435: How Anyone Can Turn An Unsolved Problem Into a Breakthrough Success with Danny Warshay

This is the Read to Lead podcast, episode 435.

Scarce resources. Why is that a benefit? I like to say that scarce resources can provide discipline to enable you to fail fast and fail cheap, which is one of the methods that we talk about in entrepreneurship because you can't afford to take a long time and spend a lot of money. You just don't have time or money. And that enables you, it forces you to iterate quickly, to try things on a small scale.

Entrepreneurship is not a spirit or a gift. It's a process that anyone can learn and that anyone can use to turn a problem into a solution with impact. Hi, my name is Jeff Brown and you found the Read to Lead podcast, the podcast that is dedicated to your personal and professional growth, where each and every week I interview another successful and inspiring author and we dig into his or her latest book and their unique insights on number of different topics. And our topic today is indeed entrepreneurship, as I sit down with author and professor at Brown University, Danny Warshay. He's written a book called See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. I'm gonna ask Danny to share about how a lack of resources can actually be a good thing for an entrepreneur, especially in the early stages, how he can help you avoid the all-too-common and expensive mistake of developing a solution in search of a problem. I'll ask him about how learning the skill of persuasive communication has impacted not only his journey, but that of his students and plenty more. Now, you might have heard me talk about my Note-Making Mastery cohort. We're in the midst of cohort number 2 right now during the month of August. Cohort 3 will be coming in the not too distant future. And if that's something you'd like to be notified about when cohort 3 happens, you can go to readtoleadpodcast.com/list and put your name on the notifications list. What is Note-Making Mastery? Simply put, think about the content you consume because of all that you want to learn from books, from YouTube videos or TED Talks, from articles on the web, podcasts like this one, even Twitter threads. If you're like most people, you take notes on that stuff and then you don't do much with those notes for a whole host of reasons. Either they're not well organized or you can't find them when you need them, or when you do find them, you realize that past you didn't really contribute much to the notes. So you're looking at them and having to start all over again. The point of taking these notes and consuming the content those notes come from in the first place is because we want to take what we're learning and put it into action. We want to create something new. The best way to do that is by taking effective and useful notes, and that's what Note-Making Mastery is all about. So far, the feedback from students in Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 has been tremendous, which thrills me to no end. Again, if you'd like to be notified the next time it's available, go to readtoleadpodcast.com/list, enter your first name and email address, And you will be notified the next time the course is offered. It's taught live over 5 weeks, so you're learning live in real time along with all the other students. It's a lot of fun, and I think you'll get a ton out of it. ReadToLeadPodcast.com/list to get on that notifications list right now. Danny Warshay is the founding executive director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and professor of the practice at Brown University. He also runs workshops on entrepreneurship in corporate, nonprofit, academic, and governmental contexts. in countries around the world. He began his entrepreneurial pursuits while an undergraduate at Brown as a member of the Clearview software startup leadership team. Apple acquired Clearview, and since then, Danny has co-founded and sold companies in fields ranging from software and advanced materials to consumer products and media. And he got his MBA, by the way, from Harvard Business School. His new book is called See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. Danny, welcome to the Read to Lead Podcast.

Thank you so much, Jeff. A real pleasure to be here. I'm honored.

I was talking with a recent guest just a few weeks ago about creativity and how creativity can be learned. It can be taught through habits and actions. And I understand you have similar feelings with regard to entrepreneurship. So what is it that makes you believe similarly about entrepreneurship?

Well, it's a good question. I always laugh sometimes people ask me, can entrepreneurship be taught? And, you know, I've been teaching entrepreneurship at Brown for 17 years. I tell you, you better be able to teach it or else I've been wasting my time for about 17 years. I think back to even when I was asked to teach out of the blue, a beloved professor of mine from Brown, Barrett Hazeltine, tapped me on the shoulder and he said, hey, you have some experience in entrepreneurship. You went to Harvard Business School. maybe you could come to Brown and be a professor and help us teach entrepreneurship. And I did have to think a minute. I thought, first of all, I've never taught anything. Am I really the right guy to do this? But you can't really say no to Barrett Hazeltine. And then I realized, whoa, what did I sign up for? Brown doesn't have a business school. And in a dominantly liberal arts institution, how am I going to do that? So that may be kind of what you're asking. And I can tell you the story, if you'd like, very quickly about what did I do. You know, I was panicking, thinking, man, I'm going to be in— Yeah. In front of a group of very smart Ivy League students, what am I going to do to teach them entrepreneurship? I had had my own entrepreneurial experience throughout the early part of my career. I even went to Brown. I was a history concentrator. I'm a big proponent of liberal arts for any endeavor. And I thought, well, maybe there's a connection with entrepreneurship. And interestingly, I was appointed as a faculty member in the engineering school. They had to find someplace for me. And I realized this phrase that I had heard throughout my early career, entrepreneurial spirit. Have you heard that phrase before?

Often, yeah.

Yes, and a lot of people have. And I thought, well, surely my charge cannot be to teach a spirit because how would you even do that? And then I realized, well, imagine the engineering school if that were our approach. You know, we wanted to teach somebody bridge building and we said, you know, just go out there and have the bridge building spirit. And, you know, throw up a bridge and be really enthusiastic. And if the bridge crashed and the cars and the trucks ended up crashing down to earth, then just go out there and have more bridge-building spirit. And I realized, well, that's no way to teach somebody how to build a bridge. We wouldn't be trusted to teach anything in this Brown engineering school. And so I realized, no, in bridge building, you could distill some fundamental principles that all bridges and all bridge building have in common. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end to every bridge building with lots of room for variation of all kinds— aesthetic, operational, functional. And I realized there must be a similar way to teach entrepreneurship, a structured process. And so I did some research and I thought through my own entrepreneurial experience. When I was that history concentrator at Brown, I fell into an opportunity to be part of the leadership team of a startup software company. We built it up and we sold it to Apple. This was in the late '80s. And sometimes I have to clarify with my young students that there were computers in the late '80s. But I could distill some fundamental principles that all entrepreneurial ventures would have in common, a beginning, a middle, and an end with lots of variation for any type of venture that we might want to think about starting. And that's what I did. And so I developed this entrepreneurial process the See, Solve, Scale process, which, you know, is the basis of the title of my book. And it resonated really enthusiastically with lots of students across campus, Hmm. who in a business environment, I think, wouldn't have been drawn to the idea of entrepreneurship. But it's a structured process, just like a bridge-building process, that anyone can learn, they can master, and then they can apply. And I've had well over 3,000 students over these 17 years at Brown, and I also taught at Yale and at Tel Aviv University. And then, as I say, in lots of professional contexts, and I still do this at big companies, big firms, big organizations all over the world. And I know that I can teach it. I can help people learn it, master it, and then apply it.

More specifically, let's define that. And I'm curious to know how you define entrepreneurship for your students. You know, when I think entrepreneurship, I see lots of definitions. It could be someone starting a new company, creating a new product that they're putting out to the world. You know, solopreneur is a popular term for someone who maybe sells courses online and calls themselves an entrepreneur. I'm not discounting that. I do that. But how do you define it more specifically, in particular for your students and in that context?

Yeah. It's a really important question. And I think it even relates again to the title of my book, especially the subtitle, How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. And the way I thought about defining it back when I was first asked to teach, is a structured process for solving problems without regard to the resources you currently control. And there's a lot in that definition that if we had a whole semester, we would unpack. But fundamentally, if you think about it as a structured process for solving problems, you can realize then it would appeal to lots and lots of different kinds of people all over the world who are facing all sorts of problems. Climate change, healthcare issues, issues related to systemic racism, financial market challenges. Like anywhere you look, you see challenges. Some are technology-focused, some are not. And the outcome, the specific entity you might form as a function of that process is something that I'm agnostic about. And that's partly why it appeals to people in big companies who are solving problems internally. big nonprofits who are doing great things to improve the world, research labs. I work with researchers at Brown and elsewhere. I did a workshop just last week online for a group of PhD neuroscience students at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and also those at Brown. And their ambition has nothing to do with commercializing. It has to do with solving important problems that will help people's brains function more effectively. So if you think about it as a methodology for solving problems, you can then realize, oh, well, that applies to anybody in any kind of context who's looking to solve a problem. And part of the mission of the book is that subtitle, How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. And so part of my mission in teaching, part of my mission at the Nelson Center and all that we're doing at Brown, part of the mission of the book is to empower, to teach, to enable lots of would-be problem solvers who been ignored, neglected, and in some cases discriminated against. If you think of how few women and people of color have been invited into the realm of entrepreneurship, we need to empower many more people who've been left out of entrepreneurship, who are now, I think, through this kind of teaching, broader footprint, feeling empowered to use the methodology to solve important problems.

You mentioned resources. And it, and it sounds counterintuitive at first, but, but why would a lack of resources actually be a good thing for an entrepreneur, especially as you say, in the, in the early stages of the process?

Right.

Isn't that surprising? Right. It's, it's often counterintuitive. People think, well, I can't be an entrepreneur because I don't have the right pedigree, the right degree from the right school. I don't come from the right part of the world or the right part of this country. I don't look like a classic entrepreneur. I'm an introvert, not an extrovert. All sorts of reasons why people either disqualify themselves or worse, as I say, based on either overt or unconscious bias, have been left out of entrepreneurship. The good news in what I've discovered and what I've also researched and I see in my practice teaching all over the world, especially in places that feel themselves disadvantaged, in the— especially in the early stages of the process where you're just trying to figure out What problem to solve. And then also in the stage where you start to solve it. Yeah. I talk about these polar opposites, which I think you noted and are surprising. The benefits of scarce resources, where the fewer resources you have actually can work in your favor. And the opposite, which is the burdens of abundant resources, which means the more resources, the more money you have, the more track record, the more established focus on a market, the more, you know, people you have on your team, all that can work against you. And if you like, would it be helpful to unpack that a little bit?

Absolutely.

What the heck does that mean? So scarce resources, why is that a benefit? I like to say that scarce resources can provide discipline to enable you to fail fast and fail cheap, which is one of the methods that we talk about in entrepreneurship, because you can't afford to take a long time and spend a lot of money. You just don't have time or money. And that enables you— it forces you to iterate quickly, to try things on a small scale, realize that you're not going to get it right the first time. And so you iterate again and you do that very quickly. You test hypotheses because, again, you don't have resources that you can afford to waste fully trying to scale something initially. Scarce resources also motivate you to collaborate with other people, and those people can often bring complementary skills and backgrounds and experience. If you were an established big organization with lots of resources, you might not be as motivated to collaborate with others, and you would miss the opportunity to bring new kinds of perspectives to the table. And in exchange, in those collaborations, if you have scarce resources, the new people often require you to share risks and rewards of the ventures. So you have kind of a team that's bought into the venture that you're looking to launch. The other side of it is, as they say, the burdens of abundant resources, and those can hinder you. And I talk in the book about a number of case studies where I illustrate that big resources abundance can force you to be too conservative. Because you're focused on preserving and protecting those resources, and they prevent you from seeing new opportunities and new innovations You become too fixed on a particular outcome. They might make you overconfident. Oh, we're the market leader here. We, of course, are going to be able to crush any new competition. But often those market leaders protect their existing models and they miss new opportunities to innovate in new approaches. They also— if you have all the resources you think you need, you lack an incentive to share risk. And those abundant resources then can make you make bets that you wouldn't make if you had big bets, if you had scarce resources. And if you don't have the incentive to share risk, you might miss the opportunity to collaborate with others who would form a more diverse and inclusive team and add value to your venture. So I could share a couple of examples of that, but that at least fundamentally is the idea of why I say The benefits of scarce resources and the burdens of abundant resources.

Thanks for unpacking that.

I'm thinking of an all too common and expensive mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make that I've made in developing a solution in search of a problem. Right. Let's dive into the, the See, Solve, Scale model, starting with See. How does See address this?

Okay. So See means figure out the problem that you should be focusing on. If entrepreneurship is a structured process for solving problems, then you ought to make sure that you're starting with the problem. And all too often I find, as you say, especially tech people will do the opposite. They will start with a solution and then it goes searching for a problem. And that's really dangerous. It's just luck if you happen to stumble on a problem that fits your technology. And instead, I teach an anthropological empathetic approach to observing and listening, keeping your eyes and ears open in contexts where people are behaving normally. Naturally. That's why I call it anthropological. It might be in their homes, it might be in their offices, it might be in a hospital, it might be in a factory. But making sure you are starting by being humble and not assuming you know what other people are experiencing. I share in great detail how to do this. And actually, some of this comes out of my training in brand management at Procter& Gamble, where I went right after Harvard Business School. And And at the time I thought it's the least entrepreneurial place I've— I'll ever be. And yet P&G is just fantastic. And I share a couple of specific examples related to the Tide brand and to the Dawn dishwashing liquid brand. My students do this very well. They're able to observe and listen, ask very open-ended questions, get people just to, even if they don't know it, reveal to you some of what's pissing them off about what makes them disgruntled or unhappy about a product. certain kind of interaction or product or service. And again, I share some good examples in the book about that, including one or a couple ventures that my students started. One I mentioned in the book is Casper Mattress Company.

Yeah.

The founders who were my students, Neal Parikh and Luke Sherwin, knew nothing about the mattress industry except that it was contrived in a bizarre way. that forced you to go through a whole process of visiting a showroom and figuring out how to get the mattress to your house and being stuck with it. They had no resources. So a good example of the benefits of scarce resources.

Mm-hmm.

They didn't even know how the current model worked. So they weren't tied to it. They weren't fixed on it. They weren't overconfident like lots of the established mattress companies were. They went to showrooms and they saw, they kept their eyes open. They were anthropological and empathetic and realized where the problems were in the whole supply chain. They did that first step of the process, see, which I call bottom-up research, to really understand firsthand, to observe and listen to people going through this really broken system of how people were forced to buy mattresses. And that set the stage for the other 2 steps of their process, solve and scale.

Yeah.

And I want to jump into solve. We're talking about going from identifying a problem to developing a value proposition, right? And you break this down, as I recall, into 2 phases. I want to kind of dig into those now, first with the mindset guidelines related to this step that you lay out.

Yeah.

And even maybe before that, just to lightly touch on it, because I think it's one of the most important parts of the book, is even who's on your team when you're looking to solve a problem. And we can dig into it more if we have time, but at least I want to make sure that it's clear that a big part of the message of this book is the critical importance of diversity and inclusion among venture teams. And when I say diversity, I mean that in some of the kind of classic ways we talk about, but I also talk about it in terms of things that you might not typically think of. And I share the research about this, academic research, because I don't just trust my own anecdotal evidence. The most diverse teams are the ones that tend to be the most successful. Teams whose members come from different backgrounds, contribute different skills, embrace different points of view, comprise different personality types like introverts and extroverts, races and genders for sure. And especially teams that draw on these differences, because it's not good enough just to constitute a diverse team if you don't actually give people the latitude and permission to be their authentic selves and bring everything they could bring to the table. You have to create not just a diverse team, but an inclusive team. And I say that especially in the solve stage that you're asking me about, because who's around the table has probably more effect on the outcome than any other variable that you can control. And there's a whole section in the book about, okay, I get it. How do I constitute— how do I recruit a diverse team through your weak ties, not your strong ones? You asked about mindset guidelines. I don't have time here to walk you through every one, but I'll just give you one example. There's a concept. And by the way, I cite 11 human errors throughout the book that are a function of our cognitive bias that get in the way of our being successful entrepreneurs. And those are things that are not our fault. Our brains are wired in a certain way that we suffer from these 11 cognitive biases that I talk about throughout the book. I flag them as human errors. One is this concept. Again, this is where the mental stretch you asked about will come in handy. One of those human errors is humans, we all tend to suffer from something called mental fixedness. We think that the way the world will always work is the way that the world has worked to this point.

Mm-hmm.

And that is a real handicap when we think about entrepreneurship because we're looking to solve problems. We want to change the world. And so if our brains are wired in a way that we're actually more used to seeing into the future the way we reflect into the past, that's a problem. So one really important mental stretch, and I walk you through a number of exercises to break your mental fixedness, is that part of it. So before you even try to solve anything, it's sort of like if you were a professional soccer player, you wouldn't just run out onto the field and run around for 2 hours. You would make sure that your body was ready for that process. You would stretch. And so I provide a number of mental stretches. I'll just give you one good example of mental fixedness. There was a team of 2 psychology researchers at Harvard, Ellen Langer and Alice Piper, and they did a really interesting experiment that touches on this idea of how our brains are just fixed based on the way we are normally working. They told one group that you were going to write some things down and make a few mistakes. And they gave them each a pencil, a piece of paper, and a rubber band. And they said, this is a pencil, this is a piece of paper, this is a rubber band. And only 3% of that cohort realized that you could also use that rubber band as an eraser. Then they had a second cohort and they said the same setup. I'm going to give you a number of things. You're going to make some mistakes. When they handed them the materials, they said, this is a pencil. This is a piece of paper and this could be a rubber band. And 39% of that cohort realized that that rubber band could also be an eraser. All it took was to shift that mental fixedness away from what is to what could be.

Hmm.

And so I provide a number of really good examples in the book of fun, easy things that your diverse and inclusive team should do In order to break your mental fixedness. And then I also then probably— I think the second part of your question is, okay, you're stretched, how do you play the game? And we can talk a little bit more about that if you're interested in what are some examples of how you get creative and innovative in actually solving the problems. And I provide a number of tools and techniques that I use in my teaching that are fun, interesting, empowering, and enable you to, once you're mind is ready for it around the table, how do you actually solve the problem that you identified in the C stage?

Yeah, if you would, Danny, unpack some of those techniques that you lay out in the book for developing a value proposition.

Well, one of them, I said, okay, you should have a very diverse team around the table and invite everybody to share their full self, to be authentic and bring to the table what attracted you to them in the first place. In terms of all the diverse parts of who they are. Well, that's hard sometimes for certain personality types, especially introverts. We think that we always have to work in teams. We don't. And so I provide a really good approach called— it sounds sophisticated— Nominal Group Technique. But we don't have to get into the details now. But fundamentally, it's how do you have a conversation in a diverse team that will encourage everybody to Contribute, participate, help solve that problem that you've discovered. And Nominal Group Technique is especially helpful for inviting people to participate who might feel a little shy or resistant or introverted. Some of the work that Nominal Group Technique structures is completely separate from the team, done individually, which is a format where frankly most problems are solved.

Hmm.

And then it invites everybody back to the table to integrate what people might have discovered Individually, and it helps meld all of that together. And it helps you figure out how do you rank and prioritize which solutions are best. It's an approach related to a concept that a mentor of mine, Bob Johnston, always says, which is diverge before you converge. And part of the technique that I teach here is be very open-minded and bring lots of ideas to the table. And again, it's easy to say, everybody says that, but I teach some techniques, including nominal technique, that'll help you do that. I I won't mention all these, but I'll mention 2 real quickly. One is an approach of structured innovation called Systematic Inventive Thinking, SIT. It was invented by a group of researchers who I know well, one named Amnon Levav. In fact, at the very end of the audiobook, which I narrate, I interview in a bonus section Amnon about Systematic Inventive Thinking.

Hmm.

And it's an incredible technique where it shares 5 patterns which have tended to yield the most enduring and innovative breakthroughs. They researched over 25,000 patents and backed into these patterns to help guide us into what are the approaches we should take. And it's again surprising. A lot of people are surprised when I teach entrepreneurship, to your earlier question, that there's a structured approach. They may also be surprised to realize that in this solve stage, the stage in which we're innovating to solve the problem, there are these 5 patterns that you might follow that don't tend to limit your approach. They tend to expand what you might find as new insights that you wouldn't find if you just said, you know, there's no kind of guardrails in the process. And then the last thing I'll mention, and again, it's kind of like, which is my favorite child? You know, which is my favorite technique? There are so many of them that are guided in the book. But again, Bob Johnston says, and I love this, it's far easier to make an innovative idea feasible than a feasible idea innovative. And this is especially hard for the corporate entrepreneurs that I mentor and teach through my workshops, because you are initially very focused on, well, what's going to fit into our budget, or what's going to fit into our— the way we divide the products into different categories. And so I provide a number of techniques and guidance that, for example, force you in your portfolio of solutions to have at least one wildcard idea, something that's demonstrably not feasible. And I talk in the book about a number of those that came out of the course, which are kind of funny at first. But when you think about it, you realize, oh, actually, that's a good place to start. And eventually, you certainly have to think about feasibility when you're in the scale section, the third section. But I help you avoid those hindrances by thinking about feasibility and execution too soon.

Now, speaking of that third section, I understand that it was your students who accused you of not taking that step yourself and maybe arguably are partly responsible for the book's existence.

They are not only partly responsible, I give them the credit. You're absolutely right. They came to me and they said, you are not doing this third step of the process. You're not scaling. You know, your course may have changed our lives and yet you're doing that only in small chunks. in the classroom at Brown. And boy, I had to thank them. And I thought, boy, you're absolutely right. That's true. How nice when the students become the teacher. And I said, well, what do I do? And they said, well, to begin with, you should write a book. And then I've done— even through COVID, we've all learned. I mean, you and I are not in a studio face-to-face. We're on Zoom here.

Mm-hmm.

We've learned how to scale what we're doing in a context that enables us to do it even online. For example, recently I did the biggest workshop I've ever done. It was for PwC, for many of its consultants, for 2,400 Hmm. Of its consultants. We did it on Zoom, we had 300 breakout rooms. And I think my students would be proud too to say, yes, that's an example of scaling. And now, you know, many thousands of people are reading the book. And there's even a LinkedIn group, a CSolve Scale LinkedIn group that people are joining from all over the world. And so yeah, scaling is that third step. I talk about having impact at scale, you want to create a solution that is addressing a strong and enduring need. And in order to do that, in order to really change the world, which is my mandate to my students, you know, I'm not talking about a little coffee shop on Thayer Street. I say actually in the book overtly, if you are not scaling something to the point where you're going to have very significant impact over the long term, that may be called something else, which is important. We need cafes. But I would call that small business I don't define that as entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has to have all 3 of these components. You have to see a problem that you want to solve. You have to solve it on an iterative basis. All those techniques I just described are not going to yield a eureka moment where you immediately stumble onto the perfect solution. It's going to take some patience, some iteration, and I talk about how to structure that. And then it definitely requires this 3rd step. And this is where it starts to layer on resources. Raising money, attracting more people to the team, maybe attracting some experts in this field that you didn't have on your team prior. But it's all 3 of these steps. And part of the problem I see in big companies, who I know are some of your listeners for Read to Lead, is that people, if they define the problem to begin with at all, but even if they do, they try to leap directly from see to scale. And that's a problem because you miss the iterative nature of the solve step. And inevitably those fail. And worse than failing, it's not failing fast, failing cheap, it's failing really slow and expensive. And it means that you've bet a lot on that one kind of random first iteration. And instead, especially in big companies, it takes some effort for me to get them to learn how to tolerate iteration and failure. And that's one of the chief parts of the scale stage. The other, I'll just mention briefly, I introduce a technique here that again, I owe in its embryonic form to Bob Johnston, who helped me put together this thing called the landscape exercise. And landscape exercise helps especially young, inexperienced entrepreneurs think big, which is a challenge. It's one part of our mental fixedness again, being able to think far enough into the future at a scale that can really have significant impact. And they need a tool like the landscape exercise that I cover in the 3rd section of the book to help them reach the point of even envisioning what scale could be to have big long-term impact.

There's some very practical chapters at the end of the book, some pitch documents, some pitch mistakes to avoid, common pitfalls That plague a lot of entrepreneurs when it comes to pitching. I love also that you include a chapter on persuasive communication. I was delighted to see that. How has learning this skill impacted not only your journey, but that of your students, would you say?

Yeah, that's— I really appreciate your pointing to that. You know, I honor my father who unfortunately passed away 5 years ago from pancreatic cancer, and he was a NASA engineer. There was a story he always was proud to tell us that our school system in Shaker Heights, Ohio came to him for some advice on What should the curriculum look like in this new science magnet school? And the first thing out of his mouth was, you need to teach people how to write. And the administrators of the school system said, no, no, no, you may not have heard us. This is a science curriculum. And he said, absolutely. It doesn't make any difference what kind of scientific breakthrough you could have. And he was a NASA engineer, chemical engineer, so he had several of his own. But he said, if you can't pitch it, if you can't communicate it in writing and verbally, it's worthless. And I pay honor to a professor of mine, a collaborator now at Brown, a world's expert in communication, Barbara Tenenbaum, and with her blessing, share a number of the techniques for communicating persuasively to an investor, to a— you know, we talked about recruiting teams, to a client, to a customer. I also talk about a number of the classic mistakes I see students making throughout these last 17 years and I catalog. I'm up to 41 and I always share that list with my students and I say, these are kind of the answers to the test. Don't make these same mistakes. You're not going to be perfect. I encourage you to take risks and make new ones. And then I'll encourage you to share those mistakes and I'll add them to the list. So that list is cumulative. It keeps growing. One of the classic mistakes is how people share what they're doing with with an unknown person, they bombard them with what I know is in fashion these days, a pitch deck, you know, 20 slides that are really detailed and supposedly look beautiful with lots of pictures. Honestly, it's, it's a little bit embarrassing and it's a little bit inappropriate. If somebody sends me, here's 15 to 20 pages I'd like you to pore over over the next 30 minutes. No, I, I share the guidance that I teach in my class and I walk you through in the book of 3 separate documents, a 1-page executive summary that is both concise and comprehensive, very challenging balance to achieve. And I walk you through what each element should look like, what you should include, what you shouldn't include, a more detailed written plan. And I walk you through what that should look like. And then yes, a deck that you can use not to send to somebody, Because that's again, I think, unprofessional, inappropriate, presumptuous, but to structure a conversation either in person or more typically these days over Zoom. And those 3 documents work really well. I share some examples from my courses of people who've done that well. Imperfect Foods, one of the founders of Imperfect Foods, Ben Chesler, was my student. I suspect many of your listeners have heard or maybe even are subscribers to Imperfect Foods.

Mm-hmm.

I walk you through some of the rudiments of how they pitched. They've now raised over $200 million million in venture capital.

Wow.

They have over $250 million of annual revenue. They are operating out of 43 states with 1,500 employees. And most important, if you think of the problem they were looking to solve, which was that 40% of all produce in this country is thrown out because it doesn't conform to how perfect produce is supposed to look, they've saved well over 100 million pounds of produce, which is helping climate change and helping all sorts of other issues. And I walk you through some of the details of how Imperfect Foods positioned themselves to investors in order to raise as much money as they did. And at first, I was a little uncertain whether I should include those 41 mistakes to avoid, 41 pitching mistakes to avoid. I thought, I don't know, does that fit in this book? And it's amazing how much feedback I've gotten from students and others who've said, That was such a valuable thing to be in the book because it helped me realize I was making a lot of those mistakes and no one had ever told me. And so a lot of people are resonating to that portion of the book.

You talked early on about your dad's advice to the school, I believe it was, of the importance of writing as a discipline. Have you ever read Writing to Learn by William Zinsser?

I haven't, but it sounds like a really good book, Writing to Learn. I'd love to learn more about it.

I'm just starting it, but it's about 30 years old. He passed away, I think, in the '90s, but a great book so far, basically talking about the importance of developing the skill of writing regardless of discipline, that it's applicable to every discipline.

So important. I will look that book up. A really critical part of entrepreneurship.

Well, I have just a couple more questions that aren't directly related to the book, but before I get to those, did I miss anything? Anything that you want to add that we didn't talk about with regard to the book?

I appreciate that. Boy, there's so many things, you know, that I took— I took 4 years to write this book. I guess you could say I really took 17, or maybe I'm 57, 57 years. I'm really proud of what's in here. Most of all, I'm proud that my students are proud of it. And so, and it's getting a lot of play and feedback in all sorts of corners of the world. There's a concept called ikigai, which you may remember is in the book. It's this Japanese which means living a life of meaning and of purpose. I thank my youngest daughter, Marin, for turning me on to the word because she was doing this leadership course for her camp and they were teaching it. And she said, whoa, Dad, this seems to encompass the 4 things that you always tell students they should think of as guides for what to focus on. Because there's lots of problems we could academically focus on, but it's so important to think about something that is is an area that you are really good at, and I call that drive. An area that you really love to focus on, and I call that passion. An area that will have meaningful impact on the world, and I call that purpose. And an area that will pay you financially fairly for the value that you're adding. And as it turns out, Marin saw that those 4 pillars— drive, passion, purpose, and, you know, a financial transaction are the 4 elements of ikigai, which is this beautiful Japanese concept of living a life of meaning and purpose. And it turns out that it's an area that I work with my students a lot on because they're very talented. They could go off and do all sorts of things, but they don't always have the right guidance to figure out where they should end up. And I think it's so important that I made it a highlight of the book and some guidance to even think about, okay, you might know what you're good at, but you might not actually know what you love to do yet because you've— you're too young or you've been stuck in you narrowly focused on an area that you've been doing, but it's not necessarily your passion. And it's not always the case that people think in terms of purpose, what will add value to the world. And then, yeah, it's important to have, to have some way of being remunerated for the value that you're adding. I normally find that if something's not quite right, that one of those pillars is off and we can readjust the course of an entrepreneur to think in those terms. And I think it's good guidance for anybody doing anything. even if you don't describe what you're doing as entrepreneurship. And so I think for many of your listeners, it's in the book and I think it's highlighted there, but you could just Google ikigai, starts with an I-K, and you can learn a little bit about it. So thank you for asking. I'd say that's one thing I want to make sure we get in here.

Well, as you were preparing to sit down and write your book, I know that was preceded by, as it is for most authors, with a fair amount of research. And that research often involves reading a number of books. I'd be curious to know what some of your favorites are, whether it was books you found during that process or prior to that, that have had a profound impact on you.

Yeah. I always love that question. One that I read, it was the audio tape, like cassette tape version. So it'll tell you how old that was, but it was by Stephen Covey, which I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Turns out that 2 of his sons were in my class at Harvard Business School. And I was able to hear Stephen Covey come to HBS because I think his sons were able to persuade him to do so. And that motivated me to at least listen to the book. It's so profound and it had real profound impact on the way I thought about my life, my journey, even the idea that I took seriously that offer to come to Brown and teach 17 years ago. So I won't read through all the habits, But I still think it's a classic and it's one that's really important. I mean, one that I think about that is inherent in the way we think about that first step, see, you know, be anthropological, be empathetic. One of the habits that I thought was really critical is about being human, and that is how do you interact with other humans? And that is seek first to understand before being understood.

Hmm.

And so, you know, listen well, observe well, really understand what the other person is going through. before you ask them to understand you. And boy, if the world operated that way, I think we'd be in a better place.

Last question, and I especially love to ask this of authors, especially authors who are also professors, teachers. You're in the research world quite regularly, and I'm curious to know how you manage your personal knowledge, if you have any tips or techniques you're willing to share when it comes to collecting and capturing notes, Organizing those notes, distilling those notes, and then eventually, ultimately adding your own thoughts and insights and ideas and expressing those notes, whether that's publicly or in a classroom or something like that. Anything you can share with us in that regard?

Yeah. I had to learn how to do that even more effectively as I was gathering research for the book. I'd say I'm obsessive about storing information in the cloud. So it's available to me anywhere I go because I just don't know when I'm going to get a little bit of an insight or a thought. It might be listening to your Read to Lead podcast and to your other guests. It might be reading something. I mean, I found myself reading so many. In fact, if you looked at my copy of Range, I had so many Post-it notes identifying key passages. And so I realized, whoa, that's not sustainable.

Right.

And so I live through Google Docs. If anybody ever wants to send me anything, I just flat out refuse. You sent me a Google Doc, which I was proud of. I flat out refuse a static document. In fact, maybe too much inside baseball, but it took some effort for me to even persuade my publisher to use dynamic documents. I said, I'm not going to be emailing you back, you know, static manuscripts. So, you know, I'm not the biggest gadget guy, but I think I'm to the point where it can be very effective. And I do capitalize on the idea that it's unpredictable when you might be coming across something that would be useful. I do have a crazy good memory, which helps, but I don't want to rely on that. I mean, I remember details of comments from my students from the very first class 17 years ago.

Wow.

And I think I freak them out when I reference it, but it's, it's not like it's a circus trick or something, or I even try. It's just the way my mind works. I think my wife would say I'm not good at short-term memory.

Well, appreciate your time, Danny.

The book again is called See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. It is available now and it is doing quite well. And I suggest that you pick it up. Danny, thank you so much for being a guest on the show.

Really appreciate having you and you taking the time to be here.

Jeff, it's my pleasure. It's an honor to be be with the Read to Lead community. And I hope some of them will take an interest in the book and even the CSolve Scale group that I've created on LinkedIn. So thank you for having me and happy to be back if I can contribute anything further.

To find out more about Danny and to connect with him online or check out the book he recommended or my Notemaking Mastery cohort waiting list, all you need to do is go to the show notes page for this episode. That's a dedicated URL. You'll find all of that at readtoleadpodcast.com/435 for episode 435. You know, it's only fitting that Danny recommended the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. Now, some 32 years ago is when that book first came out. I am scheduled next week to welcome his daughter Cynthia, who has never appeared on the show before, and she has finished up a book that both she and her father Stephen started over 10 years ago, and I am really excited to talk to her about it and present it to you. It's called Living Life in Crescendo. That's scheduled for next week. I hope you'll be back then right here on the Read to Lead podcast. Well, that does it for this week. In the meantime, remember, leaders read and readers lead.