141: Kaihan Krippendorff — Use the Fourth Option to Disrupt and Out-Think the Competition

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective, and really well done. I think docsa Talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill G One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out today. Well, with a breakthrough strategy, you actually outthink your competition. You do something bold and different. But how do you get that? It feels like that kind of strategy is the exclusive sort of province of certain people. Well, today's show is all about a repeatable process that you can make part of your company strategy and culture. If you've been listening to our podcast or you've read the book Scaling up, you might be interested in our workshop on the Scaling Up Growth framework for your own business. We have a workshop coming soon to San Francisco and we have a few hundred dollar discounts for our loyal podcast listeners while supplies last. Just go to scalingcoach.com workshops and then enter the code sup. That's sup for scaling up Podcast when you register. We'll see you there. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Kaihan Krippendorf and who's up in Connecticut. We're on two opposite coasts and we're talking about the Plan D strategy. I mean, last one or two episodes we talked about Disruptors. This time we're talking about another kind of plan and how do we get beyond the obvious things and find the fourth option and so on. So I'll let Kai han introduce it. Dr. Kaihan Crypto is a super business strategy guru. He has written a number of books. Today we're focusing mostly on outthinking the competition. But he's a blogger. He's been and worked with a whole range of companies. Abc, aig, BNY Mellon, Citibank, Microsoft, Johnson Johnson. Like big range of companies. I've had the pleasure of spending some time going through his methodology and in workshops and classes and things like that. He's been around our world with Scaling up. He's been a speaker at our summit. So welcome to the show. Kaihan.

Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm super excited. It took us a long time to get connected and I know it's going to be worth it. So talk to us a little bit, take us back before we get into the core ideas of the book. A little bit. Talk about your background in strategy. How did you get interested in this? Where did this start? What, like chess or D and D obsession or what was it that got you started?

I'm glad you went back there. If I think about it, really. I think I got interested in strategy when I was a young kid in high school, maybe before high school, my dad took a trip to Japan and he came back with some, some Japanese books, you know, like the Zen and the Art of Archery, for example. And that kind of led to a semi fascination with, with Sun Tzu and the Art of War and which led me to read all of the books in that genre, the Miyamoto Musashi Book of Five Rings and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. This whole body of language of work that is sometimes called the Art of the Advantage. And that actually was the title of my first book, which I published in 2004. I went on, I studied business at Wharton, I went into investment banking, I went back to business school at Columbia. Then I worked at McKinsey, the strategy consulting firm. And throughout that, the kind of the seven years leading up to me leaving McKinsey, I had been working on a book that I said is called the Art of the Advantage. And really it takes this ancient Chinese text that not many people are aware of called the 36 stratagems. And it applies it to say, strategy design. How can you use these 36 tools to come up with disruptive ideas and the evolution of the methodology, which then I kind of codified, if you will, in my fourth book out think the competition really came about from applying these patterns as part of a strategy design process for companies. A lot of them certainly followers of your work and your blog, a lot of them through Vern Harnish. He actually gave me my very first shot when I published my first book. I had never given a speech before and he took a risk and I think it was a pretty high, you know, high stakes risk. And he put me in front of a room of about 60 CEOs and I was super nervous. But I prepared and prepared and, and delivered a good enough say, performance that he has trusted me to come back in and into his conferences and with his Gazelle Coaching Body and clients. And over the subsequent years, I just sort of refined this methodology through trial and error, seeing what works, what doesn't work. And really it all comes down to, as you, as you alluded to this being a disruptor, how can a group of people come together and create a strategy that will disrupt rather than be disrupted? And there are a whole bunch of kind of language and psychological habits in how people design strategies that lead us away from the really interesting, disruptive, innovative fourth option, as I call it. And really the methodology is meant to address those. And I think I put it in a fairly elegant framework that is hopefully easy to remember and to apply. And that's what we call the out thinker process or the ideas process. Um, so I, I, you know, it's hard to pinpoint the exact origin of my fascination with strategy. There's a lot I do not know much about, but strategy is something that I have been fascinated with and turning back to for, you know, 20 years or so.

Well, so before we lay out the process a little bit, why don't you tell some stories to bring it to life? Maybe talk about the Miami logistics company or, I don't know, something like that.

Yeah, there's, yeah, this logistics company that I work with early days. So 2004, I leave McKinsey. I published my first book. And I am just trying to build a business around my book. I don't know if I'm gonna write another one. And so I go to companies that I'd like to say that I would work for, I've worked for. And I would say, let me just come in and give you a free talk or free workshop. I learned tons during that period. One of the clients that I work with is a large logistics company. I won't mention the name, but you've certainly seen their trucks driving down your. They kind of operate big fleets of trucks. And we were going through a strategy exercise, and they came up with an idea that maybe they could use all of their capabilities around logistics and their relationships and their capabilities and knowledge to operate a seaport. And they got excited about this idea and started laying out how would it work and how would they charge and, you know, how would they build this as a, as a, as a, as a side business and how big could it be, et cetera. But then at the end of the conversation, the boss said, well, you know, that's not going to work because the concerns of security are so high that the government would never allow the operation of a seaport to be outsourced to a private company. And so they just killed off this idea. And I don't know if it was a good idea or not, but they didn't even explore it because of this belief. A year later, the port that they were looking at operating, the port in Miami, was outsourced to a Middle Eastern private company. And so it just disproved the belief that killed off this idea. And so I was noticing this happening often that there were great ideas popping up and they were not being pursued for reasons that had nothing to do with fact or strategy or market analysis. They just, in the conversation, someone said something like, well, that won't work. And they laid out a reason. They just killed it off.

Yeah, here's the thing. I think it's really interesting because I think a lot of our listeners are founders and, and part of founding teams. And in many times, the ultimate founder of a business was in a company and had an idea for something and got shot down like that. And they were like, f, you guys, I'm out of here. I'm going to go do something else. I'm going to go figure this out on my own. I think this is a good idea. And so that's one classic sort of founder story. Somebody had some idea and then they got shot down. But. But I think the ironic thing is that then you start to grow a business and somebody comes in with a new idea in your business and you become the person, right? The guy or gal who shoots it down and says, nah, that's not going to work because of blah, blah, blah, and it's some offhand thing, but you control the company, you control their salary, you control stuff. You have sufficient power that your naysaying in a moment is sufficiently powerful to kill something, right?

And you're pointing to the fundamental dilemma of being a disruptor, which is that for your idea to disrupt your competition requires that that idea is inconsistent with some beliefs that your competitors have about the way that business works. And you are essentially challenging your competition to say, if you want to adopt my idea or react to my idea, or compete with me and my idea, you have to rethink some belief that you hold. And people will almost always choose to hold on to their beliefs. And the problem emerges when you, having been in your industry long enough, you've started developing these rules, this belief structure of what will work, what won't work. And that is the same belief structure as your competition. So in order to disrupt really requires you to step out of that belief structure. That's why I call these People out, thinkers to think outside of the current belief structure, to consider a possibility and then potentially pursue that possibility.

Yeah, how? So how could we make it? Wouldn't that be interesting if we could? And what would that look like? What would that take?

Right, right, right, exactly. So I'll give you, I'll give you an example of another, another, another group that I, a publisher at Macmillan. And they started recognizing, one woman there started recognizing that the current publishing model looked like it was broken because increasingly authors would try to get a book deal, they couldn't get a dick book deal, then they'd self publish. And if they were successful, then Macmillan and other publishers would go to them and say, congratulations, we'd like to publish your next book. And it used to be that an author would say, oh great, I couldn't get published before, but now I can get published by a legitimate publisher. And increasingly those authors were choosing to decline book deals. And so something was changing. Right, you can put a PDF on Amazon if you've got a few hundred thousand Facebook friends, as nothing will buy it, that you can make 100, $200,000 off selling your book. But if you go through a publisher, they're going to take 80% of the revenue. So we applied several of the narratives, these 36 narratives. The one that really took hold was coordinate the uncoordinated. And I think that that represents a big strategic shift in how successful companies, the Amazons, the Alibabas, the Googles that are thriving in our fast paced exponential world, they view power is not coming from control, but rather from coordination. And so we generated some ideas about how could we coordinate future self published authors. And because we did that within a context of we're going to explore ideas that may not make sense given what we know now, but we're looking for something different. They developed that idea and over the course of a few months they developed it into a platform they call Swoon Reads in which self published authors can submit manuscripts. The community starts interacting with them, giving feedback on their manuscripts, then they rate the manuscripts according to heat, tears, laughs and thrills. And then they turned on this competition, kind of a Dancing with the Stars competition. The top 10 become the top five become top three, McMillan picks the winner and the winner gets of course, a publishing contract. Now you could say that that's simply a crowdsourced platform for self published authors, but if you think about the strategic value of that, what they have done is they've turned what could have been a fatal threat to their business model and they've turned it into a competitive advantage?

Well, you could say it's a crowdsourced thing. And what's wrong with that? I mean, certainly different than the traditional publishing world. Right?

Right, yes, yes, right, exactly. But understanding the strategic value behind it, sometimes I think that, you know, some innovations kind of look like people are using the word crowdsource. Let's see how we could apply that here. But the way they got at it was from understanding what the strategic threat was, what their strategic goals were, deconstructing, what was the mechanism that was making it a threat, and then reconstructing a business that turned the threat into an advantage. Yeah.

And one that they controlled and had hands in and that kind of thing. And that coordination, I mean, we see that. Isn't that the same thing that you're talking about with like an Airbnb or an Uber or that kind of thing?

Yes, yes. Yep. Right. So Airbnb, Uber, those are examples of platforms coordination. Blockchain, I think, is an example of coordinating the coordinators because you have different nodes that are coordinating. And so there are, you can call that many, many different, many different things, community building tribes. Right. But I think when we something, then it starts limiting our thinking. But when we keep it open as like a concept, coordinated, the uncoordinated, it invites people to think more expansively. Right.

Talk about the window company.

Yeah. So there's a window company. And the point here, I think is really that we want to look for opportunities to accelerate the growth of our business by not only looking at the core product, one of the tools in the, in our methodology, we call it the eight P's. So you've got products, you can innovate in product, you've got pricing. So you can innovate in pricing, promotion, marketing and sales placement, how you distribute, you've got positioning, which is your branding, you've got your processes, which are operations. You got the physical experience, which is kind of the customer journey, customer experience. And you have people who you hire, how you organize them, what your cultural norms, worms are. So there are eight, at least eight different ways to look for advantage. And so this window installation company, they a window manufacturer, they would sell windows to kind of mom and pop local window installers. And the strategic dynamic that was hindering their growth was that if you are a local window installation company, you don't want to sell a large portion of your windows from one provider because then you lose your bargaining power and that provider can start raising prices on you. So you want to not sell more than, I don't know, what the exact number is but 10% of your revenue from this one provider. And so they thought, how could we unlock that? And they came up with an idea. At first I honestly, I thought it was a crazy idea, but they saw something and they pursued it. So they said, what if we bought, acquired that mom and pop distributor and we owned it? If we owned it, then there's no reason why 100% of what that installer sells couldn't be our windows. Now, we don't want to get into the business of hiring a whole bunch and operating all of these. So what if we then hired them to run their business just as they were before? So it's a way for them to kind of cash out and still get to run the business. And so they did that once and it worked. And then they did it again. And then once they showed it worked, then that opened up capital that they could borrow in order to do it again. And they just did this all over the country. And in three years, they were 10 times the size of what they were at the beginning. You know, so that speaks to, hey, don't just think about the product and how do we improve it and market it, but think about the business model, if you will, around the product.

So now it's a window company that owns window installer distributors.

Yes.

And those people carry their product exclusively and they've bought them, but the people who own them before owned them. They just gave them some liquidity in exchange for exclusivity.

Right. And I don't think that they don't require exclusivity, but what they remove the incentive away from shifting a large portion of their product mix to that one company. This is a little bit like there's a UPS store around the corner. For me, that's where I keep all my books and decks of cards and stuff. And I just send them an email when we want to ship out. Right. So I'm kind of outsourcing our distribution. Now, the owner, he sold his UPS store because he's kind of approaching retirement, but they hired him to run the store, but now it's being owned by someone else. So it's a very similar kind of financial arrangement.

So you go from being the owner operator to being the employee manager.

Sure. Yes, yes. And you locked in your exit. You locked in your cash event.

Yeah. So why don't we talk a little bit about the ideas process and how do we get to the fourth step or maybe even what it is and you know, like. Yeah, how do we.

Yeah, so the fourth option is just a metaphor. It says there's a point at which others stop looking for new options. When you hear someone say, I've been in this industry for 20 years and the way you do it is ABC. Or when you hear people talk about key success factors, the key success factors to growing this kind of business are 1, 2, 3, what that means. And they may be right, but what that means is they've stopped looking for new options. And so what the disruptor does, recognizing that their competition have stopped looking, stopped thinking, they then look for a fourth option that will surprise people. And the ideas process. And when I first started building this methodology, it was like 14 steps and I just simplified it and simplified it to make it easy for people to take and use. And ideas, ideas. It stands for five different types of conversations that you want to have in this sequence when you're designing your strategy. So imagine is stepping into the future, looking at what your trends are, pulling out your big hairy, audacious goal, what your vision is. Right? Stepping out and thinking about the future, then saying, what do we need to achieve in the next year or two? So that's imagine Dissect is pulling out those eight Ps and saying, what should we be focusing on right now? So like when you, when you're coaching clients, I'm sure that sometimes you're working on people and sometimes you're working on cash. Right. And sometimes you work on execution. It's sort of of all the different areas of the business which are the areas that we should really focus on now to unlock new growth. And you can use the eight Ps to identify those. E. Expand. That's basically expand your option set. Generate lots and lots of ideas. Not five or six or seven, but 30, 40, 100, 200. And through this process, you'll typically generate about 150 to 200 different potential strategic options. Let's price high, let's price low. Let's go after this customer, let's go over that customer. Let's distribute through this channel. Let's just move that channel. Right? But lots and lots and lots of them. And then you a analyze, you sort through those ideas.

I find a lot of folks are kind of constrained in this expand period, right?

Yes, yes. Yeah.

They want to come up with three or four and then quit. And I'm like, no, no, no. Let's hear 30 like right, right, right, right. Let's look at it for some different directions. Try something illegal. Let's think of something unethical.

Yes, right, right.

Maybe something inappropriate.

Right. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, someone will say, oh, let's kill their CEO and but allowing someone to say that, you're not going to do that, right? Obviously. But that might trigger an idea. First of all, let's acquire, let's hire their CEO, let's hire their number two. Right. So you need to really free that up. Doing Imagine Dissect really helps because under Imagine you get your team to think of a big problem. I think Vern talks about this like an impossible goal is the outcome of Imagine. And when you set an impossible goal, you have to come up. You can't just come up with seven ideas because they won't get you there. And then Dissect has you look in uncommon places because you'll find that you and your team, you tend to always go back to the same piece. Maybe it's product and promotion. Let's come up with a better product and do, do our. And do better sales. Right. And then you say, well, what about physical experience? So it opens up. So doing those two upfront steps really makes it easier to expand. Now getting 200 ideas, that can be really overwhelming. So but it's surprisingly easy to sort through them. And we put them on a two by two matrix and you end up with a bunch of waste of time ideas that you just get off the plate, a bunch of tactics that you can collect and every month or every quarter just pull some off and go and execute them. You end up with what we call winning moves, the high potential, easy to execute idea. But what we discovered, and it wasn't only until, it wasn't until we had been doing this for a number of years, what we realized was that actually the ideas that look like winning moves usually aren't the winning moves because they're so obvious that your competitors will gravitate to them very quickly and copy you and diminish your advantage. The real breakthrough ideas appear to be crazy. They seem to be impossible. And so what you want to do is you want to have a collection of crazy ideas and sit with them. Albert Einstein said, it's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer than others. So get a list of crazy ideas and stay with them a little bit longer to unravel them and work on how could we turn them into winning moves. So that's the analyze phase that gives you kind of real clarity on the five buckets or the five rocks that you're going to put into your three year, your three year set of goals and then sell is really how do you build internal alignment? Buy in and support for those for your resulting strategy ideas.

So we've got the eight P's just different ways of looking at it. We've got the ideas process to blow it out and then bring it in and then sell it right. And then. And these are all you can get this stuff at. We'll give you the link to your website so you can get some.

You've got forms workbook and in out think the competition. This is all laid out in that way. Think of ideas as the overarch. That's all you have to remember is I want ideas ideas. Imagine I expanded online myself. D is the eight p's that's a tool to do. D and then the 36 narratives or the 36 stratagems are the ways to do expand and they are really helpful strategic patterns to provoke innovative strategic ideation. Coordinate the uncoordinated was one key to.

Getting the I right.

So I think that it starts and, and sometimes us entrepreneurs, we resist this first imagine it. It starts with what I call the mess. Stepping out into the future and imagining the undesirable but realistic future that will occur if we continue on our current path and get your team to really be reach a state of discontent about where we are headed and then still standing out. You know we're, you're, you're, you're, you're setting goals that are like five or ten years from now and then saying that's one future. What is the other future that we do want? That's the future we don't want. What is our long term ideal vision or state of the business? We want to be number one. Number one. We want to be the best place to work. We want customers to just spontaneous come back to us. We want to have this much in revenue. We want to be the most profitable in our marketplace, that kind of thing. And by creating those two visions of the future, the undesirable one and the desirable one, it creates this creative tension. I have to move away from one and I have to move towards another.

Right.

And so you know in my. There are, there are actually five steps to imagine. But to simplify it I would, I would, I would do that. Make sure you describe the five or ten year mess and the five or ten year long term ideal.

You know it's interesting because I often will work with a CEO or a leadership team on developing a, a pitch or like a way to present their vision and it could be to investors, it could be at a trade very often like At a trade show, sometimes in the media. And so I'll work with them first on it. And what I'll have them do is very much the same thing, but later in the process. So describe the way things are now and then project. So they describe the current situation and then they project the likely, the most likely sort of thing of, you know, more unworkability in the world or in their area of the world, and extended out, which is usually the, you know, an extension of the current present reality, continuing on growth trends or whatever it is. And then, and then they're like, but what if the future was different? What if there was a better way? What if, like, we worked this way or did that or had this kind of a thing and then they create this picture for the future? And it's, it's very, it's an inspiring way to speak and create because first we get the whole thing. And you can see elements of this in good speakers. It's certainly present in loads of TED talks and things like that. Right. Here's the way things are now. But what if we reimagine.

Right, yeah. Like a good anatomy of a great speech is, this is the mess, this is the ideal. This is the mess, this is the ideal. And you, you create this tension between those two different states.

And then you go to work on, well, how could we get there?

Right, Exactly. You know, my only, my only piece of advice there, and I think this, where some strategy processes limit themselves, is that when you're defining what you really want, sometimes it comes out of, what if we did this differently? What would that lead to? And so then you set your goals based on what you think you can do. And what I really think is helpful in imagine is to leave people in a state of, this is what we want, and we have no idea how we could possibly get there. Then you do dissect, expand and analyze, and the priorities that come out of analyze, then you look back at them and you say, if we did those things, what would be the future state that that would lead to? And it's either going to hit your goal or it's going to be below your goal, in which case you can reduce your goal. But often it is even bigger than the goal that you dreamed up at the beginning and you go back and you increase your goal. Yeah, very often, you know, we don't know what's possible, like, until we look at what we could do to get there. And you need to, or I must say, I don't like the word you need, but if you Want to do something big. It's really helpful to sustain judgment on what's possible.

Right. Well, you know, I think. And that's what's great about if we see today, right? If, if there are any listeners who are fans of the original Star Trek episode, Star Trek show, right? As I baby of 64am, passionate fan of this utopian thing. And, and they go to, they create the show and so on. And, and, and they're like, they don't have really the budget to create and shoot all these scenes with like a, a landing craft, like a shuttle craft that they later did. But in the beginning they're just like, well, we just need to quickly get down on the surface of the planet. So they imagine this beaming thing and now like, well, what if we could create something like that and what would that be like? And what principle of physics would apply it? And then in a more practical or basic level, you know, they had this little communication device that they just sort of flicked and you could, and you could just talk to anyone anywhere. And it seemed amazing. And then years later, Motorola comes out with their StarTac mobile phone. And then, you know, then later on they had something, you just tap this little insignia on your shirt. And of course we have Bluetooth ear pieces today that you could just speak to like hey, answer that or whatever. And so we imagine something sometimes and it takes a little creativity to imagine like completely unfettered. And then, and then somebody could engineer some way to doing it or thinking about how to fulfill on that.

Exactly, exactly. We can't create what we can't imagine. And if you can't hold on to something impossible, like an impossible imagination, then all that is left to do is to execute what is possible.

But a team really needs to be able to do this on a regular basis to move the company forward, to imagine new approaches to things, to be competitive, to do something interesting. You want to build, you want to change the world, you want to grow 10x, 100x, whatever it is, let's find the problem, let's imagine a whole different solution. Not some incremental improvement to the engineering, but something fundamentally different is.

Yeah. And I think that there's a. I got a chance to do this. A workshop for a room full of board members of public tech companies. And these are mostly entrepreneurs that have built and ex. Exited several tech companies. And now they're kind of elder statesmen and women and they're on boards. And as I was talking to them, you could see that this is how they think. They think 10 years out and six months. What does the world look like in 10 years we're going to be able to, you know, use our flip phone to zap and you know, travel space and time and then six months. What can we do now to move in that direction? It's a great habit.

Last year, last year I, I, we had multiple cars here at our house and I got rid of all of them. But my wife still has a car and then the motorcycle, the couple other cars are all gone now. And I just started because I travel so much, I'm like, I just don't really need a car at home and I can take an Uber. I take an Uber already when I'm out of town and I can take an Uber when I'm at home. So I stopped having any car at all for the first time, you know, since I was 15. And, and now I start to think about the world. Well, what, what happens when we're all not driving and, and we have fewer cars? What happens to all those parking garages? What happens to all the parking spaces? What like, oh, it all starts to get, and then what about when we don't have drivers going around? You know, do I even, does anything need to park anywhere? And where does it like can imagine all kinds of things. Like I could get in the business of refitting parking garages to housing or office space or combination of the two.

Yes, and that's exactly that. Imagined thinking is allowing your team to sit in the future. You're practicing mental time travel, which is something humans can do and animals can't do, and imagining so far as, you know.

Well, yeah, we don't know what those dolphins are doing. Thank you for all the fish.

The, but imagining these pieces coming together in a picture and not letting your team just say oh, self driving cars, but rather say self driving cars and the implication of that. And then if, what if we don't own cars? But what if we don't own homes? You know, and, and just piecing all of that together so that you come up with a compelling vision of what the future state is. It's helpful if you can also wrap that into a word. You know, Verne often talks about the, the, the, the, the one phrase strategy. But I think it's also helpful to have a one phrase, say vision of the future. At Cisco, they talk about the intelligent web, which is a combination of Internet of things with router technology, with big data. But they don't call it three things. They call it the intelligent web. So a good tool to get your team to continually step out into the future is to name that future and say, remember, that's the Future. Or at MasterCard, they talk about a world beyond cash. That's the future. And there are lots of implications of that. But if you can have a trigger word that just zooms people out, it's very helpful.

My son's got a team right now working on making blockchain efficient. The underlying technology, and everybody's been focused on how do we get seas of processors, these very specific machines, doing the computations required. But it's all grossly inefficient, time consuming. He's like, let's just imagine a whole different way. What's the fundamental problem? What's the benefit we're trying to accomplish? Let's re engineer the thing. And he's got a cool team attracting international investment now as a result. It's so cool.

That is awesome.

I love that thing. And sometimes, if you think about it, no matter where you are in your career, right. There are moments of great careers and great companies that began with that beginner's mind of like, if we'd known better, we might never have done this.

But we didn't.

So we just did it. And look what happened.

When you interview an entrepreneur, I often hear that is, why are we so successful? Because we didn't know anything about the industry.

Right.

Which goes back to our fourth option. You don't know what won't work.

This is the beginning of working with a company where we challenge your assumptions. And when you start telling me or one of the other coaches, oh, well, you can't do that. Well, you don't understand our industry. I'm like, exactly. So I want to help you break that up and break through to something else with our remaining time. Talk about getting it out of the one person in the top team into all of the employees, getting full employee driven motivation and leadership teams, like activating the broader group of people for this kind of thing.

Yeah, and I'm glad you asked because that's really where I'm going next. So my first insight was that we can get people to think differently. My second insight in my last book was we can do that in groups through the ideas process. But my third thing was that what I came to realize is that, that these ideas, when they're not generated by the CEO, often get hit by the bureaucracy. And it comes in part from. And I love entrepreneurs. I'm an entrepreneur. Most of the clients I work with are entrepreneurs. But we have this idea that it is the entrepreneur that innovates and that employees don't innovate. But actually, and I won't go into it in detail here, but my research shows that 70% of the most transformative innovations of the last three decades have come from employees, not from entrepreneurs. The cell phone, Internet, email, MRIs, DNA sequencing, we would live in a radically different world. And so the challenge for you as an employee is how do you bring this type of thinking into your bureaucracy? And for you as the leader is how do you activate your employees to act and think innovatively? Because that is what is going to determine your future growth. It's not. You know, it wasn't selling books that makes Amazon what it is today. Right. It's some guy named Andy Jassy who pushed Amazon into cloud services to launch Amazon Web Services. And that is what most of Amazon's valuation comes from Apple. It's not from Steve Jobs central brilliance and its computer. It comes from the fact that he created a context in which people were allowed to dream and pursue big ideas. And so what my research shows is that they're really like four drivers. It's you as the leader. It is the type of talent that you recruit and develop the organizational structures that you put in place and whether they allow for flexibility and then the cultural norms. Do your cultural norms encourage proactivity, awareness of the customer, risk taking, those kinds of things? And you got to kind of fine tune those four drivers in order to be able to really unlock internal innovation.

Yeah. So so much to think about and get started. But I think we've given folks the beginning of something. If you want to read the book, of course it's outthink the competition. And if you want to get the forms and follow more on Kihan outthinker.com we'll put the link right in the show notes there. But outthinker.com is the place to go. So thanks for coming on the show and giving us a taste of this and the framework so that people can get started getting a little more innovative.

Well, thanks Bill for having me and I really admire the work you do. So thanks for letting me play a little role in that.

Super pleasure. Thanks. I hope to see you at the next summit.

I'll be there.

And a reminder to everyone, we bring a show like this every week. So like it, subscribe it, go to our website scalingcoach.com not only can you subscribe and be the first to know about each of our new shows, but of course we have 140 episodes already up there. Plus on every topic you could imagine plus free tool downloads. You can get a copy of the Scaling up book and the free tools that go along with it. You can register for one of our workshops. You can find out about the summit and so anyway, tons of free free and groovy self help stuff right there@scalingcoach.com thanks again Kahan. We'll see you soon.

Thank you.

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