jennie and Davis: A FUN and POSITIVE way to take your day by storm! The Morning Show with Jennie and Davis is a show about FUN, POSITIVITY, and GROWTH. We share our morning routine with you so we can all start the day on the right foot! Streaming LIVE on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok every weekday morning at 7AM CT. https://www.twitch.tv/jennieanddavis We begin with our favorite segment: “What's in your mug?!” Then we hit some Daily Affirmations and answer a question out of our book of questions. After that, it's time to sharpen our Mind, Body, and Spirit with our daily exercises.
Joe Schurman teaches from his deep experience in the software, machine learning, AI, and processes that organizations need today as they transition to data-driven technology companies. He names some of the cloud services and tech tools he uses to lead clients to start with a user case, break it into stories, build a team led by the solution owner, assign the stories to developers to build, and iterate product demos until the Minimum Loved Project (MLP) is achieved. Joe offers observations on investing the “right” amount of time in projects, and wisdom on developing a learner mindset. Key Takeaways [2:06] Joe Schurman is a 2nd-degree black belt in Kung Fu. He once judged a competition in Las Vegas. He has four children; two daughters and two sons. [2:57] Joe is an expert on the fringes of what we can do with computing technology. What we can do changes every day. In the past couple of years, from an AI perspective, with data and automation, it's taken leaps and bounds. [4:30] We're still pretty far away from general AI, despite Sophia, an AI robot that was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship in 2017. Today's AI depends on the programming we give a machine and its interpretation and output. Joe's focus is narrow or weak AI. His business colleagues call it magic. Computer vision is an area he loves. [5:45] Joe uses a lab environment across Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. The capabilities that have come up in the last year are “just insane” with what you can do with computer vision and building libraries of what the machine can see. [6:06] Joe loved seeing a computer vision capability demonstration at AWS re:Invent of tracking every NFL player on the field and predicting injuries and other types of output and insights in real-time. The machine used narrow AI to access a library seeded with “a ton” of data to interpret the action. [7:15] What you can do with this technology comes down to the data that you feed the engine. Think about the amounts of data that organizations have to sift through to generate reflective or predictive insights. Auto machine learning helps organize the data into useful information such as anomaly detection in software engineering. The data can also come from tools like GitHub and Jira. [8:25] Joe did a fun computer vision project on UAPs for the History Channel, working with some of the nation's top military leaders, building a library of video and audio data to be able to detect unidentified aerial phenomena that were not supposed to be entering our airspace, and curating that library. [10:06] AI started with the idea of speeding up processes, such as getting an app to market faster or gathering insights quicker to make business decisions more timely. [11:28] AI can enhance human performance. Joe starts by finding people who know how to fail fast; to get a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) out the door. Solutions such as quality engineering automation, test automation, and monitoring services for DevOps detect bugs and performance issues quickly and ensure that the quality of the team is sound.[12:47] Joe notes the importance of individuals performing, contributing to, and collaborating as a team. Set your organization and standards governance up first. Look for a platform of technology to leverage that enables you to build and tinker. Finding the latest and greatest tool is no good unless it provides the right level of collaboration with their platform and connection to different processes. [14:53] When introducing ML to an organization, start with discovery, to understand the culture and talent within the organization. How are they communicating today? Joe sees the biggest gap between data scientists and data engineers. Projects tend to fail without collaboration, regardless of the tech. If the data scientists don't understand the domain, then the platform is irrelevant,[17:28] Joe stresses the need for a methodology in place to make any of these aspirations work for your organization. After discovery, there's an align phase. Focus on the outcome and the use case. The solution owner is crucial. The solution owner leads the technology team and brings them together around the client's outcome to develop that use case.[18:12] If you can't take an actual use case and break it down into bite-sized chunks or user stories, then the project will never be on the right track. Start with the use case to mitigate risks. Break the use case into user stories. Match the user stories with the number of engineers that can develop a number of user stories within a given time frame. [18:38] Those user stories given to the engineers are deducted into Story Points, in the Agile Process of engineering software. Price Waterhouse Coopers (PcW) has taken it to the next level, being able to do Engineering as a Service, being able to do it at scale, and being able to pivot quickly.[18:58] Joe explains what can happen if you have a great idea, take three to six months to break down the use case, and fill all the requirements, but hand it off to the Dev team that has no idea what the use case is: you get irrelevant software that doesn't tie back to the outcome! [19:22] Keep the solution team engaged in building the bridge between the subject matter expert stakeholders and the engineers. Every two weeks, demonstrate the iteration or program increment you have built. Does it match the outcome? Does it provide any relevance? Then take the feedback and figure out what happened in that iteration. Fix errors. You will build a product that has value to launch. [20:45] Communicate a lot, so all the people are on the same page! When you have stovepiped organizations where the departments don't talk to one another, you waste time, effort, and money building a product no one will use. One of Joe's colleagues, José Reyes, uses the term Minimum Lovable Project (MLP), where people rally around the outcome, not just the tech. [22:33] What skills and knowledge will the leaders of PwC need to endure for the next five years? Joe says first are character and attitude; people that have a hunger to build something, with a fail-fast mentality, and that are excited to learn constantly, that read every day and learn new technology. [24:27] Then know the tools. Documents exist on the internet for every solution and there is access to services like GitHub to download projects and starter templates without being an expert but just reading the README file and installing the base-level template, learning as you go, and as you tinker. That's way more valuable than coming in as a book-smart expert in a specific product or technology. [24:57] When it comes to tooling, there are products like the Atlassian platform with Confluence and Jira. For an AI stack, Joe typically works with AWS, GPC, and Microsoft, more so on the Amazon side with AWS AI tools, like Rekognition, Glue DataBrew, Redshift ML, Comprehend, and more. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google produce so much documentation and certification to get you up to speed. [26:30] Judgment, wisdom, and character will not be replaced by AI anytime soon. There's still room for philosophy in leadership. There are tools and technologies to speed up the processes, but not the individuals. There are no general AI solutions out yet to replace a pod of application developers, designers, and solution owners to execute a successful MVP or MLP out the door for a client. [27:55] Advice to CEOs: Be patient and understanding. Be willing to fail fast. Support tinkering and R&D, even if the project doesn't work out. Organizations are generally realizing that today they need to be data-driven, technology companies but there is still hesitance over the risk that needs to be taken. [30:03] Why would an insurance company or other traditional company need R&D? Look at Loonshots, by Safi Bahcall for some ideas about R&D. [30:56] Joe shares how he got to this point in his career. He wanted to play baseball but started at Compaq (now HP) when he was 18, writing scripts in Unix and other environments. Just being able to make certain changes to help clients get products faster and seeing the quick response from the outcomes felt like a home run to him! [31:49] Years later, Joe went on his own, with a vision to create telehealth before telemedicine was a thing, using Skype for Business and Microsoft Lync, enabling an API for that. Seeing people connect through a technology he had built, replaced the need to be a baseball star! Joe is grateful for the break he got at a young age and enjoys his work. [33:22] When Joe first started, he was trying to be the smartest person in the room, seeing the instant gratification of making code snippets that tested successfully. Eventually just building the app wasn't enough for him. He got the dopamine hit from seeing users interacting with his code and seeing its value. [34:58] Joe's mentors include many people he worked with. X. D. Wang at Microsoft Research inspired him to tinker, build, and focus on the short-run more than the long-run. Randeep Sing Pal at Microsoft Unified Communications was another great mentor. Also Steve Justice and Chris Mellon, in terms of character and collaboration. Joe shares how they mentored him. [37:23] Jan says something we forget about technology is that there are a lot of failures and attempts before the success hits. We have to be mindful of that as leaders to give people time and space to do really creative, cool things. [38:01] Joe appreciates the opportunity to discuss these things. Joe spent a lot of his career building software solutions that were way ahead of their time. It's frustrating to see telemedicine so successful now, but not when he attempted it. He had to learn to let go. It's not just about releasing bleeding-edge tech; you've got to find some value associated with it to resonate with the end-user. [39:31] Always think about the outcome and understand your audience first. And then be able to supplement the back end of that with bleeding-edge technology, development, tinkering, failing fast, and all the things that go with software engineering. Also, be humble! Get perspective from outside your bubble to build a better solution and be a better person. [40:49] WHenever you're setting out to build anything, start with a press release! Write a story of what it would look like if it were released today. Then just work back from there! Quotable Quotes “There are so many new and cool technologies and innovations that are coming out at the speed of thought, which are pretty fascinating.” “I've been in real cloud engineering for about a decade, and from an AI perspective, with data and automation, over the past five to 10 years, in terms of running on a cloud environment, and it's just taken leaps and bounds.” “You've got to be able to connect that [data] environment to a use case or an outcome. If you can't do that and you can't enable a data scientist to understand the domain, then the data platform is irrelevant. I see a lot of performance issues occur because of that disconnect.” “If you can't take an actual use case and break it down into bite-sized chunks or user stories, then the project will never be on the right track.” “In this industry, you're constantly learning; constantly reading. I'm reading every day and learning about new technology every day and how to apply it and how to tinker with it. I need people on the team … that have that ability or that hunger to tinker and learn.” “Transitioning from a ‘knower' mindset to a ‘learner' mindset was the biggest shift for me.” “Always think about the outcome and understand your audience first. And then be able to supplement the back end of that with bleeding-edge technology, development, tinkering, failing fast, and all the things that go with software engineering.” Resources Mentioned Joe Schurman, PwC Joe Schurman on LinkedIn PwC Sophia robot granted citizenship I, Robot film Weak AI Google Cloud Platform Microsoft Azure Amazon Web Services AWS re:Invent GitHub Atlassian Jira Unidentified, The History Channel José Reyes, PwC The Shackleton Journey Atlassian Confluence AWS Rekognition AWS Glue DataBrew AWS Redshift ML AWS Comprehend Steve Justice on LinkedIn Chris Mellon Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, by Safi Bahcall
Companies looking to bring breakthrough innovations to life need the right organizational structures and incentives in place. In his book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, March 2019), Safi Bahcall, a former biotech CEO who now helps organizations innovate, explains what that requires. In this episode, he talks with Erik Roth, leader of McKinsey's innovation work globally, about why some great ideas changed the world and others failed to take off. Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 49:49) >
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 49:49) > Companies looking to bring breakthrough innovations to life need the right organizational structures and incentives in place. In his book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, March 2019), Safi Bahcall, a former biotech CEO who now helps organizations innovate, explains what that requires. In this episode, he talks with Erik Roth, leader of McKinsey's innovation work globally, about why some great ideas changed the world and others failed to take off.See www.mckinsey.com/privacy-policy for privacy information
As the CEO of Imagine Think, Nora Herting helps expand the definition of creativity in the business world. As the author of the best-selling book, “Draw Your Big Idea,” Nora has inspired thousands to think visually to access their own creativity. Nora breaks down the myth that drawing is only for the creatives, and showcases real examples of how leaders can add another dimension to their ideas (and execution effectiveness) through simple doodles. Listen in to unlock and inspire others in new ways beyond the written word! Key Takeaways [3:15] Nora shares insight about visual leadership. [5:00] Paintings have been a form of communication for thousands of years. [7:10] When we use our brain, we don't just use the right brain or the left brain hemispheres while doing a task, we use the entire brain. [9:10] If you or your team is stuck somewhere, try drawing a picture! [9:15] Nora explains how leaders can empower their staff to embrace their artistic side more effectively. [14:45] Jim shares an example of how powerful visuals are in a presentation to bring home the core message. [20:10] An important skill to have is to patiently wait for people to finish and to know when they've finished their point. [21:55] Nora shares the difference between having a liberal arts degree vs. an MBA. [25:35] Instead of looking within your industry and what the competition is doing, look elsewhere. Look at politics, cultural events, or other industries not related to you for inspiration. [28:05] Creatives and implementers tend to clash with one another, but Jim talks about the book Loonshots and how you can blend these two groups together for collaboration. [34:10] Nora offers resources on the types of visual tools leaders and teams can use. [35:55] Jim and Jan admit that their handwriting is horrible. It's hard to multitask when talking and writing. [37:00] If you have terrible handwriting, Nora offers a quick tip on how to fix this. [39:45] Listener challenge: Ask your team to draw out the description of their role and what they do every day. Quotable Quotes “If you're stuck on a problem, try solving that problem visually.” “We are wired to think in pictures and we've been doing it as a species for so long.” “The business world has a real fascination with creativity, but it mystifies business leaders.” “Artists are looking outside for inspiration all the time. They're not just looking at what people in their field are doing but they're pulling things from all over, like science, politics, and cultural events.” Resources Mentioned Sponsored by: Darley.com Imagethink.net Nora on Linkedin Nora on Instagram Grab Nora's book, Draw Your Big Idea: The Ultimate Creativity Tool for Turning Thoughts Into Action and Dreams Into Reality Think About 4u Conference Theartofvision.com Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, by Safi Bahcall Jamboard.google.com
Guest Bio: Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, sought-after advisor and speaker, and longtime professor at Columbia Business School. Rita is one of the world's top experts on strategy and innovation and is consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50. McGrath's recent book on strategic inflection points is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Rita is the author of four other books, including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Since the onset of the pandemic, Rita has created workshops, strategy sessions and keynotes, applying her tools and frameworks to strategy under high levels of uncertainty to specific issues organizations are facing. As Rui Barbas, the Chief Strategy Officer for Nestle USA said, “You were incredibly insightful and, despite the virtual setting, there was lots of engagement and comments from leaders sharing eye-opening observations and building on your examples throughout. You delivered the inspiration and illustration desired and it was exactly the right focus and challenge for this team. Appreciate your time throughout the process to align on content and delivery. The future-focus theme was the perfect close to our leadership summit.” Rita's work is focused on creating unique insights. She has also founded Valize a companion company, dedicated to turning those insights into actionable capability. You can find out more about Valize at www.valize.com. McGrath received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She is active on all the main social media platforms, such as Twitter @rgmcgrath. For more information, visit RitaMcGrath.com. Social Media/ Websites: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritamcgrath/ Twitter: @rgmcgrath Instagram: @ritamcgrathofficial Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/rgmcgrath Websites: https://ritamcgrath.com and valize.com Rita's Newsletter/ Articles Substack: https://thoughtsparks.substack.com/ Medium: https://rgmcgrath.medium.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/thought-sparks-6787762418471755776/ Books Seeing Around Corners by Rita McGrath https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seeing-Around-Corners-Inflection-Business/dp/0358022339 The Entrepreneurial Mindset by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillian https://www.amazon.co.uk/Entrepreneurial-Mindset-Continuously-Opportunity-Uncertainty/dp/0875848346 The End of Competitive Advantage by Rita Gunther McGrath https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Competitive-Advantage-Strategy-Business/dp/1422172813 Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Disrupt-Yourself-New-Introduction-Relentless/dp/1633698785 Humanocracy by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini https://www.amazon.co.uk/Humanocracy-Creating-Organizations-Amazing-People/dp/1633696022 Reimagining Capitalism by Rebecca Henderson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reimagining-Capitalism-Business-Save-World/dp/0241379660 When More is Not Better by Roger L. Martin https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-More-Not-Better-Overcoming/dp/1647820065/ Being An Adult by Lucy Tobin https://www.amazon.co.uk/Being-Adult-ultimate-getting-together-ebook/dp/B07GQ1KRTC/ Only The Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove https://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Andrew-Grove/dp/1861975139 Ula Ojiaku: My guest today is Dr. Rita McGrath. She's a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker and advisor and consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50. In this episode, Rita talked about the concept of inflection points from her book ‘Seeing Around Corners' and how as leaders, we can train ourselves to spot these inflection points and act on the information we receive. She also talked about making complex things simple for the people we work with. I learnt a lot speaking with Rita and I'm sure you will find this conversation insightful as well. Thank you again for watching! It's an honor to have you on the show, Rita McGrath. Many, many thanks for joining us. Rita McGrath: Well, thank you Ula. It's a pleasure to be here. Ula Ojiaku: Great. Now, can you tell us about yourself? How did the Rita, Dr. Rita McGrath we know today evolve? Rita McGrath: Well, it would have to start with my parents, of course. I mean, all great stories start with your parents. And so, my parents were both scientists. My mother was a Microbiologist, and my father was an Organic Chemist. And so, I grew up in a house where, you know, (if) a question couldn't be answered, you went and got the reference book and figured it out. And both, (had) incredible respect for science and for diligence. And, you know, the house was always full of books and lots of emphasis on learning. I wouldn't say we were, financially all that well-off – we weren't poor by any means. But it was, you know, there wasn't like a lot of money to spare, but there was always money for books, and there was always money for, you know, educational experiences and that kind of thing. So, that's the household I grew up in. So, my parents, when I was born, were both on the staff at the Yale Medical School. So, they were both researchers there. And then my dad in the late 60s, got an offer to go join this upstart, fledgling company that was at the cutting edge of all kinds of things in his field and that was Xerox Corporation. And he was very conflicted about leaving academia, but went off eventually to Xerox. So, we moved the family to Rochester, New York. So that's where I did most of my growing up. And my mother at that time, decided to stay home, more or less. And then she started a scientific translation business. So, she moved into an entrepreneurial career more than her scientific career. And then when it came time to go to college, I went to Barnard College in the City of New York. I'd always thought New York was an amazing place and was accepted there. So, went off to New York, did my Bachelor's and my Master's in Political Science and Public Policy. I was very interested in public policy and matters of social contract and those kinds of things. And then my first job was actually with the City of New York, I ran purchasing systems for government agencies. It doesn't sound very glamorous. But today, we would call it digital transformation. It was the very first wave of companies taking their operations in a digital form. And it was very exciting and I learned a lot. Then I got to the end of… the thing about public service is when you start, there's (this) unlimited sort of growth that can happen for a few years, and then it really just levels off. And you're never going to go beyond that. So, I kind of reached that headroom and decided to do something different. Ula Ojiaku: Was it at that point that you decided to go for your PhD? Rita McGrath: And that was one of the options I was considering. And my husband basically said, ‘look, if you get into a top five school, it's worth doing and if you don't, it's probably not.' But you have to think in that time, MBA programs were just exploding, and there'd been a lot of pressure on the administrators of MBA programs, to put PhD accredited faculty in front of their students. The big knock against the MBA at the time was, oh, they're just trade schools. You know, we've got some guy who ran an entire company comes in and talks and that's not really academically suitable. And so, there was a huge pressure for schools to find PhD accredited people- that still exists (but) the market pressures has changed a lot. But when I was doing my PhD, it was pretty sure I would get a job if I managed to complete the degree. So that that gave me that extra input to do that. Ula Ojiaku: Did you already have like children when you started the PhD? Rita McGrath: Yes Ula Ojiaku: And how did you cope? Rita McGrath: Our son was, how old was he? He would have been nine months old when I started my PhD program. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku: Wow, 9 months old. Rita McGrath: Oh, yeah, it was a real challenge. And I guess everybody manages those kinds of challenges in their own way. But yeah, it was a struggle because, you know, typical day would be you know, get up, get the baby to daycare or wherever and then do school or whatever I had to do that day. And then it was sort of pick them up. By the time I had a second child it was pick them up, get them dinner, get them bedtime, get them story, and then I'll be back at my desk at nine o'clock at night, trying to do what I needed to do. So, it was a new turn. It was tough. It was difficult years. I mean, joyful years though but it was just hard to fit everything in. Ula Ojiaku: I can imagine. I mean, although I'm thinking of starting my PhD (studies), my children aren't that small but I do remember the time (they were), you know, I was still working full time. So, the challenge is you'd go to work and then come back to work. I mean, to another type of work. And then when they go to bed, the work continues. Yeah, it's interesting. Rita McGrath: Quite exhausting. Ula Ojiaku: You can say that. I'm so glad they're not in diapers anymore. So, it's baby steps, we are getting there. So, can we go on to your book, “Seeing Around Corners, How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen”. I'd like to start from an unusual place in the book. I started from the dedication page, and you know, reading everything, and I noticed that, you referred to a conversation, one of the last conversations you had with your mother. Could you tell us about that? Rita McGrath: Oh sure. She was well, at the time, she was quite ill, she had sarcoma in her lung, and she was quite ill. It's a horrible disease, and we haven't got any real treatments for it. So, the recommendation is you do chemo and that really knocks you out. So, she was quite ill and sort of migrating between the chair and the couch and the chair and the couch. And in one of those conversations, she just said ‘I want you to know I'm proud of you. And I've had a good life and I'm prepared for whatever comes next.' And I thought that was lovely of her to say and I thought in that moment to pass it on to all these other women. And you know you bring up motherhood and being a working woman and all those complicated emotions that come with that because there seems to be guilt around every corner you know, if you're not at home full time, oh you're a terrible mom. And if you're not at work full time, you're a terrible worker. I just I think so many of those things are just designed to twist us up into little balls. And when I look at my own mother's experience - she was a working woman… I grew up but I think I'm third or fourth generation working woman so it never even occurred to me that wouldn't be possible. But I think what often is missing is this validation, you know that for women who are trying to you know make their way professionally and be great, responsible parents and do all these other things that often there's a sense of a lack of self-worth you know, ‘oh, I'm not doing enough.' The more I hear that… Ula Ojiaku: I feel like that some… most days I feel like that… Rita McGrath: Believe me, you are doing enough Ula Ojiaku: Sometimes I ask my children, am I a good mom? Rita McGrath: I think part of it too is we, and when I say we, I mean baby boomer mothers and maybe a little younger. We got ourselves all tangled up in this if it's not like organic, hand-processed lima beans with you know, organic succotash, mixed in you know, it's not good baby food. Honestly, Gerber's exists to provide perfectly nutritious food for really young babies and they've been doing it for decades and you can trust that and if it makes your life easier, go with it. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you! Rita McGrath: You know, I think we I think we get ourselves all tossed up in like, what does good mean? I mean, honestly, the kids don't mind you know? I mean, they'd celebrate if it was chicken finger night. Ula Ojiaku: Let's go to the book. You know, because in your book you said you it's about how to spot inflections before they happen in business. Can you give us examples of, you know, businesses that had these inflection points occur, and they failed to recognize it and what was the impact? Rita McGrath: Sure, let's take one that is quite sad to me, which is Intel. And Intel built its, well, Intel went through a major inflection point, in fact, the originator of the concept was Andy Grove, who was their former CEO. And he talked about his inflection points in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, which is really a brilliant, brilliant book. And one of the reasons I wrote my book was that very little had been done since his book on that topic. And Grove built this incredible company, Intel. And they were making microprocessor chips. And they were very, very powerful, very fast chips. And so, the assumptions inside Intel's business model was, what customers were going to pay for was faster, faster, faster, more computation power, more and more powerful. But what they didn't really think about was energy consumption. And as the world went more mobile… so the Intel product is the PC, and the PC, the desktop PC remains firmly plugged into the wall. And then later, we make PC chips that maybe have slightly lower power consumption to power PCs, but it's still that notion of power, you know, and I think the inflection point that caught Intel by surprise, to some extent was, this movement towards mobile, where the vast majority of chips being made were these completely different architecture chips by companies like ARM and you know, and companies like that, which, from their inception, recognized that low power was the way to go. Then they weren't very powerful in the sense of speed, which is what Intel was driving its business towards. But they were powerful in the sense of ubiquitous low power, long battery life, that kind of thing. And I think that's an example of the kind of assumption that can cause a company to get into trouble, when the underlying shift in the business environment says, ‘wait a minute, this thing you've been building all this time may not be what is needed by the marketplace.' Ula Ojiaku: That's interesting. So, it brings me to the point of, the points you made about, you know, the indicators, the early warnings, and you mentioned the concept of you know lagging, current and leading indicators. And there was an emphasis in your book on, you know, leading indicators. Could you tell us a bit about that? Rita McGrath: Sure. Well, so leading indicators are today's information about tomorrow's possibilities. And what we unfortunately rely on a lot in business is lagging indicators - so profits, performance, you know, ROI, all those things are lagging some kind of decision that you made a long time ago. So, the concept of leading indicators is to try to get business leaders to think about what would have to be true, you know, before I was able to make a certain decision, what are the leading indicators? So, an example would be back in the 90s, computer scientists all over the world realized that come the year 2000, from the turn of the millennium, that the way computer programs had been programmed, was only two digits for the year. And so, when the year went to zero-zero, computers, were going to think it was 1900 and this was going to be terrible. Because they all get out of sync, you know, and planes would drop out of the sky. You're gonna become unstable, and you'll all need to move to Montana and stuff … I don't know if you can remember this. Ula Ojiaku: Yeah, the Y2K bug… Rita McGrath: Oh my goodness…! Ula Ojiaku: It was a big sensation. Yeah… Rita McGrath: Apocalyptic – remember?! And yet, when the big moment came the year 2000. What happened? Well, nothing happened. Why did nothing happen? We looked at that early warning, and we said, whoa, if that happens, it's bad. And then so companies, prodded by their accounting firms, prodded by other security considerations invested billions in correcting that flaw. And so, that's an example of an early warning. And there are a couple of things to understand about early warning. So, the first important thing is, the measure of a good early warning is not, did it predict what happened. The measure of a good leading indicator is, did it help you prepare for what might happen? And so, I think that's a really important distinction, because we oftentimes, oh, you that didn't predict this or that. But that's not the point. The point is, did it help you think more broadly about what might happen so that you could be prepared? So, I think that's the first thing. The second thing to remember about leading indicators is they're often not quantitative in the way that we like to think about quantitative things. They're often qualitative. They often take the form of stories. And they often come from what are called unrepresentative parts of your mental ecosystem. So, you know, it's that person on the loading dock (saying to themselves), ‘this is, well, that's weird, a customer never asked for that before', or the person answering the phone, you know, in headquarters going, ‘Well, I don't understand why they need that information…' You know, it's those little anomalies or things that depart from business as usual, that are often the weak signals that you need to be paying attention to. Ula Ojiaku: So, can you give us an example where you mean, I mean, of how we can go about choosing good leading indicators? Rita McGrath: Well, in the book, I describe a technique that I use, which is you take a couple of uncertainties and juxtapose them on each other. And that gives you four or more you can do this for as many as you like, stories from the future, possibly a future that we could live in. And then depending on which one you want to think about, you say, ‘okay, I'm gonna write a headline as if it came from a newspaper story about that scenario. And I'm gonna work backwards and say, what has to be true for that headline to emerge.' So, take an example that's playing out right now, chronic and accelerating decline in birth rates in the United States. People are just deciding not to enlarge their families or not to start their families at all. And for very good reasons, you know, the level of social support for families is very low. Mostly women are bearing the burden. And very often women are the ones that make a large part of the decision about whether the family is going to grow or not. And so, we're facing a real baby bust. Well, if that's true, and we follow that along, well, what are some things that would be early warnings or indicators of what that world will be like? Well, you'll see a decline of working people relative to retired people, or people needing assistance, you'll see, you know, fewer kids with more resources to support them. So, the kind of baby Prince phenomena we saw in China. There are lots of things you can kind of work through. But once you say, ‘okay, I see a world with a million fewer children three years from now, than we would have expected well, okay, what now working backward? What does that tell us we need to be paying attention to today? Ula Ojiaku: Yes, yes. That's a great example. And I wonder, though, so given all, you know, the research that has led to, and your experience as well, consulting with, you know, most of these large organizations, the case studies, you've come to witness and all that, what would you, what would be your advice to leaders of such organizations, you know, in terms of how they can better prepare themselves or equip themselves to recognize these inflection points, and lead effectively? Rita McGrath: Well, I think the first principle is you have to be discovery driven. In other words, you have to be curious about what's going on. And if you're the kind of leader who (when) someone brings you a piece of information, and instead of treating it like a gift, you're like, oh no, you don't understand that's wrong. That's not the way the world works. If you're dismissive of information people are bringing you that's very dangerous. Because the information you need is not going to come from your lieutenants at headquarters, it's going to come from that guy on the loading dock. So, I think you want to think about establishing some kind of information flows, that go directly from where the phenomena are happening to your desk. So, as an example, a company I really admire is the German metal services company Klockner. And their CEO, Gisbert Ruehl was taking them through a digital transformation. And his big concern was not that they meant it, right? But that his lieutenants, his middle manager, cohort, would be so expert, and so experienced at the way business was, that they would just shut down these digital efforts. And he was very, very concerned about that. He said, well, I need some way of making my message heard directly to the people that are on the frontlines and I also need a way of hearing from them what's going on. So, he implemented Yammer, called non-hierarchical communication. And the deal was anybody in the company that had something he needed to know should feel comfortable sending him a note. And I'm told, I don't know this for a fact that I'm told that at headquarters, he had his instance of Yammer set up so that the lower the hierarchical level of the person, the higher it came in his newsfeed. Ula Ojiaku: Oh, wow. Rita McGrath: So, you know, I can talk to my lieutenants, anytime. Information I need is in the, you know, 24-year-old person who's just joined us with an engineering degree, who's looking at our manufacturing process for screwdrivers and saying, ‘Why do you do it that way? There must be a better way of doing this…' That's the information I really need and he set up a whole system to try to get that information to him, to himself. Ula Ojiaku: Would you say there's a typical kind of leader with, you know, some certain characteristics that's best equipped to spot the inflection point, and you know, kind of lead the charge and get the organizations in line? Rita McGrath: You know, I think it's more of the behavior, it's not the characteristics. So, I've seen charismatic, attractive, you know, movie star type CEOs be good at this. I've seen people you look at and you go ‘Really? He looks kind of like he slept in his clothes all night.' I've seen those people be good at it. So, you know, I think the differentiation is this, this hunger for new information, this curiosity, this relentless… ‘tell me again…' and ‘why was that and why was that?' It is this urgent need to really learn what's going on. And then and then putting yourself in the, in the context. So, one of the people I'm working with right now is a brilliant retail CEO, and everything. And one of the things he would do before hiring anybody into his senior team, is he would spend a day or two walking the stores, you know, and in his explanation to me was, ‘I want to see how they react to the stores. I want to see how they treat the people working in stores. I want to see what they notice, you know, I want to see if they notice that there's a thing out of array and I want to see how they are with me, like if they spend their whole two days in store visits, sucking up to me - that's not somebody I need, you know. And so, I think the best leaders along those lines are people who are relentlessly curious, bring people around them who are diverse, you know, you don't just want echo chambers of themselves. Ula Ojiaku: True, true. You don't want ‘yes' men if you really want to make an impact really. Yeah, and how can I, as a person, train myself to also recognize these inflection points. Rita McGrath: Well, it depends what the inflection point is. So, if it's a question of, you've been making nice steady progress in your career, and now you've hit some kind of ceiling and you just feel you're not growing or developing any more, then that choice is really okay, I need to… the way Whitney Johnson would put this, she's written a great book on this, “Disrupt Yourself”, right? You go up this S curve, then you need to make the decision if you're going to take on the J curve, right, which is the part below the S curve before you get into the next round of learning. So, that's a personal decision, really only you can make a decision like that. Then there are the cases where inflection points are thrust upon you. So you lose a job, your spouse has some setback, a family member has an urgent need that makes whatever you were doing before impossible. I mean, there's all kinds of outside things that can happen to you. Ula Ojiaku: Yeah… Rita McGrath: And I think the best way to try to look at those is. ‘is this a slingshot to a better future, potentially?' And you know, how many people have you talked to who got fired, and some years later say, ‘that was the best thing that ever happened to me, it shook me out of my complacency. It made me think differently.' And so, I think a lot of times, you know, we, it's very comfortable (staying) stuck in our ruts. And sometimes it takes a bit of a jolt to get us out of that. Ula Ojiaku: That's a great one. Can I just ask you about so it's not really about your book, Seeing Around Corners, but this one is about the Entrepreneurial Mindset? Just one quick question. Because there's a quote, in your book, that book that says, you know, “the huge part of becoming an entrepreneurial leader is learning to simplify complexity, so that your co-workers can act with self-confidence.” That quote, it made me kind of be more conscious about, am I really making things simpler for my co-workers instead of, you know, rather than to enable us, you know, achieve the best that we could as a group? So why did you, make that quote and associate it with an Entrepreneurial Mindset? Rita McGrath: Well, because if you make things complicated for people, there's maybe three responses, right? One is they'll start on whatever they start on, which is kind of random. And maybe they finish it, and maybe they don't, but it's really now you're leaving it to chance. Because if you give people more to digest than they can manage, you're going to get back some fraction of it. So that's one thing. Second thing that happens is, if it's too complex, a lot of times people will pick what they want to do, not have anything to do with the agenda that you want to set for the organization. And the third thing is there's just a laziness that comes from having things be complex. I know for myself, when I've had to do strategy statements for myself, or my business, it takes a long, long time to get it done into a few simple things. And each word has to mean something. So, as an example, some years back, I started a sister company. It's called Valize. And the strategy really is to its mission, its purpose for me, is to help organizations create innovation and transformation capability as the basis for shared prosperity. And that sounds really simple. That sounds really kind of ‘duh, that's not so grand, but I mean, the hours it took to get to that simplicity of statement. And then once you've got something like that, you can go back and you could say, okay, well, here's the thing that I'm being asked to do or think I'm thinking of, does it build capability? Yes. No. Does it build shared prosperity? Yes, no. Does it help organizations to help themselves? Yes, no. And it sorts out a lot of stuff means a lot of stuff we could do. But there are only a few things that really fit into that sweet spot of shared capability. So, having that simplification allows you to clear out a lot of the …, there are always wonderful options that you got to do things, right? And it's a question of abundance, you've usually got more great options than you could possibly exercise. So, picking the best ones is the challenge. Ula Ojiaku: Wow, wow. I'm going to listen to this part again. You've mentioned some books already, like Andy Grove's, Only the Paranoid, I mean, Only the Paranoid survive. And you've mentioned the book, Disrupt Yourself… In addition to these books, and your wonderful suite of books, what other books would you recommend to the audience that you believe have influenced you that you'd recommend to the listeners that would help them you know, learn more about this topic? Rita McGrath: Oh, that's hard, because there's so many. Well, I love Safi Bahcall's Loonshots. I think that's a brilliant, brilliant book. And it really gets to the heart of how innovation actually happens rather than how we think it happens. I rather like Gary Hamel's and Michele Zanini's book, Humanocracy which has the basic question, you know, if you look at Instagram, or Twitter or any of these social platforms, you see these people who are just brilliant. I mean, they're creating incredibly creative stuff. And then we put them inside companies. And we insist that they do things by the rule, and we block all the creativity out of them. So, why do we do that? You know, I think that's a really great one. I'm very taken with Rebecca Henderson's, Re-imagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. Very, very brilliant. Roger Martin, When More is not Better. Just recently had a Julie Lythcott-Haims on my fireside chat program, which is and she's got a book called Your Turn, How to be an Adult”, which is, on a personal level, absolutely fascinating - really good book. I like Peter Sim's, Little Bets. You know, they're just so many I mean, I wouldn't even know where to where to start. Those are the ones that are sort of top of mind at the moment. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. scribbling away as you're talking, and yeah, these all these would be in the show notes with the links to them. So that's great. Now, how can the audience reach you? If they want to, you know follow your work. Rita McGrath: The best place to start is my website, which is really ritamcgrath.com, that's easy. I have columns that I write for. They're currently going up on substack and medium. If you just search my name and or medium, you'll find me there. I do weekly, LinkedIn post, which goes to subscribers on LinkedIn. Also, that's all sort of good places to start. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Are you on social media? Rita McGrath: Oh, yes. So yes. I'm on Twitter @RGMcGrath. And I'm on LinkedIn. Okay. I'm not on Facebook so much. But I have put things I post there, but I'm not really on it very much. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. All right. That's, I mean, thanks for those. Now, let's wrap up any ask of the audience first? Rita McGrath: I think we're in a remarkable moment, right now, you know, we've had so many of our previous habits and assumptions disrupted, that I think it would be a shame to lose, to lose all that and just go back to the way things were. So, I think it's an opportunity to reflect and to really think about, what kind of future do we want to build now that so many of our assumptions and institutions have been challenged, and we learned whole new tricks, we learned whole new ways to do things. Let's not just snap back to the way it was, let's think about inventing better. Rita McGrath: Really, I think there's going to be great opportunity coming out of this current crisis and those who are thinking ahead will benefit from it. Ula Ojiaku: Okay, great. Well, Rita, thank you so much for your time, and it's been a pleasure again, having you on the show. Rita McGrath: Thank you very much.
Creative businesses are busy. Many are seeking new employees as they grow. The question is what do you do when they show up? Teach tasks or show culture. Let's talk Herbie, Think Again, Loonshots and video diaries. Links & Resources: Host: Sean Low of The Business of Being Creative Have your own opinion on Sean's tips and advice? Talk Back!! Email Shawn or record a voice message directly through his show's site! Link: Join Sean's Collective of Business Creatives Follow Sean on social media: Instagram: @SeanLow1 | Facebook: Facebook.com/Sean.Low.35 | LinkedIn | Twitter: @SeanLow -- Podcast Network: The Wedding Biz Network Production House: Flint Stone Media Copyright of The Wedding Biz, LLC. 2021.
Shoot your loonshot and nurture your next crazy big idea! In #33, Hala yaps with Safi Bahcall, a trained physicist who has transformed his career every 5 years or so. He's done everything from business consulting to co-founding a pharmaceutical company to now becoming a best-selling author. In this episode we'll find out how Safi is able to reinvent himself so often and his tips for getting into a new field. In addition, we'll cover his super fascinating concept and book, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform," which has been noted as one of the top business books for 2019. If you liked this episode, please write us a review! Get a copy or download Safi's ‘Shoot Your Loonshots': https://amzn.to/2Pnl8mL Social Media: Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Reach out to Hala directly at Hala@YoungandProfiting.com Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 50:13) > Companies looking to bring breakthrough innovations to life need the right organizational structures and incentives in place. In his book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, March 2019), Safi Bahcall, a former biotech CEO who now helps organizations innovate, explains what that requires. In this episode, he talks with Erik Roth, leader of McKinsey's innovation work globally, about why some great ideas changed the world and others failed to take off.See www.mckinsey.com/privacy-policy for privacy information
Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 50:13) > Companies looking to bring breakthrough innovations to life need the right organizational structures and incentives in place. In his book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, March 2019), Safi Bahcall, a former biotech CEO who now helps organizations innovate, explains what that requires. In this episode, he talks with Erik Roth, leader of McKinsey's innovation work globally, about why some great ideas changed the world and others failed to take off.Join 90,000 other members of our LinkedIn community: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/mckinsey-strategy-&-corporate-finance/See www.mckinsey.com/privacy-policy for privacy information
Companies looking to bring breakthrough innovations to life need the right organizational structures and incentives in place. In his book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, March 2019), Safi Bahcall, a former biotech CEO who now helps organizations innovate, explains what that requires. In this episode, he talks with Erik Roth, leader of McKinsey's innovation work globally, about why some great ideas changed the world and others failed to take off. Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 50:13) >
What if the fates of careers, companies, even entire industries depend on nurturing crazy ideas? In “Loonshots," physicist turned biotech entrepreneur Safi Bahcall pulls back the curtain on history's greatest scientific, technological, and entrepreneurial breakthroughs, introducing us to a cast of colorful characters with much to teach us about how innovation really happens. In doing so, he provides a brand new framework for understanding the delicate relationship between complex ideas and even more complex people.Join The Next Big Idea Club today at nextbigideaclub.com/podcast and get a free copy of Adam Grant's new book! Listen ad-free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad-free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/thenextbigidea. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
What if the fates of careers, companies, even entire industries depend on nurturing crazy ideas? In “Loonshots," physicist turned biotech entrepreneur Safi Bahcall pulls back the curtain on history's greatest scientific, technological, and entrepreneurial breakthroughs, introducing us to a cast of colorful characters with much to teach us about how innovation really happens. In doing so, he provides a brand new framework for understanding the delicate relationship between complex ideas and even more complex people.
Safi Bahcall has a conversation with Tom about his book, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. This episode is brought to you by Lumie, the original inventors of wake-up lights, whose Bodyclock Luxe 750DAB wake-up light mimics a natural sunrise and sunset. Shown to improve quality of sleep and to boost productivity in clinical trials, this remarkable device also features high quality audio with DAB+ radio, Bluetooth speakers, USB port and a selection of over 20 sleep/wake sounds. The Lumie Bodyclock Luxe 750DAB can transform the way you start and end your day, especially if you struggle to wake up in the morning and/or get to sleep at night - it certainly did for me. Go to lumie.com to find out more. This episode is brought to you by Modal Electronics, who make beautiful, innovative and powerful synthesisers. You can enjoy vibrant wavetable patches with their ARGON8 series. You can produce state-of-the-art analogue-style synth textures with their COBALT8 series. Go to modalelectronics.com to check out their incredible array of synthesisers.
In the inflection point that is a public health crisis, an economic crisis, a crisis of social justice and an environmental crisis, few people have more smart things to say than Physicist, biotech entrepreneur, author and consultant Safi Bahcall. His most recent book "Loonshots," was an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. He previously co-founded a company developing drugs for cancer which went through an IPO. We'll be talking about smart ideas, innovation, science and discovery. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thoughtsparksritamcgrath/message
In this episode, "LOONSHOTS" author Safi Bahcall—a second-generation physicist, bio-tech entrepreneur, and former public company CEO—absolutely inspires entrepreneurs as he talks with Host Tom Loarie. Safi is known widely beyond the world of biotech as the author of LOONSHOTS, which was the #1 most recommended book of the year in 2019, has been translated into 18 languages, and has since sold more than 250,000 copies…Find out why the subtitle of his book is "“Nurture the CRAZY IDEAS that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries," how he ended up creating the company Synta, his Five Rules of LOONSHOTS, and how all of his learning can be directly applied to your business, your ideas, your situation and put YOU on a path to achieve breakthrough results. After the radio episode airs on Saturday morning, find Show Notes here and radio podcast below and.... You can also sign up for THE MENTORS RADIO PODCAST -- FREE -- and never miss a show! Sign up here.
Do you know what happens to your brain when you are sleeping? In a sense, a cleaning crew gets in there to clean out all the toxins so that your brain works better the next day. I know it sounds weird but it is exactly what happens. Listen as I begin this episode with that explanation. http://ens-newswire.com/2013/10/18/brain-cleans-itself-of-toxins-during-sleep/ Failure is often part of success. In fact, most great breakthrough ideas fail first and then get modified before they became a success. It often happens multiple times. Being open to learning from those early failures and being able to adapt your ideas is what helps make ideas prosper according to Safi Bahcall. Safi is a physicist and biotech entrepreneur and author of the book, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases and Transform Industries (https://amzn.to/2GsXA8u). Listen as Safi offers insight and great examples of how important inventions and breakthroughs have happened by learning from failure and how we all can do it. Often the reason you get upset or stressed out is because things aren't the way you think they SHOULD be… Traffic should not be so heavy, your doctor should not keep you waiting – that type of thing. Listen as I explore how to change that thinking to relieve yourself of unnecessary frustration. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2015/04/frustrated/ When I think of compulsive behavior, I think of people who wash their hands a lot or check to see if they locked the door or turned off the coffee pot 50 times a day. While that seems to be extreme compulsive behavior, how is it any different than checking your smart phone 86 times a day? (That's the average). Science writer Sharon Begley has explored this in her book Just Can't Stop: An Investigation of Compulsion (https://amzn.to/2IAUnHj). She joins me to reveal why compulsive behavior isn't necessarily bad and explains at what point it does become a problem and what to do about it. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Hims is helping guys be the best version of themselves with licensed medical providers and FDA approved products to help treat hair loss. Go to https://forhims.com/something Save time, money, and stress with Firstleaf – the wine club designed with you in mind! Join today and you'll get 6 bottles of wine for $29.95 and free shipping! Just go to https://tryfirstleaf.com/SOMETHING Learn about investment products and more at https://Investor.gov, your unbiased resource for valuable investment information, tools and tips. Before You Invest, https://Investor.gov. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We breakdown about many of the ideas of the second half of "Loonshots" by Safi Bahcall and conclude the book with a big-picture review.
In this podcast, we explore the first half of Safi Bahcall's "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries".
Safi Bahcall is a second-generation physicist and entrepreneur, whose first book, Loonshots, has been described as a cross between Freakonomics and the da Vinci Code. At the heart of the book is a philosophy which is foundational for everything we do at OutsideLens: that you can learn a great deal by applying the tools and techniques from one world, in this case the world of physics and to a lesser extent psychology, to the world of innovation in business. Read the full article here: https://outsidelens.com/loonshots-innovation-through-the-lens-of-a-psysicist/ What Was Covered: How the structure of a company, rather than its culture, enables or disables innovation The two basic phases in any organisation – who are “artists” and “soldiers” and how to achieve an equilibrium between them The three key elements to build a sustainable innovation system – the metaphor of the ice cube, the garden hoe and the heart Key Takeaways and Learnings: Using the lens of phase transitions to understand and benefit from structural forces which operate in any organization Why leaders need to keep their artists and soldiers separate when they want to engage in innovation Persistence as the main factor of innovation and how “the rule of three deaths” applies to science and business breakthroughs Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, a book by Safi Bahcall Safi Bahcall's website Connect with Safi on LinkedIn and Twitter McKinsey & Company – Global Management Consulting The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology – PCAST Science the Endless Frontier – A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, a book by Richard Thaler Thinking, Fast and Slow, a book by Daniel Kahneman
Safi Bahcall received his BA in physics from Harvard and his PhD from Stanford. He co-founded Synta Pharmaceuticals—a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he served on the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Safi is the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. The book was selected by Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Susan Cain, and Adam Grant for the Next Big Idea Club. Some interesting insights from this episode: “Very often people go on a path that the world expects them to without ever pausing to say ‘why am I doing this?'” For an entrepreneur, the critical ingredient for success in building a company is surrounding yourself with talented executives and then bridging the divide between people who wouldn't naturally interact with one another. Culture are the patterns of behavior you see on the surface in an organization while structure is what's underneath that's driving those patterns of behavior. The activities being rewarded (i.e. incentive structures) will drive the culture. So it's the structure that's ultimately most important in influencing behavior. As companies mature, employees tend to shift from focusing on collective goals toward focusing more on careers and promotions. To reduce that behavioral shift, you want to minimize the growth in compensation that comes with each level in the organization. In addition, you want to maximize span of control. With fewer promotions and less of a financial incentive as you move up the organization, employees will focus more on their projects and less on corporate politics. You want some employees focused on activities that reduce risk and another set of employees focused on maximizing intelligent risk taking. Effective leaders create a dynamic equilibrium between these two groups and are able to effectively balance the core with the new. Most innovative products will have at least one or two false fails on their way to achieving significant market traction. The key to success is to get really good at investigating failure and not just accepting it on face value. Companies need to create a new C-suite role called a Chief Incentives Officer whose job is to design customized incentive packages to motivate employees and optimize outcomes. “Excellence is always striving to improve yourself and improve your performance.”
On this week's Tech Nation, Science/Tech entrepreneur Safi Bahcall. He's written “Loonshots … How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries.” And French biotech - Sensorion Pharmaceuticals. Its president and CEO, Nawal Ouzren, tells us about making progress in severe vertigo, sudden hearing loss, and hearing loss in children following treatment for cancer. Also, Daniel de Boer, the CEO of ProQR Therapeutics, talks about their approach to treat genetic diseases, including as childhood blindness. We'll learn how it works, and why it's safe.
A única forma de atingir metas disruptivas é contar com lunáticos corporativos, pessoas capazes de ideias loucas que fazem o mundo avançar. Essa é a tese do escritor Safi Bahcall em seu livro “Loonshots”. E ele não está sozinho. Consultores e especialistas em transformação digital avisam que é preciso “sair da casinha” para entrar na segunda década do século 21 e prosperar em ambientes de mudanças constantes e velozes. Dá o play e acompanhe a nossa conversa. Tem muito insight para o seu final de ano.=====EMBRATELEm um cenário de mudança contínua e veloz, não basta apenas fazer melhor o que já vinha sendo feito antes. A nova rotina é a reinvenção constante das práticas da TI. E se por um lado isso exige grandes mudanças na cultura corporativa, do lado da tecnologia a jornada precisa de parceiros com ferramentas e práticas que facilitem e acelerem a mudança. É aqui que a Embratel entra, como uma grande empresa de infraestrutura que atua como um agente acelerador, apoiando clientes de todos os tamanhos na jornada para o próximo nível.Confira no site da Embratel todos os serviços e produtos disponíveis. www.embratel.com.br.=====ASSINE A THE SHIFTwww.theshift.info
EP 511 เล่าเรื่องหนังสือใน Bookoins Book Club ครั้งที่ 4 ตอนที่ 2 วันนี้มาเล่าต่อจากตอนที่ 1 ครับ เป็นหนังสืออีก 3 เล่มคือ 1)The Millionaire Fastlane 2) Loonshots และ 3) $100 Startup ลองฟังกันดูครับ
Have you created a Loonshot? Have people dismissed or laughed at your Loonshot? Safi Bahcall takes us through how to manage Loonshots—a big goal, an audacious idea which has a lot of enthusiasm and support, but may be viewed as crazy. What if you nurtured these crazy ideas that are dismissed and written off. Loonshots […]
Chris sits down today with Safi Bahcall--physicist, biotech entrepreneur and author of the recent book: "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries."We talk about his career and using curiosity to check in with his direction, and we dive in to his recent book and talk about incentivizing innovation, making sure that both the artists and the soldiers feel equally loved, and why talking about "disruption" is for historians. Nurture the crazy ideas, and you too might just change the world. Chris also talks about giving in to the absurdity of the world of business. Pick up a copy of Loonshots. Read "Sisyphus Smiled: How to Embrace the Absurdity of Business"Check us out!Facebook: MondaypodLinkedIn: MondaypodTwitter: @Mondaypod1IG: @Mondaypod
無論任何領域，最重大的突破幾乎永遠是那些挑戰傳統思惟的想法；但正因如此，那些想法也最有可能一開始就夭折。如何讓這些看似異想天開的想法發芽茁壯，也就成為至關重要的課題，對老牌企業尤其如此。
Safi Bahcall is the author of Washington Post's "10 Leadership Books to Watch for in 2019", Adam Grant's "19 New Leadership Books to Read in 2019" Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries!Safi is a second-generation physicist (the son of two astrophysicists) and a biotech entrepreneur.He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard and his PhD in physics from Stanford, where he worked with Lenny Susskind in particle physics (the science of the small) and the Nobel laureate Bob Laughlin in condensed matter physics (the science of the many). He was a Miller Fellow in physics at UC Berkeley (the school of the many). After working for three years as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years.Safi has presented at approximately 130 banking conferences, investor events, and medical meetings around the world, as well as at leading academic institutions including physics, mathematics, or medical departments at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Caltech, Cornell, Bell Labs, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Rockefeller, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. What do James Bond and Lipitor have in common? What can we learn about human nature and world history from a glass of water? In Loonshots, physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs. Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall reveals why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice. Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall reveals how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere. Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of phase transitions to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, criminals behave, ideas spread, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. If 20th-century science was shaped by the search for fundamental laws, like quantum mechanics and gravity, the 21st will be shaped by this new kind of science. Loonshots is the first to apply these tools to help all of us unlock our potential to create and nurture the crazy ideas that change the world.Please do NOT hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or via email mark@vudream.comLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-metry/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/markmetry/Twitter - https://twitter.com/markymetryMedium - https://medium.com/@markymetryFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/Humans.2.0.PodcastMark Metry - https://www.markmetry.com/Humans 2.0 Twitter - https://twitter.com/Humans2Podcast
My guest today is Safi Bahcall, an American technologist, business executive, and author. He has presented at over 130 banking conferences, investor events, and medical meetings around the world, as well as at leading academic institutions. The topic is his book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Social media companies Loonshots National research system of the U.S. Leader mindsets Innovation Good companies vs. Failing companies Early stage ideas Apple Steve Jobs AT&T Bell Labs Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
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