140: Mike Maddock — What Do Disruptors Have in Common?

Well, disruptors are people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and others. And again and again industries are being disrupted and you might want to be a disruptor, you might need to work with disruptors or you might want to manage disruptors. And that's what this show is all about. It's about stories about disruptors and what makes them tick and what are the frameworks or approaches that you can do to be more of a disruptor of disruptive company, to work with them better or to manage the people, the process that go into them. So listen in.

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We'll see you there. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I am your host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. I'm on the show with me today is an old friend who's back again because he's got a new book out. Mike Matic is an all around busy guy. He's a founder of an internationally recognized innovation consultancy, Matic Douglas. He's worked with like 1 in 4 of the Fortune 100. He's a serial entrepreneur. He's written a bunch of books. He's launched multiple companies. He's a regular on Forbes and Bloomberg and businessweek. He's been around the gathering of titans, mit. He chaired that thing at least once. He speaks regularly to YPO and EO organizations. He's been a member of those. He's dad, this is the book we're talking about today that he wants his kid to read. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Thanks, Bill. I appreciate you having me.

So we've had you on before and folks can go look for the prior show, but I'd love if you would talk to us again a little bit about your background. Like, you know, I shared the highlights there. But will you tell a little bit of your personal story? How do you come to write this book? The book, by the way, is Plan D and it's all about the world's most successful disruptors and that's a topic of real interest. So to go back into your history a little bit, how do you come to be interested in this whole area?

So I grew up in, just outside Chicago in Illinois. My dad ran a manufacturing plant. My mom was, stayed at home with us. And in our neighborhood we had two or three super successful people. You know, these are the ones that we didn't live in a fancy neighborhood, but they, but there were people that would ride up in fancy cars. And I remember being a kid thinking, wow, that person is so lucky. That person is so lucky. And then I, then I started working for entrepreneurs. Just by chance. I work a lot because I like to have money in my pocket. So I started working, I had these little side gigs, but every person that I worked for was an entrepreneur. And I had this little voice in the back of my head going, this person's lucky and that person's lucky. And then I noticed, and I've continued to notice this through my whole life, is that people seem entrepreneurs, a number of them seem to be able to manufacture serendipity, which is to say they're lucky again and again and again. And after a while it strikes you, even people not as, as dumb as I am, that it isn't luck at all. They're doing something that's repeatable, they're manufacturing their own luck. So my career is to help smart people come up with new products and services. And I've started to call myself an entrepreneurial anthropologist because I've lived with them in the wild in startups, in mid sized companies and the big companies you mentioned earlier. And I got curious about what these people that could blow shit up for the good of the whole and put it back together again and it was better and faster and cheaper and surprising what they had in common. And so that's what the book is about, what disruptors have in common, what their superhero powers are, whether they realize they have them or not. So it's been fun writing it and it is the book I want my kids to read. I, I actually thought about that from a legacy point of view, what I'd want them to know about these really smart, special people that are changing the world every day.

It's funny, in your intro you talked about the people who are consistently lucky. And I'm reminded of the story. You're going to love this. You maybe have already heard it before, but there now I can't remember if it was Cambridge or Oxford, but one of these two prestigious British institutions of higher learning did a study of people, lucky people, and they, they asked people to categorize whether they were lucky or unlucky and then they sent them off on this little social experiment and they said, okay, we want you to walk down the street and go to this cafe and then come back and report what happens. And. And the, the people went out and between the lucky people, the people who said they were lucky, and the people who said they weren't particularly lucky or they were unlucky, there was a really interesting thing. The lucky people found money on the street as they went down the street and they met a fascinating millionaire in the cafe or some similar combination of things like that. And the unlucky people said, I was just fine. I went down the street and I had a cup of coffee and I came back here and is there anything else? You know, and the funny thing about it is, of course, all of that stuff was set up. It was all arranged for them to find the money and the other things and meet the person and. But the lucky people expected to be lucky and were looking for opportunity and discovery and things like that.

Yeah. Einstein said the most important decision a man will ever make is whether he lives in a friendly universe. So, you know, that book, the Secret, was really popular. The secret of entrepreneurs and disruptors, and this is chapter five, is that they have an abundant mindset. I love that. There's a story about these two shoe salespeople that go to India 30 years ago and it's a third world country. And their sales manager says, go and sell shoes. And so after a couple weeks, he calls salesperson number one and says, how's it going over there? He goes, this is horrible. I mean, I'm walking around, nobody wears shoes around here. What have you done to me? He goes, huh? Calls salesperson number two and says, how's it going over there? He goes, it's unbelievable. It's awesome. Everybody needs shoes. So people with the abundant mindset are looking for treasure. And one of the things I've taught my kids, or try to, is that in every room, in every relationship, in every business, there's treasure to be found. But you gotta be looking for it. It's the people that are looking for that good thing to happen that see possibility instead of persecution. And so chapter five is a story about a guy named Barrett Ercek. And I was there. You mentioned mit. Barrett will describe himself as a lousy student. He had a lawn care business. He dropped out of college because he was making so much money in lawn care that it made no sense to him to sit and listen to professors drone on and on. He. And I was watching him. It was the second year of a three year program, and on the first morning he Jumped out of his seat, ran out the door, and just vanished for the next two days. And I remember sending him a note saying, are you okay? I left him a message like, are you all right? I thought someone had passed away. The next year, he came back, and in the beginning of the program, our mutual friend Vern Harnish said, hey, Barrett, you know, you have an announcement to make, don't you? You had a kind of a panacea moment last year. And Barrett stood up and said, you know, I was sitting here and I was trying. I was racking my brain. And he described his business in great detail and where all the choke points were. And he had figured out a way, before Google Earth did, to map property. So when people wanted their lawn care done, instead of sending someone out to their house, manually measuring a yard, writing up a potential bill, and waiting for someone to call and say, we'll take it, he figured out a way to do it on the phone with a software program. It quadrupled the sizes of his business within a year and a half. He'd sold it to, I think, Scott's Lawn Care. I mean, and this is a guy that was running a lawn care business. Now, what's fascinating about Barrett is he keeps doing it. He keeps finding these serendipitous discoveries that huge businesses are missing. Years later, he shorted lawn fertilizer, filled a warehouse with it, which promptly exploded. And in the moment when his father put his arm around him and he was crying, saying, you just lost all your money trying to get ahead of the fertilizer market. So that's okay, dad. I'll figure it out. Within six months, he'd come up with a solution to manage phosphate going into waterways. And that's because he's always looking. So he has this abundant mindset. So the question is, one question is, how do you manufacture an abundant mindset? And so at the end of that chapter, I interviewed dozens of people and say, well, how do you do it? And a guy named Kevin Cruz, who's a leadership coach or coach, starts the day with an abundant mindset. He sits down every day and makes a list of all the things he's grateful for. He'll tell you that he's like, I can go out of business tomorrow because I've got all these great things in my life. Everything, you know, he just reminds himself there's all this science around gratefulness and possibility and how it, you know, it keeps your blood pressure low, etc. David Rich, another entrepreneur, has. Has an achievement gap exercise where he Actually emails his friends achievements that he wants to succeed in over the week, and then at the end of the week, checks in with them so they can compliment each other on what's gotten done. And they're. They notice the progress they're making. And noticing progress creates gratefulness.

You know, two, to underscore two things there that you're sharing, I think are really helpful, important. One is the gratitude thing. I started a couple of years ago, maybe as many as three years ago now, with a couple of daily gratitude reminders. And when I just put them in as an appointment every day in my calendar, at first I had two. I just have one now, but I put in two. And when the reminder would come up, then I would notice something, think about something, and then I would say it, remark it, acknowledge it. In the beginning, very publicly, like, I'd post on Facebook, or I'd go in the other room and I'd say thank you to someone, or I, you know, I do something to express gratitude for something that I was genuinely, authentically grateful for. Could be small, could be, you know, like, whatever. It could be a cup of coffee. But I have kept that up now. Now I just have one a day. And sometimes I just. I just sit back, I know the reminder comes up. I think about something for a minute, and I feel good and grateful, and then I move on. And other times I actually express it. But the difference in my life is amazing in terms of the feeling of abundance and peace and like that. And even when I'm dealing with a particular challenge, some business or family crisis or something like that, like, I just. I feel abundant and positive and that kind of thing. And then the other thing that you mentioned is, I think it's related, but it's a little bit distinct as well. And that is just noticing progress and movement on things. And we always recommend people put that at the beginning of their daily huddles and in their weekly leadership meetings and things like that, that they open with a little bit of winds, bright spots, whatever you want to call it, something that's working, and we start with that. And sometimes it's like I'm still breathing and I'm awake right in the middle of something. But that's something in itself sometimes. And that also then is connected to gratitude and makes such a difference to be coming and starting there.

That's right. There's a great book called what Happy People Know. It's one of my top three books, and it's written by a friend, Dan Baker, and he showed in the book the Science of gratitude and happiness. And it's physically impossible for you to feel afraid and grateful at the same time. And typically when we are not in an abundant mindset, we're afraid of something. We're focused on problems and issues. So what's incredible about what we're talking about right now is it doesn't take a lot. You just have to have choice. I can do this and I can do this, and I can do this and I can do this. That keeps you from feeling trapped. Or I'm grateful that I can smell the pizza in the other room. My kids are healthy. I'm on the right side of the dirt. These little things are what these disruptors are doing many times unconsciously, but we can do them consciously. So I love that you're saying that because I know that most emotional people in my experience and most entrepreneurs who are highly passionate swing pretty wildly from. There's actually a chapter that probably the most important chapter in the book is about ghosts. And what I have found is I've never met an incredibly successful person who's not either chasing a ghost or being chased by one. The question is, who's got who? And when I talk to these leaders who have their ghost, it's this thing on the. You know, it's their relationship with their father or that teacher, or that failure or that there's something that's driving them. It pushes them every day. And it's almost like a game. They've got it and they'll put KPIs against it. They'll compete with the ghost. But then. So for example, Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan famously didn't make the varsity basketball team when he was in high school. Leroy Smith did. Now, Michael Jordan was 510 at the time. Leroy Smith was 69 or 6 10. And eventually he made it. Well, what you need to know is Michael Jordan never forgot that. And in Chicago, where I live, Michael Jordan is known as not only the greatest basketball player, but that ever lived, but also one of the most competitive people. This guy, whether you're playing him in cards, golf or basketball, he didn't want to just beat you. He wanted to step on your throat. I mean, there's, there are film clips of him, like taking on 12 year olds. And he just could not, not compete. So when he became an NBA player, everywhere he went, he checked into hotels under the name Leroy Smith. Everywhere he went. When he got into the hall of fame, he had 300 tickets. The last one he held for Leroy Smith and he put him in the front row and he and in his speech, he looked at him, he said, I got you. So that's what happens when you're competing with a ghost. And you're. And interestingly, LeBron James, two years ago, was interviewed in Sports Illustrated, and he literally said, michael Jordan is my ghost. I compete with that guy every day. And you can see what that does. It makes you a better player. I mean, it's great you're competing with something that's driving you into better things. The challenge happens when you have leaders that don't understand what's chasing them. And then you get depression, then you get bullying, then you get this craziness that you see in these partially successful but highly unbalanced leaders. And so one of the superhero powers that this book talks about is how to understand what that ghost is and how to make it into an unfair competitive advantage.

It's a really good point. And as you were talking earlier, I was reminded that there are these. We have drivers, right? We all have deeply personal, emotional drivers, and we don't want to be rid of them. They're very powerful kinds of things. And yet, if we are clueless about what's going on, if we haven't looked under our own hood, if we haven't looked in the mirror, then it can sometimes create some mischief. But when you have it, and you were talking about fear and gratitude not existing at the same time, but a lot of times people will try to plaster inauthentic gratitude or positivity on top of something else that's going on. And I think it's an and thing. I remember, like, after 2001, September 11th, the economy in the world, and it all seemed chaotic, and our businesses were failing and our marriage was stressed. And I'm like, wow, that's happening. Okay, now let's look outside. And I would see trees. And it was an and kind of a thing. It didn't put it away. And there was no, like, dressing putting icing on a mud pie. You know, the bad things were there, and there were other things going on. And I think that, like, okay, that guy pissed me off, and now I'm gonna prove something wrong. I had this great woman. I was coaching in a leadership program years ago, and she was really driven by a professor who told her she could never be a successful engineer. Women didn't belong. And she was like, f you, man.

And she knew it. And she competed with that guy. There's that. Do you remember the White House correspondence dinner where Jimmy Kimmel was at some point, he said, My seventh grade English teacher, our history teacher, Mr. Mills, said, I'd never amount to anything. Well, Mr. Mills, I'm about to high five the President of the United States. And turned over, gave Barack Obama a high five and turned to the camera and said, eat it, Mills. That was his ghost. And Jimmy, he made a joke out of it, but it really isn't that funny. This is a teacher that told a student that he would never amount to anything. And rather than bury it in his subconscious, Jimmy Kimmel's like, you don't think so? Okay, bring it. And that's what disruptors do. They're very aware of it. The balanced ones, the productive ones are very aware of it. And I tell some stories in that chapter of some really sad things that can happen when you're not aware of. So that's an important chapter. A more practical chapter is there's a chapter called the Da Vinci Effect. Leonardo da Vinci. And I started that telling a story about a guy named Dan Hyrutz. We called him High Rise. I went to college with him. And Dan is from Lamars, Iowa, where Blue Bunny ice cream is manufactured. It's a small town. Dan is an absolutely, genuinely good guy. He's the same guy I knew in college. He still hangs out with the same people he went to high school with. And a little bit about Dan, I saw him, he was managing a bar, and he was managing the stadium in Ames, Iowa. I went to Iowa State for undergrad, and he then bought the bar. Then he bought a beer distribution center, but he kept his job managing the Coliseum in Ames. And what he would do is, like, Hootie and the Blowfish would come, and he'd go backstage, go, you guys okay? You got everything you need? And they're, yeah, that's fine. And we're good. And he said, well, listen, what are you doing after the concert? And they go, well, it's Ames, Iowa. What are we gonna do? He goes, well, I happen to own a bar in town, and I've got a drum kit and a band kid, if you want to come in, I got. There are girls there, and I've got beer. And so, you know, after the concert, here's Hootie and the Blowfish playing in his. In his. You know, in his bar. And then he went on to buy restaurants, and he bought. He was a consultant. The guy's like, a serial entrepreneur now. He's building hotels. He's just a great. And I. And I watched him. And it took me. Again, I mentioned earlier, I'm just not that sharp. But. But I, he, he seemed to be able to make really, really quick decisions. And what I noticed was that successful disruptors might not make the right decisions all the time, but they're able to make decisions much more quickly. So by the time they've made seven decisions and learned seven things, their slower competitors are all tied up in their own underwear and they're on decision number one. And when I dug a little bit deeper, what I found was that disruptors like da Vinci use frameworks. They learn a pattern that are really, really simple frameworks and they just, they use those to make very quick decisions. So in the book I lay out dozens of different frameworks. You know, how do you fire people, how do you make really tough decisions? How do you make, you're familiar with goals, how do you make goals that you can actually, that are specific and measurable and achievable? You know, so those types of very simple things are just underneath these really successful people. And they can be observed and parallel engineered, which means stolen. You can learn from them and actually use them yourself.

Yeah. You know, there are these things that many people struggle with and I love that you have more than one because some people are paralyzed with one aspect of something and that may be a great opportunity for some self examination and breakthrough. But look, if you can't use one, find one that you can use and, and start there. Yeah, with that.

What I see is creative people tend to want to do things differently every time I drive to work, I drive to work a different way every day because I like a different view. People like Dan, if they find a simple process or framework that makes them quicker and appear smarter, they will get, they will, they will beat that thing into the ground. They will take that out at every meeting. And people around them then are being trained on how to make a quick, good decision. So a good example is a firing, the firing framework, which is a simple two by two. On the bottom you've got culture, you know, high culture, low culture. You have to understand what your core values are. And on the Y axis you have things like, you know, this person's a really strong performer or a lousy performer. So bottom left is, you know, they don't fit with our culture and they're not a high performer. Well, you get rid of that person. Bottom right is they really fit our culture, our core values, but they're, they're not performing that well. Where you train that person top right is, you know, they're high performers and their cultural fits that person you cherish. But the top left is where most companies make their biggest mistake, this is the high performer that has no, that doesn't show your core values. So think of your best salesperson that treats everyone like crap, but they have 70% of your sales coming through or they had a strategy. And you rationalize all these reasons why you have to keep, keep them, you have to keep them around and they poison your culture. So that's a simple framework to have a very candid discussion about. Where do our people line up and what do they need? The irony is that if you protect that top left quadrant, the top right people quit because they feel like you're violating the core values of the company. So that's a very, very simple framework to have very difficult conversations with your leadership team. And what I see is people like Dan rely on those things to make the right decision more consistently.

Yeah. So embracing something and it's interesting, you know, so I work with a big range of companies from some fairly large and fast growing companies to some earlier stage startup, very, very small teams. And I do those through a nonprofit in these accelerator programs. And what's interesting is that my biggest and fastest growing, they're not necessarily the same companies, but the bigger and the faster growing are more often willing to embrace the routine. Okay, let's do that one every month. Let's apply the talent assessment every month or every quarter. Let's go back and do a review of the last quarter and planning the next quarter and let's look at our functional accountability and let's review stuff and, and do embrace these routines Vern talks about. The routine will set you free. Right. The notion of going back over these familiar frameworks and patterns and even to do disruptive things. But my earliest stage ones are like, oh, we already did values. I'm like, okay, but tell me, how are you using them? And when you inspect the ones that are like, they don't want to look at it again are the ones that aren't actually using it. They know a lot of stuff, they're not actually doing a lot of stuff. And they're, they're definitely attached on the innovation side. They love coming up with new things, but then they struggle to scale and get beyond their own thing. I mean, I like that too. I'm more on the innovation side of things. I love to launch things and start them up. I've only learned to embrace the other over time.

Well, I, I wrote a book called Free the Idea Monkey to focus on what matters most. And it was about the tension between operators and visionaries, between Walt and Roy Disney. And that's actually a chapter in this book as well. One of the things about disruptors is they have found a yin for their yang. You can be a disruptive operator like Jack Welch or AG Lafley at png, or you can be a disruptive visionary idea monkey like Elon Musk or Richard Branson, but you can be damn sure that those people have a balanced executive team. And what you're talking about is, I was kind of wincing because it's an indictment. I always want to have a new idea, a new process, a new. Which is incredibly useful when you're under pressure to change, but it's incredibly distracting when things are. When you've already set a plan, a strategy, and now it needs to be executed with precision. So, you know, the Colby Index is a great way to check your leadership team to make sure that you have fact finders and follow throughs to balance out your quick starts. That's a great way. I think operators love process. So putting process around the way you ideate and the way you determine which ideas are first, second, or third. For ringleaders, who are also known as idea killers to visionaries and idea monkeys, I coach them to make wishes. So instead of saying, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard, which is not a very nice or humble response, because really, if you think it's stupid, that means you don't know how to do it. And a better strategy would be to say, is to admit that you don't know how to do it, you don't have an idea how to do it, and make a wish. Like, geez, I wish that wasn't illegal. Or I wish we could do that in the operating system that we currently have. I wish we could afford that. I wish that. Just lay it out there and once you make a wish, you're being humble, right? You're, you're saying, I don't know how to do it, but we'd do it. If you could solve this problem and then let those, you know, the idea monkeys and the visionaries on your team run out the door and say, that's a really good point. Let me think about it. But there are these strategies that you see balanced leadership teams and organizations employ that makes that partnership like a love affair, like they have a soulmate. I tell a story of, well, this is what, right?

When people don't understand who they are and who the other person is and what their relationship needs to be, when I don't recognize I'm the operator and I'M interacting with you, the innovator, or vice versa. When we don't recognize each of our roles and embrace the partnership that we have, we end up with trouble. And I just want to fire the people that shoot down my ideas, and they just want me to go away for bringing in ideas that don't fit.

Yeah, I thought, you know, Michael Gerber's book, one of the first books I ever read as an entrepreneur was the E Myth. And I thought the brilliance of that book was two things that he showed how doing what you love isn't necessarily running a business. So you have to be really clear about the different roles that it takes to run a business. And it's not going to be all be fun and then that. That, you know, where you put down the org chart and you slowly eliminate yourself and find someone that has passion and talent to. To do that role better than you can. That awareness of the question I get when I talk about finding a yin for your yang, which is chapter five, more often than not is, well, what if I can do both? You know? Okay, well, I assume you can do both if you started your own company because there was only one of you. But what makes you feel strong? What are you passionate about? Because if you can find someone that's really passionate about that thing that you're not passionate about and they can do it equally well or better than you, that's awesome, you know, so that's a hard thing to do because most companies are started by visionaries but finished by operators. And then, ironically, most companies are put out of business because they have too many operators and not enough visionaries, because eventually that thing that got you there, that has been scaled. There's no more margin to squeeze out of it. You need a new idea.

Yeah, well, so you and I are probably both the. I think we've talked about this before. We just generate ideas whether or not there's a problem to solve.

My CFO once said to me, the problem with you, Mike, is you're always trying to solve problems that don't exist.

Yeah, right. And I have. There are places where we classically generate them. Like, I generate ideas in the shower or while running or like outdoor exercise and while driving. Those are like three key places. So in my shower, I have aqua notes. While driving, I can use the Voice Siri thing to take a note or send a message and running similar kinds of things. So I'll capture stuff. But now I've learned I just don't take them to my assistant or other people on the team. I ask myself, does this fit any of my current priorities or challenges? And if not, I put it in a throw it away or someday in the future category. And if it fits something, then I actually.

Well, in the innovation process, the difference between invention and innovation is inventors start with an idea and look for someone that needs it. Google Glass costs Google billions of dollars, and no one needed it. That's an invention. Innovators start with a need, a pressing, prioritized, meaningful need, and then they figure out how to solve it. And so there are. There are systems, you know, soft systems and hard systems to do that. I talk about those in the book. My operator buddy, Raf Viton, I used to come in with ideas, and he had this dramatic, painful walk where you go over your whiteboard, and he'd add it to the list. It's like, number 47. And he's like, okay, that's a good idea. Thank you. Isn't more important than the 46 ideas in front of it, you know? And he kind of put the. It was a. It was a good way to remind me that I. I was giving him a lot to do.

Why don't we talk about one more before we run out of time? Why don't you talk about thinking differently and the marshmallow challenge? When you said the marshmallow challenge, I was thinking of that deferred gratitude experiment with kids and not eating a marshmallow placed in front of them when the supervisor leaves the room. But you have a different one about a tower.

So I was in a room with a client years ago and a partner, Jim, Joe Kim, was with me. And the client left, and I turned to Joe and I said, joe, you are one of the most unbelievable ideators I've ever met. You're so freaking creative. And he said, no, my God, the least bit creative. And I go, what are you talking about? He goes, I'm a critical thinker. You're a lateral thinker. You can come up with ideas one after another. Since I'm a critical thinker, I had to train myself techniques in order to think laterally. What are you talking about? And he laid out two or three techniques that he was running through in his brain when the client was looking for ideas. So here's a critical thinker that has learned to think laterally. Critical thinkers draw a straight line between past experience, the problem, and the easiest way to get to a solution. Engineers tend to be critical thinkers, for example, lateral thinkers. You know, the lateral thinker joke is, how many. How many light bulbs does it Take to how many. How many innovators does it take to screw in a light bulb? Does it have to be a light bulb? Lateral thinkers come up with hundreds of ways to solve a problem, even if there isn't a problem. So what I noticed was that disruptors have trained themselves to think in an opposite way under stress. If they're critical thinkers, they train themselves to think laterally and vice versa. Which leads to your question about the marshmallow challenge. There's a guy named Tom Wujak that has done this challenge thousands of times. And what you do is you take four people, teams of four. You can do it in a room, and you give them 20 sticks of uncooked spaghetti, a yard of tape, a yard of string, and a marshmallow, and you give them 20 minutes and say, okay, the tallest tower wins. It has to be a freestanding tower. The only rules are, is freestanding. You can only use the materials that you have in front of you, and the marshmallow has to be stuck on top. So at the end of and at the end of this, the average marshmallow tower is 20 inches, which is just sad. And the average B school group, people that have just graduated from business school, their average tower is 10 inches. Meanwhile, the average kindergartner is 27 inches. And so the reason is because there aren't any kindergarteners that want to be CEO of Marshmallow Inc. They don't spend any time thinking about who's in charge, what the best plan is. They don't draw stuff. They just start experimenting. They are lateral thinkers. They have the ability, like we all should, to think like a child. And through experimentation and fun, they have a 27 inch tower. When the B school folks have talked their way into a 10 inch tower. By the way, I was just, I just did this at a conference out in Seattle, and I had executives from companies like Coca Cola and Boeing, Google, and, you know, just big companies. And I put $150 million in play. I said, the winning table has a chance to win $150 million. I'd gone out and gotten powerball tickets, and the prize was 150 million bucks. One table, no, two tables out of about 15, actually had a tower up at the end of 20 minutes. So under stress, under stress, we tend to get worse. We go to our core. We go more critical thinking instead of laterally. So all this to say is there are these little simple things that you can do to teach yourself to think under pressure differently than you normally would, and that's what disruptors do.

Yeah. It's interesting, that shift in the approach and the mindset. I'm reminded of when we did a. We were up against a big financial thing and the business had changed. And last business, I was running early on, and we just took a whiteboard and we wrote down everything that didn't work on one side, everything that worked or was difficult, and everything that worked well and worked that was good on the other side. And we said, okay, how do we throw away all these things? And we. So when it looked like really there was no other option, we just threw away. And we said, we're just going to concentrate on the good things, the things that work. And it doesn't look like a business. We can't draw a model or pencil it out or anything like that. It doesn't add up Right. But we're just going to keep going and then experiment with things on this side. Well, in the next year, we doubled the business. It was remarkable because it didn't make sense from where we stood there, but we threw away what was unproductive or difficult and a struggle and where we continually fail and we just focused on the other things and we found ways to do things and the response that we had, we could not love it.

I think that that's a process where focus on the good, not the bad. Let's double down on the things that are working and just stop throwing time, effort and emotion at things that aren't. That's the type of system that, you know, it feels random and like, how did that work? But when you observe these disruptors in the wild and you know objectively, or you start to see the patterns, you're like, wow, you know, who else does that? This guy does, that new house does. And it works the same way. And that really is, I think there in that chapter, there are about eight different ways to. To just force yourself to think differently. There's a fun one is called scamper, which is an acronym for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other use, eliminate, or rearrange. So, you know, you, you, it's. You just did sort of a scamper. You can take, like if you took CAD cab companies, if you own a cab company 10 years ago and said, all right, what can we substitute? What if we substituted people's private cars for a fleet of cars? What if we combined the payment and the call option? It's easy to do it now to create Uber out of a cab company. But Scamper, when you're forcing yourself to modify and adapt and eliminate things or rearrange the experience. You come up with these really different ideas that you wouldn't unless you put it through some kind of process sausage machine. Another one that's really fun is, you know, you've seen what Would Jesus do Bumper stickers, you know, and I. You catch yourself like, huh, that's an interesting question. What would Jesus do? Well, you can do a WW D. What would so and so do? And you could put Einstein or, you know, Cheryl Sandberg or Oprah Winfrey or, you know, Sam Zell. You can put someone else's name in there and force yourself to see the problem through that person's lens. Like, how would they solve this problem? And I'll be, you know, when you, when you can, you know, kind of do that Zen objectifying an issue through the lens of someone else's perspective, you do come up with different. It's kind of fun because it's not your idea. It's, you know, it's, it's. I mean, that's what. I wouldn't do it, but Bill would do this. And you come up with these different ideas. So those are the types of really fun little games you can play with yourself to make under pressure to think differently.

Well, it's interesting at different times, right? There's different things appropriate. Like SpaceX now is being run by a CEO who doesn't get the same attention that Elon gets, who's the public, visible ringleader. But they're working with different problems now. And it looks like he plays a different role. Whereas Tesla, the original thing was, let's just make electric sexy, right? Instead of a depressing car like a Prius or like that, let's make it. I mean, that's a hybrid, but let's make Eco sexy instead of depressing. And. But now their challenge is how do we make it economical? How do we change the way things are manufactured? And it's a different problem.

It takes a different mindset, different skills. And it takes a team that is willing to step aside and let someone with a different lens and ability take it on. So, you know, there's no. I guess the takeaway. One of the big takeaways is that when I was interviewing these disruptors, they all had three or four of these things going for them. None of them had them all, but they were really good at leaning into these three or four superhero powers and consistently going back to them. So it's, it isn't luck. These people are not lucky. They're working really hard and they're doing things to Manufacture serendipity. Just watch them because they're going to do it again and again and again. And you know, I'd like my kids to be disruptors. I'd like. I think, you know, Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. Well, we're all getting punched in the face as leaders now.

And so we use the same quotes.

And I think that we have and I believe that as the future punches us in the face again and again and again, much more quickly, we need to be a disruptor, work with disruptors and know how to manage them. And, you know, that's what I was trying to do with this book.

Yeah. Well, especially if you love. If you want to stay competitive and relevant in an increasingly competitive and global world and if you love the world of scale up where things are changing rapidly. I love this kind of book where you've got loads of stories and multiple frameworks and there's a lot in here. So go to Amazon, get the book. Plan Lessons from the World's most successful Disruptors. Mike Mattick, it's been so great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Always an honor, Bill. Thank you.

So thanks again. And reminder to everyone again, Amazon Plan D Lessons from the world's most successful disruptors. Go get it now. And we have. You can find Mike's other podcast episode with us from a couple years ago@scalingcoach.com where we also have. You can get a free copy of the Scaling It Book. Just go register and pay the shipping and handling. There's, uh, we've got downloads of tools and worksheets and things like that to get your company scaling up or begin the scaling up process. If you need help finding a scaling up coach in your area, I'm happy to make some recommendations for you. Just drop us a line to infocalingcoach.com and we'll help you out. Thanks again, everyone. We'll see you next week.

Don't forget to register now for our next workshop on Scaling Scaling up to get one of our limited 100 discounts for our podcast listeners while supplies last. Just go to scalingcoach.com workshops and then enter the code sup that's S U P for Scaling Up Podcast when you register.

We'll see you there. Oh, I always love talking to Mike. Such a great show. I really appreciate the richness in the story and I hope you get a lot of the book and I encourage you to go get it. But the thing that I think there is to get is that there are repeatable frameworks for disruption. There are patterns that you can learn. And whether you're going to be the one to do it or you need disruption as part of your ongoing process of innovation in the company and for your industry, there's an approach, there's something to develop there. So that I think the key message of this show, go get the book on Amazon. Plan D. I want to give special thanks to our original growth guru, Vern Harnish. This show is produced by Crystal Carson and our audio is produced by Podfly Productions with the audio edited by Albert Burge. And our show notes are compiled by I'm Codina proofread by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of the show, please like it, share it, subscribe, do all that stuff now before you forget to you can, you can drop us a note infocalingcoach.com and thanks again for listening. Keep scaling up.