215: Josh Linkner — The Road to Reinvention

Well, you probably know that you should be reinventing and innovating every day. Except you also know that you're not most of us anyway, maybe in small ways and probably feel like you should do more. Today's guest is all about how to be reinventing and innovating all the time. Direct access to it. Really great topic. So listen in as we talk about this. And now if you could use a coach in this timeframe, you think maybe a coach would be helpful for you? There's never been a better time to get a coach. Coach is in high demand right now and we have lots of different options both with myself and with others. In our world of scaling, we have over 200 coaches, we have online self directed kinds of elearning things combined with live things entirely, live in person, offline, all that kind of thing. So if you'd like to talk to us about some of those options and explore what fits you, your situation, your needs, your budget, even to talk to us, I'm sure we've got something that could help. Drop us an email to infocalingcoach.com we'll get you help started and helped out in finding something that works for you. Anyway, listen in now as we talk about invention, innovation, reinvention, that whole world. 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 Josh Langner. Welcome to the show, Josh.

Thanks so much. Great to be with you guys.

Josh started his career as a jazz guitarist and he's been founder and CEO of five tech companies and sold for a combined value over $200 million. He's also deeply experienced as a business leader, a venture capitalist, he's been a speaker, he spoke recently to the Scaling up audience. He's the author of four books, a New York Times bestseller, Disciplined the Road to Reinvention and the latest book, Hacking Innovation. Did I get them all, Josh?

I think so. You got it.

And he still plays jazz guitar. So I'm excited to have you on this subject of reinvention is top of mind for a lot of folks right now or becoming top of mind. And innovation is something that not everybody has sort of direct thoughts about. So welcome to the show again. Before we get started, why don't you tell folks a little bit more about kind of your entrepreneurial journey, some of that background and how you became obsessed with innovation.

Sure. Well, I've had a non traditional background at every step. I was born in the city of Detroit and I still live here in Detroit. I'm very proud of my hometown, but I grew up playing jazz guitar, and I just put myself through college playing music. I just loved playing music. And in jazz, it's very much of an improvisational art form. Whether or not you like listening to jazz is a different thing. But to play it, 99% of what you play is sort of made up as you go, but there's a structure to it. Without that structure, it sounds like a train wreck. And what happened was early on, I also was a bit of a tech nerd. I started programming on an Atari 800 in the early 80s, believe it or not. And what happened was I had the chance to start a business, and in 1990, which is crazy, 30 years ago, I started a technology company. By the way, I had never taken a business course. I had no idea about anything related to business. But I figured, like jazz, maybe I could just figure out as I go and fast forwarding without all the nuances and ups and downs. Over the, over the last three decades, I've started, built and sold five companies. I started a venture capital fund and invested in well over 100 startups. And I just became so deeply passionate about the role that human creativity has on people's business results and the results in their lives. And so that passion around, like, how do you harness this gift that we all have, but not all of us use, led me to write three books on the topic. And it's really become my life's work now is helping people connect with this incredible ability that all human beings have.

Interesting. So why don't we get into then? I don't know some of the stories or examples. I think it's probably helpful. Let's talk about the St. Regis one first.

Well, like many people listening, trying to reinvent ourselves, we're struggling. We're in difficult times with the coronavirus pandemic, with competition, and with new technology, with digital disruption. And the one thing that we know for sure is that we can no longer simply rely on the models of the past and expect the same results. So I would argue that today we need an entirely new and fresh approach in order to win and meet the challenges of the day. But that in and of itself can feel overwhelming. You might say, gosh, like I'm not wearing a lab coat or I'm not the CEO. Can I really be creative? Can I innovate my way forward? And it reminded me of the story of the folks at the St. Regis hotel in Washington, D.C. because like many of us, they're looking around saying, all Right. How can we grow revenue? How can we be more competitive? And as they look around their hotel, it leads them to the empty closet. And that's the same closet that's in everyone's hotel room around the world. But they said, wait a minute, maybe this is an opportunity, maybe we're not going to make the COVID of a magazine, but could we innovate the closet? And here's what they ended up doing. They partnered up with luxury retailer Neiman Marcus. And now as a guest, before you arrive, you're sent an email survey asking about your size and your fashion preferences. So when you walk into that room and open up the door of the closet, it's not empty, it's filled with hand selected goods just for you. So they turned it, instead of E commerce, it was like closet commerce. And what happens is you try these, the garments on in the privacy of your room. It, if you like it, you just walk off with it and it's auto billed to your hotel. So what they did, let's just think about this, they activated a dead space. They created a new revenue stream. They did it with no capital since they partnered up with Neiman Marcus. They drove competitive differentiation, they added better value to their customers, all because they had the guts to look at the most mundane thing in the entire building and imagine something more. So I guess the challenge I would offer to listeners with great respect is what are the empty closets in your business? You know, what are those things that you look at 100 times a day and say, hey, that's just the way it's done in our industry, or hey, that's just the way we do it. To me, that's a real opportunity to imagine not even the breakthrough things, but the mundane things, to examine them and say, all right, is there a new way to experience this? Can we bring something fresh to life? Can we better serve customers? And just like the folks at St. Regis, you might land on something really cool.

Well, I hear in there a couple of things. One, I hear selling new things to existing customers, so they're tapping into and using something unused to sell something new and different. And there's a kind of a playful experimentation with that. Did I hear that right?

Yeah. And just keying in on that experimentation part of it. Too often we think that ideas have to happen like a lightning bolt from up above, from the heavens. And then the idea is perfect and we just roll it out company wide, which could be wildly risky and hope for the best. And that is just not how most ideas are brought to life. Most ideas happen as a series of lots of bad ones inside and there's one good one kind of swimming around there. And what great leaders do isn't bet the entire company on one idea. They're constantly running little teeny experiments and tests. So at St. Regis they tested this in one hotel for like a couple weeks. And then as that momentum built, as the data proved out that that was a good idea, then they expanded the experiment. And so when you think about innovation not as a solitary act, but rather lots of little experiments, knowing that most will fail and you double down on the good ones, it totally de risks the creative process. You don't have to bet your company or your career on one idea.

Yeah, we know this concept bullets before bombshells. You've maybe heard like do invest lightly before you and see some traction before you put a lot of resource behind something, put it in one property. The other thing I love about this story is that it speaks to two industries that are just really screwed right now. Right? So hotels are at near zero and retail is massively impacted, depending on where you are and that kind of thing, but on a long term decline. So people are. So this is innovative retailing, personal shopping kind of approach for an upscale consumer and doing something in the world of hotels which will come back but will be reshaped and different than they were. Right?

Yeah, you're exactly right. And the point you made first, which I didn't mean to shoot by, is that selling more to an existing customer, I think there's a real focus there that many of us miss. We think that because our company was successful at serving a customer need in the past, all we need to do is keep serving that need. And it's not necessarily only about just capturing more of someone's wallet share, but it's about making sure that you're delighted, not just satisfying a customer. And too often what happens in that pattern is cliche. You know, company has an idea, they succeed in the market, they become complacent, they don't change, they don't add new value to customers, they don't change the experience, et cetera, et cetera. New company comes in, sees a vulnerability, better serves customer, displaces old company. And so to me, the lesson is that success isn't permanent, it's a temporary state in the context of so many external factors that are today changing at a rate like none other in history. And so as I was building my own companies, I would have a saying, I repeated it so much that my people were sick of hearing it. But the saying was that someday a company will come along and put us out of business. Hey, it might as well be us. And I think when you apply that lens to your customers, saying someone's going to come and dislodge my customer, it's either going to be some new competitor that I'll later hate, or it can be us. And I think that the notion of reimagining the value that you deliver to customers is critical to sustainable success.

Yeah, I think that's really, it's a really. Well, you know, it's funny, I. So let me share a micro story, right? That's just like current right now. So we're in the shelter orders here. Our general social life is highly restricted. And about once a week we go to the market, but we end up also ordering a lot of grocery delivery for the last little bit. And in the mix of it, I noticed that the produce were getting kind of sucked. And I said to my wife, hey, why don't you get one of those produce boxes that deliver? You know? And she's like, oh, I'll look into that. So, so she looks into it, she finds a produce box service that'll deliver. And some guy has started up this thing. And evidently now people who serve food service, food producers, whether it's eggs or produce or meats or that kind of thing, if your channel and distribution is like cafeterias and restaurants, you've been severely impacted. If you serve grocery stores, it's different, but over much of the country anyway, so we got this guy and he started up this new business picking assorted vegetables from really high quality things that used to go to very premium restaurants. And he starts delivering this box to us. Well, we've had it in and out three weeks and he's delivering stuff that like, I never would have thought to buy on my own. Walking through the grocery store, even if I was in getting great stuff. Rutabaga. I've never cooked a rutabaga in my life, but now I know several rutabaga recipes, among other things, right? And so he starts delivering this stuff. Then yesterday Sunday, he comes by with a new box for us and he announces, oh, yeah, well, since I'm delivering, I realize there's coffee producers and other. So now he's going to start bringing all kinds of other foods along to all of the people on his route now, because what he has now is a route and he has customers. And he's like, how do I put more and more into this? Because I can't really get to any more places in a day as a single driver entrepreneur.

Well, I love the story there on so many levels. I mean, first of all, times of turbulence unlock fresh opportunity. And perhaps that he wouldn't have been able to do that or reach you or get supplied from cool restaurants hadn't there been a crisis. So inside the crisis, and I know, I don't mean to be glib, because I know it's negatively impacting many of us, but just the fact that there's an inflection point unlocks fresh opportunity. The second thing that I just loved about it is that he discovered a market need again. He got close to the ear of the customer. He understood, hey, you wanted fresh vegetables that didn't suck from a bad food delivery. And he's now uncovered a real opportunity. He's got real customers, which then, as you mentioned, he can expand and further serve. So I think it's important that we, number one, look for the opportunities in turbulent times. And number two, let's not get so complacent thinking that, hey, people always buy our gross carrots and wilted lettuce. I'll just keep doing that. We got to make sure that we remain on that forefront of delighting customers and driving new value, right?

Being innovative, not complacent, not taking it for granted. Because as you said in the earlier example, if you don't compete with yourself, your customers, you think about so many things that we deal with today, right? At one point, Nokia was a brand of phones, right? Who knows who they are today? BlackBerry was dominant. Nobody could have conceived that they would come along and become obsolete overnight. And Kodak was an early innovator in digital cameras, right? But now what?

I mean, you go right down the list from Pan Am Airlines to Oldsmobile to blockbuster to Rand McNally. And it's funny, it's so predictable and cliche, it makes us roll our eyes. Yet people still fall into the same trap. And putting the companies aside, individuals can fall into that trap too, can't they? They can say, hey, I know my job inside and out. I've been. I've been leading this way for years until instead of retiring with a gold watch, they get a pink slip. And so I think it's incumbent on all of us, individually and organizationally, to be that source of disruption, to put ourselves out of business so we don't fall into the same fate as you point out, as, you know, Kodak or others.

Well, take that even personally, right? I think I've been married for 25 years and I Like many people who've married a long time, there are many ups and downs, many times where we wanted to kill each other. Right? But one of the most powerful things that we've done over the years is from time to time, we would complete and reinvent our relationship. So we would say, okay, the marriage we had is over. Let's look at what there is. Let's sort of memorialize that like you would a company at the end of a period, at the end of a quarter, a year. Let's take in all the good and bad, acknowledge everything, let's call that done, and let's then see what there is to create for the future. And I'm always a little terrified in doing that. I suppose I'm more attached to keeping something going than walking away. But we walk out of every time we do that. It's a really bold experience and really invigorates something. We get back in touch with something. We see what there is to invent and create together freshly. And I think at its core, that's the same thing that we do in companies on a regular basis.

Yeah, man, that's really cool. And I think it's such a powerful point. I mean, if you, if you walk into your own house and you. And you look past the tilted picture over the couch and you don't notice it because it's been that way for years and a friend walks in and instantly notices it, you know, we can, we can tune out. We just get so comfortable in previous patterns that we do shake it up at times. I love the idea of firing yourself. Like, what if you're walking today and say, you know what? I'm fired. For better or worse, I'm fired. Now I got to reapply to my job. I gotta re. Earn the same job. How would I treat the job differently? What if a new candidate took the job? How would they approach the work? And so challenging ourselves again to refresh, to hit the reset button, to come up with a new and better version, to upgrade it. You know, to upgrade. Whether it's a product or a service or an approach or ourselves, how do we upgrade it to become more relevant and more impactful going forward?

Now, as we get ready for the show, you mentioned the cattle industry, and I'm very curious what you have to say about that because we're hearing all kinds of reports, meat processing and things like, talk to me about. Share that story.

Yeah, so I study innovation and I'm so passionate about people finding creative approaches to difficult problems. And it kind of makes me Sick when I hear people talk about Netflix and Amazon and such because yes, those are totally innovative, but there's so many other stories around the globe, it feels like a lazy thing to talk about those companies. But here's one I someone who scours the globe always looking for cool ideas and fresh approaches. I found the really neatest thing recently. So it turns out that the cattle industry is plagued by flies. Unlike horses, cows can't swat away the flies. And you might think yeah, it's probably just an annoyance, but it actually, it interferes with the grazing and feeding and sleeping and it's actually a really big problem. So anyway, researchers get together and they say like, how do we solve this problem? And they try all the obvious things. The they tried pesticides and bug zapping lanterns. And the problem is each of those created their own set of problems, environmental issues and health issues. So they couldn't just do the obvious thing, they had to keep going. And I love this idea of keep going and pushing yourself to find that weird, oddball, unorthodox, kind of bizarre, unexpected idea because those are the ones that often make all the difference in the world. So these researchers, they start looking at, all right, what other animals don't have a fly problem. And it led them to zebras. Turns out zebras rarely get fly bites. And as they got into a little bit more, again, they kept their curiosity going. Why don't zebras get fly bites? Turns out that the black and white stripes interfere with the flies depth perception. Flies leave the zebras alone. So what did they do? Yeah, you guessed it, they painted the cows like zebras. And so they had they ethical paint doesn't hurt the cows or whatever. But here's what happened. Fly bites were reduced by 70%. And in fact, if they rolled this out across the entire cattle industry, it would save the industry $2.2 billion a year. So is this a goofy example? Yeah, but, but let's think about it again. This was uncovered by, by ordinary people. They weren't, you know, CEOs or hoodie wearing tech entrepreneurs. And it's a multi billion dollar idea. All because you looked at a problem in a fresh way. You look for a weird, oddball, unexpected approach to solving it. And so to me that's so encouraging because that means the biggest problems we face, whether it's the shutdown from COVID 19 or whether it's a new competitive threat or the talent war or whatever else, they can be solved in these non traditional ways that are accessible to us all.

You know, I hear two Things in that that I think. Well. So I'm also left with a question right now. Some cows have spots. I don't know what kind of cow that is, but. Cause I'm no expert in cows, but I wonder if they do. You didn't by any chance happen to hear that, did you?

I don't know, but now I'm curious. I'm gonna have to look into it. The ones that I saw were like these all brown type looking cows.

Yeah, yeah, right. Which we know the all brown or all black are mostly monotone, but then there are those spotted cows. I wonder if they have the same issue, if they benefit from some of that zebra effect. But I also hear like the innovation of is best when it comes after a problem. People are just like, oh, let's create something cool. I'm like, okay, what problem are you solving? I think it's really hard to just invent some novel breakthrough idea. But I hear people trying to do that all the time instead of looking for a problem. In this case, they have a real problem. They have flies and they're going through all the standard kinds of obvious things which aren't working until they come to the novel one. But it's in search of or in service of solving a problem.

Yeah, I'm glad you said that because that's another misconception around innovation. That it's only for blue sky opportunities, like inventing some brand new thing. Nothing wrong with that. So call that playing offense innovation. Great.

Awesome.

But we can enjoy so much value with sort of playing defense innovation. Maybe there's a setback. Maybe you're dealing with a tough thing. Maybe there's an environmental issue or a safety issue in a factory. So innovation is misunderstood because we only think it applies to some product breakthrough or maybe some marketing campaign. But really it can be applied to any aspect of our businesses. It could be applied to an HR issue or trying to create more efficiency. So when we think of innovation as a tool that can be applied across the board, both playing offense and playing defense, it really again becomes a very powerful weapon in our arsenal.

Yeah, it's absolutely outstanding. And I think that's a key thing, is go look for a problem that you need to solve. And the bigger the problem, the more compelling the drive to do something innovative and the less likely that the easy, obvious solutions will be helpful. Because if it's a big problem, lots of people have already tried the more obvious things, the more the need for something.

Yeah. The only thing I would add though is that while certainly we can Apply creativity to big problems. Let's not be afraid to apply them to little ones. For some reason, in our world, we sort of think like innovation only counts if it is a billion dollars or it makes the COVID of a magazine.

Yeah, good point.

I love the idea. In fact, I'm working on a new book right now called Big Little Breakthroughs. And the whole notion is that we can accomplish huge amounts of gain if we practice creativity as a habit. So in other words, if we're doing multiple small acts of innovation on a daily basis, but those in turn can add up to big things. The other thing that's sort of interesting about it is that it doesn't feel so scary, you know, if you think innovation only counts if you tackle. If you're saving a life or something like that so big we can freeze up and just do nothing. But what I encourage people to do is these little teeny acts of creative thinking, which is just doing something that you've never done before. Like you can go order a pizza with the pepperoni under the cheese instead of on top of it. You know what? That's creative. And what it does is it builds your creativity muscles. So when da Vinci painted his Mona Lisa, that wasn't the first painting he made. First he had to learn to paint, and he had to learn to paint every day, and he had to get good at it. So if you want the big breakthroughs, the best way to get them isn't putting the pressure on yourself to come up only with big ideas. It's to come up with a whole bunch of little ones first, and that will enable your big ideas to emerge.

You know, that's a great example. And of course, our past guest and speaker around the world of Scaling up is Paul Akers, who talks about Lean. And in that case, he's also his book. I think his first book, Two Second Lean, is really about finding those small opportunities, making this a regular habit. I think that's a very complimentary idea. But also I hear the changing things up and noticing what you notice about it. Years ago in a course, I was asked to do everything differently for. I forget how long. It was like a couple weeks, right. And the first instruction was, okay, reach down. If you wear a watch and move your watch from whatever, if it's on your left or your right wrist to the other wrist. And then try sleeping on the bed on the other side of the bed, if you normally sleep on one or the other. And try, if you run or jog or walk to go the other way. If you Have a particular route, drive to work with a different route. And it was really uncomfortable for a few weeks, but also like, really eye opening. Like, I was surprised at how different my run looked When I changed the direction that I ran the same loop, I just went the other way. It's fascinating to me. Like, instead of right, you go left and see what opens up and that kind of thing. Just exploring the possibility of something that is so cool.

And I'm so glad that you shared that because again, that feels accessible. You know, most people, they say, gosh, I want to be innovative, or most leaders say, I want to be innovative. But it feels so overwhelming. The stakes are so high. We just usually gravitate to what we've always done. But when you think of it like that, little teeny, controlled experiments, that's what really builds up the muscles, that's what builds up the skill set, and that's ultimately what will drive massive value as we look to scale up our businesses.

Yeah, it's interesting. So I didn't hear the story, but talk about Nathan's. What was that?

Well, it's another example where I find of innovation being deployed in non traditional ways. And so Nathan's hot dogs. Every year they host a big hot dog eating contest. This has been going on for decades, and in fact, it continues to grow each year in terms of kind of notoriety and size and also prize money. So the way it generally works is to see how many hot dogs you can eat in 12 minutes. And the participants are these. I know, it's kind of gross, right? But horrifying.

I love hot dogs, but.

Yeah, but you don't want to, right? Exactly. But what ends up happening is these big, burly, generally men, kind of overweight men, just jam as many hot dogs as they can in the same way they would eat them at a picnic.

Charming.

Okay, so enter a brand new competitor named Takuru Kobayachi. Now, Kobe, as he goes by for short, doesn't even like hot dogs. But he liked the notion of that prize money. So he said, well, wait a minute, could I innovate something as simple as the way you eat a hot dog? Here's what he does. He said, I'm going to train for this like an athlete would. So first he builds all this lean muscle mass. He figures out how to expand his stomach capacity by drinking a lot of water. But then he actually deconstructs the hot dog eating process itself. He says, all right, first I'm going to separate the meat from the bun. And through lots of little experimentation, he Realized that he can look like fold the hot dog meat in half and down it in one gulp. Pretty inventive. He takes the bun. He's like, how do I deal with this? Well, he realizes that the contestants are allowed a glass of water. So instead of using the water to drink, he said, what if I took the hot dog bun, stuck it in the water, then squished all out all the excess liquid and also could eat that very quickly. So, again, what he's doing is he's innovating the way he eats a hot.

Dog, deconstructing the challenge, reinventing each aspect of it.

Yeah, totally. So, again, this isn't inventing a new drug therapy or some marketing campaign or writing a film score. He's trying to figure out, how do you eat a hot dog better? Well, here's what happens in 90 years. The 90 years before Kobiachi tried his first attempt, the worldwide record was 25.1 hot dogs eaten in 12 minutes, which is just gross. But when Kobiachi tried it, he ate 50. 50. He doubled the record, which is more gross. But the point is, you can't argue with the results. And he didn't do it just by eating the same hot dogs in the same way. Faster. He innovated the process. So the message I want to share with those listening today is when we want more performance, our instinct is to just eat our normal old hot dogs faster in the same way we've always eaten them. And I think there's a real opportunity there to deconstruct our approach, to deconstruct our systems and our processes, look for fresh, innovative ways to go about it, and that may drive all the results that we need. We might not even need to come up with a whole new product offering or find a new customer base. Maybe we can just do the work that we do better.

Yeah, that's a really valuable thing. When we do work with companies on their processes, whether it be a single departmental process or a core process, we start first by mapping the process out as a team and identifying stuff. And very often, the main process owner won't really appreciate some of the parts of the process that were invisible to them or unconscious to them. So they'll get it mapped out. And then we start identifying where are the delays and the mistakes? Where do things get hung up? Where are the problems in this process? And then that gives us some things to look in at and figure out what to try new approaches for. But. And now we're not thinking about it in a large gross fashion, but the Little things. It's not one grand, elegant solution that would bring a whole new set of problems. But we're looking discreetly at all the little pieces of it and thinking, well, maybe we could do that a little differently.

And that very much is what innovation to me is all about. It's not only blue sky, blank canvas type stuff. It's looking at what you might be doing already and putting it under the microscope and deconstructing it, taking it apart to put it back together, you know, breaking existing patterns to discover new ones. And that is. That's really very much what the creative act is all about. And I think it just creates so much opportunity for almost all of us. You know, I talked to, I work with leaders at organizations all around the world, helping them become more innovative. Often you hear people say, well, I'm in healthcare, I can't be innovative, or I'm in financial services, I can't be innovative because of the regulatory burden. And there are always going to be some areas you can't mess with for sure, but there also are always areas that you can. And so I think it's interesting for us to maybe compartmentalize the things that are untouchable and examine the things that are still on the table. Maybe if you can't change the way a surgery is done, you can change the way you handle bedside manner with a patient.

Yeah. And I think that notion that inflexible rigidity gets in the way of an awful lot of useful innovation because people are like, well, you don't understand my industry. You're right. And that's what's valuable, because I don't. So there will be some things that from a regulatory standpoint, you couldn't do, or from a safety. But there may be other aspects to even that thing that feels so sacred and untouchable, that is alterable, that could be reimagined, and somebody outside your world may just come in and disrupt you if you don't do it for yourself.

But it's so funny because when you look at so many of the success stories, the heroes that we celebrate, they weren't in the industry that they disrupted. They were outsiders. I mean, Elon Musk wasn't in the car industry before he started Tesla, and Jack Dorsey wasn't in the payments industry before he started Square. And so, you know, you have these massive industries and everyone thinks they know exactly how that should be done. And then an outsider comes in with a fresh perspective and is able to completely transform it for customers in the industry itself.

Yeah. And you know, I think the other thing that's interesting about this, we talk about this about company growth all the time. People ask me, well, you know, I've been trying to double my company for years, and we've made modest gains every few years. And over the last 10 years, we doubled the business. And I'm like, great, I know the shortcut to doubling your business. Here's the shortcut. You want to double your. And this is true for everyone listening right now. I've said this a jillion times. John and Verne have said this repeatedly. Play a 10x game, you think about 10xing or 100x in your business, you start to think really differently. Doubling your business is hard work. 10Xing, your business produces the double result really quickly because you cannot just do little incremental things. You've got to reimagine stuff. Now, in the end, you will make a lot of little changes on the path to reinvention.

But.

But that. Challenging your way of thinking, shaking up the complacency is, I think, central to what you're talking about here.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's, by the way, why most brainstorming exercises fail. Brainstorming in the traditional sense is perfectly designed to yield mediocre ideas. And what happens is that fear creeps in. And so instead of sharing your big, bold, crazy ideas, you share your safe ones. So what ends up happening is you have a whole bunch of incremental ideas, and how do you get 2% gain here or 0.3% gain there? And really, what's a much more effective approach is to sort of send your left brain, your linear, logical brain out for Starbucks and let your right brain run free and come up with the most bold, provocative ideas, even if they don't make any sense. Like, you can't physically execute them, because it could be the idea that leads to the idea. It could be the crazy idea that, once toned down slightly, is even better than an idea that was so puny it needed to be amped up. So I really encourage people to let their creativity go full throttle and then tone it back if you have to, rather than needing to inject steroids into ideas that are too minuscule to begin with.

It's funny, back in 2009, in the last downturn, I was running a fashion jewelry brand with my wife. She was the founder of the company. I was the CEO. We'd been running it for many years. Suddenly, we were massively impacted by the economic downturn of that time. And the one that we're headed into now is gonna be much worse. I'll bet any amount of money on.

That.

And who knows how bad or whatever, but it's massively disruptive, right? So our business was seriously disrupted, but we began a series of reinventions. And as we did it, we said, you know what, there are lots that was fine about the old business, but a lot about it sucked too. So let's start to reexamine every little thing. The product we sell, the way we sell it, who we sell it to, the prices we sell it at, what when we get paid, when we pay for stuff, how we produce it, how we package it, how we ship it, all of those kinds of things, and in the background of all of it is how could we be 10x, what we're doing now, how could we do it dramatically differently? And that level of thinking impacted the product. The pricing, the distribution, the promotion, the customer interactions, where we sourced it from, how we sourced what it looked like, the price points, a whole range of. We were still in the jewelry business. It was still fashion driven jewelry sold through retailers mostly. There was also quite a bit and grew then later online sales. But we went through a whole series of that thing. And that approach had people coming in and saying, you know what, I don't want to ship that way. Why don't we get these things packed overseas at the point of production, packaged this way so that we have less touching to do here and moving around of things. And that'll improve the tarnishing, reduce the tarnishing and reduce the handling and the cost and the speed, speed up the shipment and that kind of thing. And where we went to, where we could ship a certain amount per day, suddenly we could ship 10, 20 times that amount in a single day.

It's so good, it's such an instructive thing for people to grab onto that we can examine each aspect of our business, whether it's distribution or price point, or product offering or HR policies or facilities, and one at a time, really examine them and say, all right, is there a better way? You know, let's really look at it in the context of today, not when the thing was put in place at the beginning. And look, if it's perfect, don't change, don't change just for the sake of it. But maybe there is a better way. And by systematically going kind of point by point through one's business, back to my comment earlier, you can be the company that puts yourself out of business with a better version. And times like these, when the world is shifting. When we're locked down and perhaps have a little more time on our hands, that's the perfect time to go into the lab, to go into the artist studio and reimagine your business one aspect at a time.

You know, I think this applies in every case. If you think about it now, your business is in one of three extremes right now. Your business right now is either like demand has skyrocketed because what the world needs right now, you supply and you've got heavy demand. And that's not that many, but there's a few like that, right? You do delivery, you do touchless kinds of things, you sell personal protect, whatever it is, right? There's that category. Then there are the people that are just kind of chumming along. It's more or less the same, maybe a little increased or a little decreased, but it's in the same ballpark. And then there are the people who are substantially impacted, either entirely or nearly. In any case, it would benefit you to start to reinvent and reimagine things. So if you're suddenly deluged and you're in a flood of business right now, reimagining things will help you deal with and level up that flood so that it doesn't kill you, because that can kill you as much as a lack of business. And if your business is effectively over for the time being, it wouldn't hurt you to reinvent now to see what you might create out of the legacy of what you had in the past. Could you pivot or work in some new way that did work for the times of whatever you're dealing with in your local environment or your sandbox? And then the one in the middle is tempted to do nothing just to kind of hang in there, except, you know, that change isn't over yet. Like, we're not like through the middle of anything. We're in a period of shift. You look back to the depression, you look back to the last recession. It's a multi year period of shift. And if it's like the depression, you're looking at at least three years of development of the crisis.

Well, P.S. that's only one factor. So obviously the crisis is high on everybody's mind and it's certainly traumatic. But. But you've got a lot of other factors also changing at an unprecedented rate. You have technology advancement, you have consumer shifts, you have demographic changes, you have geopolitical turmoil, you have tariffs like check, check, check. So you're playing a multidimensional game here. And it's funny you're right. The one that is doing okay, that's actually a riskier position than most people think. And I always liken the world that we're living in today.

Because you're complacent, right?

Well, you can become complacent. That's right. You can feel like, hey, I've cracked the code, and like, everything's good, and I don't need to change, and I just keep doing what I'm doing and why rock the apple cart? And all these other ridiculous cliches. I think that what we're living in is a game of Frogger. I don't know if you remember that 1980s game.

Yes, I do.

But if anyone's listening that doesn't know it, you're basically this little frog, and your job is to cross the river. Problem is, you can't swim, so you have to jump on the back of solid surfaces, like the back of a turtle or the back of a log or an alligator or a lily pad. Here's the thing. You leap from one solid surface to the next, and now you're safe. But if you do nothing, if you stand still, you fall into the raging river and die. So the whole thing about Frogger is in the context of challenging times, you have to leap from one solid surface to the next to the next quickly. And that's exactly what we need to do in our businesses when we land on a solid surface. Yeah, let's slap high five. Let's drink the champagne. Let's celebrate the victory. But then we got to quickly say, all right, where's the next lily pad? Where's the next back of an alligator or a log that I can jump on next? Because standing still is the riskiest thing that we can do.

Yeah, it's a brilliant thing. This notion of normalcy, a stability is illusory. Right. There is nothing. The only thing constant is change, which is a funny and uncomfortable thing. But it's pretty liberating if you give up that notion that.

Yes, exactly. And so we just got to get used to that. Our job is to innovate and then keep innovating forward, keep putting ourselves out of business, keep coming up with a new and upgraded version, whether it's individually or organizationally, so that we're able to continue to win.

So what are your sort of key points, then, for how do I become more innovative and how do I do this on a regular basis? What are the. The steps or recommendations you would have for folks?

Well, one is carve out a little bit of time, not A lot. I learned to play guitar by practicing every day for 15 minutes a day. And so it doesn't have to be a massive investment of time or money. It can be just small little habitual acts that start to build your creativity muscle. A couple other things. I think it's important that we don't look at creativity only as product development or only as something that's massive. As mentioned earlier, let's look at applying creativity to all the aspects of our lives and our businesses and apply it to the little stuff, not just the big stuff. And the better you get at creative problem solving, which is sort of defensive creativity and inventive thinking, which is kind of playing offense, the better you're going to be at uncovering and then ultimately bringing forward the biggest ideas. So in other words, let's democratize the act of innovation. Let's make sure that this is something that is truly accessible to us all.

That'S really useful to think about and a great place to end. So a couple follow up things. If you want to know more about Josh Langner, just go to his website. Of course, we'll put that in the show notes. And then you've got 21 days of inspiration. If you'd just like a little bit of inspiration over a 21 day period, you can go to 21.platypuslabs.com and Josh will send you out a little blast every day that'll help you in this time to be a little more innovative, a little more playful in your approach to what you're dealing with.

Yeah, it's exactly right. And by the way, that's not a spam thing. There's no cost. But if you like 21 days of a 3 minute read once a day, that'll be helpful. It's sort of like the equivalent of your daily guitar lesson. And the whole notion is building a habit of thinking creatively. And what that happens is you just start to build the skill set. And it's funny, I play jazz music and often people think of jazz musicians as wildly creative human beings. But frankly we're no more creative or less so than anybody else. And the research is so clear that all of us as human beings have enormous reservoirs of creative capacity. We're sort of hardwired to be creative and we can be creative in different ways. Like I can play jazz guitar. I can't even draw a stick figure if I try. But the point I'm making is that this is not some superpower that's, that's anointed on a select few and the rest of us have to suffer. All of us, seriously. All of us can build these skills, apply them in our businesses, and use it as a really powerful competitive advantage.

Yeah, it's powerful. Well, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us today. I think it's a really timely, useful topic for people to think about how to be more creative and inventive in their approach as they deal with the challenge not only of this time, but of every time, and the challenge of just leading and growing a business. So thanks again, Josh, for joining us. We'll talk to you everyone again next time. All right, if this was helpful for you, please pass it along to somebody else. Turn somebody else on to the Scaling up podcast and then like it and subscribe and and give us comments reviews. That all helps us. But if you subscribe, you'll get them every week. You can drop us an email with feedback, questions, comments, or if we can help you with anything to info scalingcoach.com info scalingcoach.com is the email. Special thanks again to Vern Harnish, author and creator of our Scaling Up Framework and the original Rockefeller Habits. The show is produced by Lucy Summers, our audio is edited by Alberta Burge at Podfly Productions, and the show notes are written by Ein Kudina and then proofread by Tim McGowan. Thanks again for listening and keep Scaling Up.

Sam.