A summary of things you should know about Seeing What Others Don’t according to Gary Klein: Introduction In this episode Gary Klein reveals all his insights on his book, SeeingRead More
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]]>In this episode Gary Klein reveals all his insights on his book, Seeing What Others Don’t, where he reveals when, why, and how insights are formed and what blocks them.
In his book Klein shares stories involving his years of cognitive learning research that uncover the origins of creativity and how many successful innovators were able to create their marvelous ideas. The goal of the book is to help you train your brain to be more creative, effectively solve more problems, avoid disruptive idea blockers, and think faster than the average person.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who work in a stressful, fast-paced environment and want to learn how to improve their cognitive thinking skill in order to make fast, intelligent decisions.
My book is based on 120 cases of actual insight research. This is a fresh look of how people actually come up with insights.
There can be some jumping in and out but I suggest you read it straight through.
If there is only one thing the one thing would be this notion of a down and an up arrow. Too often our thinking is over balanced about reducing mistakes and being defensive and there needs to be a balance. We need to balance how much energy we are putting into reducing mistakes and how much energy we are putting into gaining insights.
The first section asks the question of where do insights come from and it not only describes how insights are achieved but it also shows how I came up with each conclusion. The outcome of this first part is a new model of where insights come from. I show that there are several different paths, one is a traditional path, another is a path people have heard of, and the third is a path no one had mentioned before.
Now that we know where insights come from we ask the question why we don’t have more of them. To my surprise I find that there are a lot of forces that work against having insights and the scariest is that organizations are afraid of them. They claim that they want to promote it and believe it but insights don’t work well with organizations because insights are disruptive.
The third part of the book is about what we can do to try to increase insights. I have some suggestions about what we can do personally and I have more suggestions about what we can do to help others gain insights. I also have some suggestions about what organization can do and I am working with organizations that want to increase the number or insights.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 03:38
“I have tried to take some of the mystery out of insights but I don’t want to diminish the aww we feel when we encounter insights whether it’s our own or someone else’s. At these times something magical has happened.” – Gary Klein
I was trained in experimental psychology and over the years I got interested in seeing how people actually work outside of laboratories and specifically how people make life and death decisions under extreme time pressure. So we’ve studied firefighters, nurses, physicians and so forth to see what they actually do.
I would make presentations on my work on decision making to audiences and there was a slide that I would use that had an up arrow and a down arrow. The down arrow was ways to improve performance by reduction and the up arrow was about what to increase in order to improve performance. What you wanted to increase was insights and so I would tell groups that and they resonated to it. They kept asking me questions about the up arrow that I didn’t have answers to. Finally I decided I need to do some research and study the up arrow which is what led me to writing this book.
What Computers Still Can’t Do by Hubert Dreyfus
Buy Seeing What Others Don’t by Gary Klein on Amazon today
Visit PsychologyToday.com to learn more about Gary’s blog
Visit ShadowboxTraining.com to learn more about Gary’s training techniques
Follow Gary Klein on Twitter
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Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spluber
Anticipate by Rob-Jan de Jong
The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Innovation in the Family Business according to Joe Schmieder: Introduction In this episode Joe Schmieder shares his book, Innovation in the FamilyRead More
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]]>In this episode Joe Schmieder shares his book, Innovation in the Family Business where he takes a thoughtful look at innovation in the family business industry.
In his book Schmieder shares a variety of insights and best practices applicable to family businesses more generally. The goal of the book is to help you dissect the relevant data and provide a working framework with which you can innovate your own family business and stay relevant to your specific market niche.
This book is perfect for family business leaders or any executive leading a family owned business who is in search looking to reinvent or implement the best practices for family businesses.
The first differentiator is that we are combining innovation and the family business into one book. The books that are available on the topic are mainly academic research manuals so I have combined the research material with about 50 family business stories to help describe the many different areas where family firms have been able to effectively use innovation to grow the value of their business. The book is a combination of research and hands-on practical examples of how family businesses have effectively used innovation in their firms.
It’s definitely a jump in, jump out kind of book. It’s not a real long book so you can also read through the whole thing.
Developing a culture of innovation is the most important thing in the family businesses. So creating the culture of innovation is the biggest takeaway from this book.
In chapter one, discussing the family business difference, I talk about the family business difference and how to capitalize on it for innovation. So I am detailing the innovation drivers and set it apart from other businesses and these refer to things like the trait of having a long-term horizon compared to public companies. And also the fact that family businesses have been phenomenally successful at incremental innovation verses breakthrough type ground breaking innovation. We also layout the differences how families use innovation in other areas of the business like in their organization structure. And how they are using succession in an innovative way as well as training the upcoming generation to be more innovative.
In chapter two I talk about creating a culture of innovation and how one family in particular created a framework called structured chaos. Structure chaos is a way to have some stability and structure in business while still being free flowing and chaotic enough where you can have an innovative spirit. In this chapter we take some of the drivers that were discussed in chapter one and show how they can be used to create an innovative culture that can infuse the organization with a mindset that embraces change whether than fighting it.
Chapter three is one of the longest chapters which is on product and service offerings, new ventures and startups. And that is what it takes to create a process for innovation. I outline in this chapter four different processes that are used out there for product and service development. But the conclusion is that you don’t have to strictly follow any of these one processes but rather create a process tailored for your company and follow the process, have it become part of the culture so that it’s not just done in a verbal context.
Chapter four is about funding and measuring innovation. It’s difficult to find examples of this because people don’t always fund innovation in a clear way. So how to capture different sources of funding in a family business are described and then the types of metrics used to measure innovation from a percent of sales coming from new product to how successful succession has gone is all described in this chapter.
In chapter five I dive into the next generation which could be siblings or cousins that are coming into the family business and what it takes to re-innovate or re-energize or reinvent the family business. As many know today the pace of change is so rapid that if people aren’t looking ahead and trying to figure out what the next offering should be then they are going to slip behind. In today’s world the younger generation is so much more attuned to digital marketing and digital means that it’s a great opportunity for them to dive into re-innovating a family business through some type of digital approach of format.
The sixth and seventh chapters deal with governance and succession. Sixth is talking about leadership succession and that means passing the business from the current leader to other leaders. I also talk quite a bit about governance and that is how to use advisory boards and family counsels to help with the relationships that support innovation in a family business.
In the eighth chapter I talk about moving innovation forward and what it takes collectively to make sure that your family business is being innovative and that means making change that is meaningful and adds value to the business.
“Developing a culture of innovation is not only necessary, it is more exciting and fun than just sticking with the status quo.” – Unknown
I am a family business advisor; I have been working with family businesses for over 35 years. I ran two family businesses as an executive for 25 years and I have been consulting with family businesses for the last 10 years.
I was very interested in helping family businesses continue their firms for more than one, two or three generations. So I worked on the book to help family members and executives who are interested in innovating in the family business. And I also try to inspire those enterprising family members to focus more energy and resources on innovation and change throughout their family business instead of just relying on the status quo. I have this passion to make sure we can keep family businesses strong because they do generate the majority of the income and the jobs throughout our economy.
Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge
Buy Innovation in the Family Business by Joe Schmieder on Amazon today
Visit TheFBCG.com to learn more about the company, advisors, and all the books
Follow Joe Schmieder on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr
The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber
CoupleCEO by Heidi and Scott Shimberg
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Seven Sins of Innovation according to Dave Richards: Introduction In this episode Dave Richards takes a deep dive into his book,Read More
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]]>In this episode Dave Richards takes a deep dive into his book, The Seven Sins of Innovation, where he discusses 7 causes of success or failure for innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors.
In his book Richards shares examples and case studies from some of the most well-known organizations and demonstrates how individual and group psychology must be engaged effectively to create entrepreneurial cultures capable of powerful innovation. The goal of his book is to provide you with a guide to applying the model, finding the right external resources, and involving people effectively.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs, business leaders, or managers attempting to start, reinvent, or grow an organization of any kind.
A lot of books on innovation tend to be quite academic or theoretical. Also a lot of great stories about entrepreneurship and innovation are really personal stories. My book is more about trying to make sense of it all and draw together various theories and practicalities of innovation. And pointing out why most efforts fail but also what to do about it in practical terms.
There are sections of the book that are devoted to specific types of enterprises. So there are sections that I think might be of interest to specific readers but I’ve tried to write them in a way that they are applicable to any type of innovation effort or any type of entrepreneurship.
I think it’s that the success or failure of any innovation effort or any entrepreneurial effort is really all about the people. If you are successful it’s going to be because of the people and if you fail it’s because of the people.
I start with definitions and the reason I start with definitions of basic concepts is because looking at the literature on these topics I see a lot of inconsistency. I define innovation in terms of creation and value and I define entrepreneurship as anyone trying to innovate. I felt we needed to rethink our concepts of innovation and rethink our whole approach to how we are trying to innovate. From there we move into talking about why it’s so difficult. The reality in the world of innovation is the vast majority of innovation efforts fail to deliver the desired results.
The seven sins are looking at the fundamental reasons underlined the failure of most innovation efforts. And of course with every sin there is a corresponding virtue. After going through the various sins of innovation I get into specific prescriptions for how to succeed.
The first key sin of innovation is pointless purpose. Pointless purpose can come in many different forms but it is fundamentally all about an entrepreneur not having a really strong connection to a purpose. One of the most common forms of that is what I call the technology push. This is when really clever technologists come up with a so called solutions and conceptually throw it over the wall and say I have the solution now where is the problem. What are you trying to do as an entrepreneur to make the world a better place? If your innovation isn’t connected to some fundamental purpose than in my view it is pointless.
The second sin we talk about is impaired vision. Your vision for success is fundamentally connected to purpose but takes it a step deeper in terms of understanding the specifics of what you’ll achieve.
The third sin is an inability to articulate what you are trying to do. This sin I call apathetic miscommunication. This is miscommunication that can be the result of apathy or lack of the ability to articulate and the inability to express the value that you’re trying to deliver. And to express it in a way that attracts, excites, and influences your potential customers.
The fourth sin is about ambivalent disengagement and failure of relationship.
The fifth sin I call frightfully disempowered followership. In other words the opposite of good leadership is followership and the opposite of empowerment is disempowerment. The virtue as an innovator is to responsibly empower the resources that are required to drive innovation. So if we fail to appropriately empower those resources than fundamentally we are being irresponsible. One of the key things we need to do as leaders of innovation is to appropriately empower and that often means making very tough choices.
The sixth sin I call painfully boring uncreatively.
The seventh sin I call comfortable complacency and it’s related to the realm of motivation. It’s were we implement strategy and it’s the realm of performance and results. In that realm of human behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and motivation, complacency is the big killer for motivation.
The book ends with some specific prescriptions related to different types of enterprises. One of them looks at revitalizing an enterprise which I think a lot of organizations need to look at. I personally believe that leaders in government need to be far more innovative than they are and we need a step change in terms of the ability of public enterprises to deliver value.
“If you’re not living, leading, learning, and loving on the edge you are taking up too much space.” – Dave Richards
I live in the UK but I’m an American and Canadian. I’ve got five great kids, two relatively little ones and we live on the South Coast of England. I work all over the world, I enjoy public speaking, plus I work with a variety of organizations ranging from startups to multinationals essentially helping people create more success.
Essentially it represents a lifetime of learning and an effort to understand why the vast majority of innovation efforts fail.
The Mandala of Being by Richard Moss
Buy The Seven Sins of Innovation by Dave Richards
Visit DrDaveInnovation.com to learn more about Dave and his book
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber | The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | From Idea To Exit by Jeffrey Weber
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Unstoppable Entrepreneurship according to Ilkka Lavas: Introduction In this episode Ilkka Lavas takes a deep dive into his book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurship whereRead More
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]]>In this episode Ilkka Lavas takes a deep dive into his book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurship where he shares his experience on what makes an entrepreneur unstoppable.
In his book, Lavas reveals over 18 years of experience as an entrepreneur and addresses the successes, failures, and tactics that took him from a 17 year old web designer to a 35 year old serial entrepreneur. The goal of the book is to teach you new ways to be successful, overcome hurdles, take your business to the top in the digital age we live in today.
This book is perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs who are in the early stages of startup development and are learning from the success stories of experienced entrepreneurs.
If you read management or self-help tip books they all are around the same topics about what makes you successful and how you set your goals. In my book I open with how to become unstoppable and I also share my biggest lessons and failures along the way.
The tips and chapters in the book are fairly easy to read. Many of my readers have said that they read this book in two hours.
As an entrepreneur one of my favorite ideas is that if you want to be successful you must understand that you have to be successful every day. I believe that we shouldn’t be waiting for that one day when we become successful; we should be living for the moment.
The book starts from 12 years ago when I was 23 years old and I had 17 people working for my company. The first chapter is about never giving up. When the IT bubble burst my company’s volume of orders fell and we had a serious cash flow crisis. Things became much less pleasant, less fun and exciting. I couldn’t sleep because I was worried how I could pay salaries for my employees. I had to make the choice to either file my company for bankruptcy or try and continue the business. I didn’t want to give up so I started thinking about what the worst thing was that could happen to me if I failed trying to save this company.
I realized that if I failed or didn’t even try saving the company the worst case scenario was that my company would go bankrupt. I calculated that I could save the company by downsizing the amount of employees and by handling all the sold and still open cases as well. So I called the tax officers and talked about the payment terms and they took some of our office furniture as a payment of the bills. With a heavy heart I had to lay off 12 people including some very close friends. After not paying my own salary for many months the challenge in downsizing finally ended 14 months later when I paid my last unpaid tax payment. I was exhausted but I didn’t give up and I survived my first big business challenge.
Chapter two is about the things that make you unstoppable.
Chapter three is about reflecting your life habits. It’s very important to know what your strengths and weaknesses are in life.
Chapter four is about managing your own self. You must manage yourself or someone else will.
Chapter five is about how to create new competitive advantages.
The biggest idea of my book is how to go from a state of crisis to a state of success.
I am 35 years old and a serial entrepreneur. I am involved with 10 companies and I have around 100 people working in my companies. I started my first startup when I was 17 years old so half of my life I have spent as an entrepreneur.
I have been teaching entrepreneurs here in Finland for the last 10 years. I wrote my first book seven years ago about positive things about entrepreneurship. Since then I have been growing my businesses based on that book and because of that I now have many successful companies. I wanted to write down the principles and management tips that I have learned in my life as an entrepreneur. I have been teaching myself about being unstoppable and this book will help others do the same.
Managing Performing Living by Fredmund Malik
Buy Unstoppable Entrepreneur by Ilkka Lavas on Amazon today
Visit UnstoppableEntrepreneurship.com to learn more about Ilkka and his book
Follow Ilkka Lavas on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Lifestyle Entrepreneur by Jesse Krieger | The New Entrepreneurz by Ronen Gafni and Simcha Gluck | The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure | 7 Signs That You Have What It Takes to Be An Entrepreneur
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Innovative Entrepreneur according to Daniel Spulber: Introduction In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The InnovativeRead More
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]]>In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The Innovative Entrepreneur, where he shares the economic framework that addresses the motivation, advantages, pressures, consequences, and contributions of the innovative entrepreneur.
In his book, Spulber unveils an economic theory for innovative entrepreneurship that asks why people with new technologies start their own companies. The goal of the book is identify the costs that other companies incur to readjust their focus, and reveal the problems that arise in the market for new technologies.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a passion for creating new ideas and want to know the economical effects of creating their own company based on their ideas.
A lot of experts who do research on entrepreneurs really don’t think that entrepreneurs are that important. My book tries to show a little bit about why entrepreneurs are so important to our country, what they contribute and all along the way I think it yields some insights that may be helpful to individual entrepreneurs.
You can think of the book as a reference work or you can try and catch some of the highlights.
The number one thing that I would like the reader to takeaway is that innovation is a choice.
The book is organized around five major questions. The first big question that a lot of people have asked is what I call the question of entrepreneurial motivation. Why do individuals choose to become innovative entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs have choices; individuals have other possibilities for their time. They may have a day job or other careers in progress and they have to weigh the returns and rewards or their careers against the returns and rewards of choosing to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have other choices, they may have some money that they make investments with or pursue an education. They too have to make a decision whether they want to invest that money in the startup venture. Perhaps most importantly if they decide to be entrepreneurs they face another choice of whether to be a replicative entrepreneur or to pursue innovative entrepreneurship. One of the things that I point at as an answer to this important question is that I think individuals tend to make these choices in the context of the life cycle. In other words entrepreneurship is a way to build personal assets for the future while doing what you love to do. One way of understanding the entrepreneurship decision is not as a snapshot but it’s a major decision that falls within your life cycle decisions.
The second question is what I call the question of innovative advantage. And that is why does it seem that entrepreneurs are better at innovating than existing firms? This is important because a lot of people think that the big firm can do all the innovating. One of the many reason why existing firms can’t do it all is because they are faced with all kinds of inertia. It’s not just that managers are short sighted but rather the existing firm has to fund its existing business and it’s very hard to change directions particularly for big companies. The entrepreneurs have an advantage and that advantage is the key to my book. The advantage is that the entrepreneur is not a big organization or a small organization but they are often an individual and as an individual they have got the initiative. The initiative or personal decision can overcome any kind of inertia. Entrepreneurs bring change because they’ve got initiative and they can overcome the inertia that existing firms face.
The third question my book talks about is competitive pressures. Does competition help or hurt innovation? A lot of people are worried that too much competition hurts innovation but entrepreneurs know that they are going to face challenges and I think it’s really important to have competition and competitive pressures.
The fourth question is about creative destruction. Why do we see creative destruction and why not just sell out and avoid the competition? There are a number of reasons for this and one is that I think often is it is very difficult to sell or license your idea to the existing firm. Another idea is that often the person who comes up with the idea has the best way of realizing it. So even though you might cash out, you might do much better doing it yourself.
The fifth and final question is what I call the question of the wealth of nations. How do entrepreneurs affect the economy? This is really important because I think we’ve forgot that. Right now big companies have a grip on regulation and they have a big influence with the government and essentially it’s made it harder and harder for the little guy to get going. Regulations tend to favor big firms and tax rates tend to penalize individual success and so on. Understanding the important contribution that entrepreneurs make to the economy will help motivate entrepreneurs and it will shed a little bit of light on the public policy’s that we need to open the door to startups.
“The innovated entrepreneur is the man on the spot.” – Daniel Spulber
I am a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University here in Evanston Illinois. I have been teaching entrepreneurship and all kinds of topics for a long time so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Entrepreneurs are so important because they provide the creativity, the drive and the initiative that drives our economy forward. I wanted to make sure that entrepreneurs themselves had a better understand of the major contributions that they are making to our society. I also wanted public policy makers and experts in the field to have a better understanding of what entrepreneurship is and what it means to our country.
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
Buy The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber on Amazon today
Visit Kellogg.NorthWestern.edu to learn more about Daniel and his studies
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | Inside The Box by Drew Boyd | The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
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