Danny Warshay- How to Solve Problems

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

The green notebook carried by military leaders around the world. Within those pages are sweat, tears, triumphs, and the hard-won lessons of life. Lessons worth sharing. Each week, the team dives into the notebooks of military leaders. Business professionals, authors, athletes and coaches, and entertainers to share lessons and help you lead with the best version of yourself.

Hey, it's Joe here, and every morning before I crack open a book or sit down to do some writing, the first thing I do is brew an amazing cup of Alpha Coffee. They make premium 100% Arabica coffee, and Alpha has some of my favorite blends. They have Dawn Patrol, which is a nice medium-light breakfast blend. I also enjoy Charlie Don't Surf, which is a medium Kona blend. And I even get to take Alpha Coffee to work with me because they also make K-Cups. Not only do they have great coffee, they're a great veteran-owned business who has shipped over 20,000 bags of coffee to deployed troops. They also offer a 10% discount to members of the military and first responders. And Alpha Coffee has been an awesome company to partner with at From the Green Notebook. So taste the Alpha difference and purchase their coffee today at www.alpha.coffee or via Amazon Prime. Welcome to another episode of From the Green Notebook. I'm your host, Joe Byerly, and this week we're diving into the Green Notebook of Danny Warshay. He's the executive director of the Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship at Brown University and the author of See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. You know, often we think of entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley or the startup sense, but in this episode, Danny argues that entrepreneurship is a process that anyone can follow to help identify and solve problems. And he explains why organizations have natural antibodies against new ideas and how the See, Solve, Scale process can help navigate those antibodies and get people on board. Danny's insights can also help us become better problem solvers and avoid becoming the good idea fairies that we all hate, who are always in search of problems to apply their solutions. This episode was like stepping into Danny's classroom. I learned a lot, and I hope you do too. So please welcome to the show, Danny Warshay.

So happy to be here, and, uh, an honor, and thank you so much for Ah, thank you so much for making the time to have this conversation, Danny.

A couple months ago, I got an advanced copy of your book, See, Solve, Scale: How to Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. And I think I was maybe 15, 16 pages in and immediately reached back out to the publisher to see if we could set something up. And then as I got further along into the book, I could tell that this was going to be a great message, not only for our listeners, but for me in particular. So the first question I have is, what led you to write this book in the first place?

I love that question. And it's often one of the first questions. It's even one of the first questions you may recall that I address in the book itself. And that's because I'm not sure I ever even thought about writing a book. The impetus for doing so was my students. I am a professor of entrepreneurship at Brown University. I'm the executive director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship at Brown, and I've been doing that for— well, at least teaching at Brown for about 17 years. And then I teach, as you know, in different formats, different contexts all over the world. Some big companies who will invite me to lead workshops related to my entrepreneurship teaching. Sometimes the US government or other governments invite me. So I've had well over 3,000 students and workshop attendees And many of them kept coming to me to say, wow, your teaching had really profound impact on me and on my life and on my career trajectory, which is always a wonderful thing for a professor to hear. And they pointed out that I wasn't doing the 3rd step of the process, to scale. And I thought, boy, that's interesting, you're right. And then I said, what, what should I do about it? And they said, you should write a book. And I thought, how wonderful when the students become the teacher. And so it's really because of my students that the pointed out to me that I wasn't doing the 3rd step to scale, that I embarked on writing it. And I'm not sure I really knew what I was getting into. This was about going on 4 years ago that I wrote the first words in a big Google Doc. But I'm really happy I did. And we can even talk about, you know, how the writing of the book has even influenced my teaching. The teaching certainly influenced the book. But now the book has influenced my teaching. And I'm so overjoyed that it's allowed me to meet wonderful people like you and many others around the world who are now approaching me about the impact the book is having on them. So, uh, thank you for asking that question.

It's funny that you talk about scaling and, um, you know, as I was reading it, the one thing I was thinking, I was like, wow, this is, this is like I'm taking a class from Danny as I'm reading it. And I was listening to a podcast between you and one of your former students, Haley Hoffman Smith.

Right.

And I was like, oh yeah, I remember when Danny said that. But then I was like, I was never in his class. So the scale worked there because I've never been to Brown University, but it was like taking the course as I was going through that book.

Well, that's exactly what those students meant. And Haley was a superstar in the course and is now scaling her own impact through her own podcasts and her appearances on social media as an influencer. That was a little bit of a, again, kind of surreal, wonderful moment when I was— when she hosted me on her podcast. And, you know, she was one of those voices that said, Danny, you need to scale what you're doing. So I'm thrilled that that's happening. And I'm, again, I'm happy that it had influence on you.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's begin by the definition you have of entrepreneurship. I think it's going to change the way a lot of people think about it because I'm thinking skinny jeans, lattes, and venture capital funding, but that's not it at all, is it?

Well, it might be, but it's certainly not limited to that. The way I define entrepreneurship is a structured process for solving problems without regard to the resources currently controlled. And, you know, in shorthand, it's a problem-solving methodology. And even where that came from might be interesting to some of your listeners. About 17 years ago— and for most of my career, I've been doing entrepreneurship. You know, I've been involved in a whole bunch of startups in various industries that I helped to get started and got funded and built up and then sold. And in 2005, a beloved Brown professor of mine, Barrett Hazeltine, asked me to come teach at Brown and teach entrepreneurship. And I thought, Again, like when the students asked me to write a book, I thought, I'm not sure I know how to do that. And is it even possible to teach entrepreneurship at a place like Brown, which doesn't have a business school? And so I had to think a little bit about, well, what definition for entrepreneurship would be appropriate at a place like Brown, where I think most people wouldn't be thinking of themselves as kind of skinny jeans, you know, ramen-eating entrepreneurs, again, where there was no business school. And so that definition has worked really well at Brown because it's a much broader footprint that engages people who are looking to solve problems. And that is one thing that many, many, many Brown students are looking to do. They're looking to change the world, to have impact. And that also then seemed to work in other places, other contexts. Again, like when the US Embassy in Bahrain asked me to go there. I had to first look up on a map where Bahrain was. I sort of knew, but the mission there was to try to help Bahrain do economic development and think about alternatives to oil because their oil supply was drying up. And then when I go to other places in the Middle East, I teach in Israel, I teach in Palestine, sometimes I teach Palestinians and Israelis together. I do a bunch of work with Seeds of Peace. the mission there is not, you know, selling a lot of widgets. It's, I mean, it really is world peace. And so I realized that that definition of structured process for solving problems could apply to a whole range of places throughout the world where entrepreneurship wasn't so typical. And it could, I mean, you mentioned the subtitle of the book, How Anyone can turn an unsolved problem into a breakthrough success. It's really the emphasis on anyone, because— and we can talk about it— but there's lots of people in the world who've been neglected, ignored, maybe even discriminated against from mainstream entrepreneurship. And the mission of my teaching, the mission of the Nelson Center at Brown, and the mission of the book is inclusion, to enable anybody to learn this process, to master it, And then apply it to solving consequential problems.

As I was reading it, it's one of those frameworks that, as I was working through the book, that all of a sudden, every problem I started seeing, I started seeing it through that lens. And I think it's really important to have a framework because in large organizations, especially like the military or the government, there's a thing that you talk about in the book that as soon as you come up with an idea, if all your ducks aren't in a row, it could quickly get shut down. I wonder if we could talk about that first before we actually start working our way through the process, kind of set the landscape together.

That's a great place to start, especially because, as I say, and this is a little bit unusual for entrepreneurship teaching and books, this is a methodology that I— and I know because I do a lot of work in big established organizations, in government, in nonprofits, in healthcare, and definitely in big companies, Recently, I was asked to do— lead the biggest workshop I've ever led in my life, and it's enabled through the fact that we've learned how to do things remote. It was for PwC. There were 2,400 people in the workshop. We had 300 breakout rooms, and that was great and good for PwC for recognizing that they wanted to do that and figuring out a way to engage me to do it. Very big organizations suffer from 3 areas of resistance, and I talk about these in the book. I borrowed them from excellent mentors of mine, Bob Johnston, Doug Bate, Marta Reiss from Strategy Innovation Group. They talk a lot about these 3 forces that work against entrepreneurship. One is corporate gravity, and they define it as an invisible force that prevents employees from venturing too far from the current business model. Or he might shorthand it by saying, that's not the way we do things. And you can imagine— I don't think you have to imagine much. And look, sometimes there's good reason for that. In the military, I'm sure, if you don't have standard operating procedures for certain things, people can get killed. And that's, that's of course necessary. But too often, some of those things in well-established organizations prevent people, as you say, from moving too far in the direction of changing the way things are done. And look, let's face it, that's what entrepreneurship is. It's about changing and solving problems. The second way they describe this is corporate myopia, which they define as— and I talk about in the book at greater length— a condition where the urgency of today's business supersedes the importance of the future business, resulting in a nearsighted perspective. And that's often a function— and again, I think this is probably true in the military, you can tell me— but leaders are often asked to do 2 things, and both are very difficult to do at once. One is sustain the fortress. The other is to invent the future. And corporate myopia is the tendency to focus too much on sustaining the fortress. Continuing to do things the way things are normally done. And then the third force, and I'm sure the military experiences this, is what is called a corporate immune system. The role played by current systems and processes to repel anything that threatens the current stability of the overall organization. So that's where it's not just a sense that we shouldn't be doing things that are different, but it's actual systems that are developed to repel things that might be new. Immune systems are important, clearly. We all need them or else we would die. But if they overheat and they prevent good things from entering your body, then that might be a problem. And that's also a problem, again, metaphorically, in a corporate immune system. So I, I'm glad you started there. Corporate gravity, corporate myopia, corporate immune systems are things I talk a lot in the book, especially about, as we're setting the stage, what are some things you have to be aware of when you might be entrepreneurial, looking for a problem to solve in an established organization?

I appreciate you, again, beginning with that. And I think that one of our strengths in the military a lot of times is that you could hand me a blanket, And go tell me to go sit in the snow over there and like, you know, I'll sit there for a couple days and, you know, just kind of tough it out. But that's also a weakness too, because it's like, well, why are you sitting in the snow in the first place? Like, why? There's a heated building right over there, you know? And so we have the tendency to kind of just endure when there's problems all around us that we can solve. But, but there are, there's so many immune systems, there's so many antibodies. And I think that, you know, people with an entrepreneurial mindset have to be careful because, you know, sometimes you just get so passionate, so excited about an idea that you're ready to just walk around with a box of matches and just start throwing them all over the place. And you end up burning the idea down before you're even able to pitch it. So again, going back to what we're about to talk about, I think this is a great way to, you know, have a system, have a process to where all your stuff is wired tight. And you're not this radical who's going around the organization and, as I've heard some people say, use a suicide vest to blow yourself up before you even see any traction with that idea.

Right. And we can talk about that. What's the best way to influence the people around you? What's the best way to get something started so you gain credibility and momentum? What's the best way to avoid failure being catastrophic and blowing up the entire context. That's all important. Even the idea of a process itself sometimes does— most people find it a relief that there's something that they can learn. And then, as I say, master and apply. Because I remember back when that fateful tap on the shoulder from my former professor Hazeltine happened 17 years ago. And I was a little bit stymied myself to think, how do I teach entrepreneurship, especially at a place like Brown? I realized that I'm in the engineering school, that's where my faculty appointment is. And I thought, well, it can't be that we would teach this approach that a lot of times I hear, and maybe you've heard, called entrepreneurial spirit. And, you know, a lot of people around the world will tell me, oh yeah, I've heard that. Well, I don't know what that means. And I know a lot about entrepreneurship. And I certainly don't know how to teach a spirit. And so I thought, it has to be something more routinized than that. And I realized in engineering, if we were to build a bridge or teach people how to build a bridge, and if we said, you know what, just go out there and have the bridge-building spirit, you know, and if the bridge collapses, and the cars and the trucks fall down to earth, then just go out there and have more spirit. And yet, that's the way I heard people talking about teaching entrepreneurship. And I thought, that's crazy. In bridge building, you can distill fundamental principles that you can teach somebody, they can learn it. They can master it, and they can apply it to any bridge building. And there's lots of room for variation of all kinds— operational, aesthetic, functional. And I thought in entrepreneurship the same. We can distill fundamental principles that every new venture will adhere to, leaving lots of room for variation of all different kinds. I did a lot of academic research when I was asked to teach at Brown. I figured, I ought to learn the research. And so I distilled these 3 steps of a process, which, you know, you've now read in the book and which are the bedrock of my teaching.

Right. So let's begin with the first one. I guess what I understand is when I have a good idea, I'm just supposed to go around and find the problem that fits with the idea, right? Is that—

No, that's— so that's actually a good setup. Exactly. No, that's the opposite of what you should do. That is what I call being a solution in search of a problem. And that's very dangerous. And it's often what I find tech people doing, not only tech people, but especially tech people. And remember, I'm in the engineering school, so even some of my colleagues, tech people tend to fall in love with their tech. It's a cool thing, and it may very well be cool, but cool tech is not a place to start. It's not necessarily valuable or useful. It doesn't necessarily solve a problem. So if entrepreneurship is a structured process for solving problems, The right place to start is to find and validate what that problem is, to really understand the problem. I call it an unmet need. And so the first step of the process, C, is to do something that I teach in my classrooms, in my workshops, and also is the first part of the book, is something I call bottom-up research. And it's to be anthropological and empathetic, to listen and to observe people, Behaving very naturally in their own habitats, their own workplaces, and to learn what they're dissatisfied with. And one really interesting insight, and I share a few kind of fun, entertaining, I hope entertaining stories that illustrate this.

They're entertaining. Yes.

Okay. Is that often the people who are experiencing these problems don't even necessarily identify them as problems. They just, it's like you sitting on a pile of snow. with a blanket, well, you're just supposed to do that. You didn't know any better. And if I said, hey, Joe, what's the story with you sitting on the pile of snow? What's the problem there? You might not say that it is even a problem. Again, I talk about several examples in this section of the book, 2 from Procter& Gamble, where I worked in brand management for a while. And the consumers of these products that I illustrate didn't even realize that they were having a problem. So I train people to do anthropological, empathetic, bottom-up research as a way to do the first step, to observe and listen to people behaving naturally, not just asking them, by the way, what's your problem? Because they may not know that they have a problem or may not recognize a way to describe it to you. And I quote Albert Einstein in the first part of the book where I say, You should invest disproportionately in this part. If you do this part of the process really well, the second and the third step will flow very naturally. If you don't do it really well, it's like building a house on a faulty foundation. It just won't work. And the Einstein quote is, if I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes Defining the problem, because once I've done that effectively, I can spend the rest of the 5 minutes solving it. So I say, think about it in those ratios. Spend a disproportionate amount of time upfront in the see stage, really understanding the problem. And I guide you through all sorts of ways to relax your bias, to be able to see things that you might not have normally seen, to hear people, To pay attention to things that seem a little wacky at first, but over time might reinforce your perception of a problem. And again, once you do that, just like Albert Einstein says, the rest of the process will flow very naturally.

You know, one of the things that we do all the time in the military is we'll bring groups of people together and just kind of ask them questions, which I think there's a place for that. But one of the things that you point out in the book, but it's actually watching somebody go through the process of doing something to kind of figure out that there's an unmet need? Because a lot of times, like you said, just asking the question is not going to necessarily have the person identify that there's a problem.

Absolutely right. Yeah, I warn against what sounds like you were describing, focus groups, or I also warn against surveys. Surveys and focus groups are not at all an anthropological way of watching people behave naturally. In fact, you couldn't even imagine a more contrived way of trying to observe people. Nobody comes to a focus group, sits around a table with a facilitator, and having, you know, often a couple of extroverts dominate the conversation. That's not normal conduct, and nor is conducting a survey where you're filling out a series of questions that focus you on what the survey wants you to focus on, not necessarily on what you'd be doing naturally in your own environment. I know, for example, you were— I'm, I'm super proud to be talking to you. You were just deployed overseas helping the efforts nearby Ukraine. Imagine the difference between being there with you and observing you and the other people who you were deployed with interact with whatever you were interacting with on a daily basis— weaponry, communication devices, Clothing, food, like all the things you're dealing with, versus you and a few of your colleagues around a table back on a base somewhere in the United States, where you're trying to describe what you were doing, and you, no matter how well you do it, won't do it justice. There's just such a difference between my observing you and listening to you. In the moment versus second or third or 10th hand, trying to appreciate it just because you're sitting around a table or you're filling out a survey. There's just no comparison.

It reminds me of a story. I just recently did an episode with Jennifer Moss, and she was talking about the burnout epidemic. And one of the things that she talked about was this hospital administrator, instead of sitting in his office, actually started walking around the hospital. And on this particular floor, there were nurses who were waiting like 30 minutes for a copier that was way on the other side of the hall. I mean, like, and you started looking at the frustration that was caused from that, the amount of time that they were waiting, the lost productivity, all those things. But it was him observing this happening and in observing it, he was able to fix the problem. But he, he never would've known that if he was just sitting in his office all the time, because, you know, those nurses doing what they were doing. We're just, hey, this is an issue we're having, we're just going to fight through it.

Healthcare is one of those environments where absolutely this kind of approach— and by the way, it's a good example of where even if you don't adopt immediately all 3 of the steps we're going to talk about— see, solve, and scale— there's huge benefit to being able to really understand a problem, even if you're not going to dive into an entrepreneurial solution. So the nurses who you're describing there, or the doctors who were immersed in an environment that they thought they knew very well, just being able to get out into the actual user environment, the patient environment, can yield all sorts of insights that you wouldn't gain if you were just in your office somewhere. So that's a really good shorthand way of saying, you know, get out and immerse yourself anthropologically. Again, I'll use that word so that you're doing ethnographic research. A couple of key things there. You should not try to change people's behavior when you're trying to do this first step. There may be time later. You know, one of the adages people use for this, at least in Western culture, is putting yourself in someone else's shoes. And in my teaching I always joke, and in the book I say, you're not trying to sell somebody, you're not even trying to judge somebody's shoes. Like, oh, your shoes are so 2016. No, you're just trying to understand what it's like to be in their shoes. In Japan, when I teach Japanese faculty members, they have a different way of metaphorically describing empathy. It's not about shoes, it's about synchronizing your hearts. And I really like that. That's a special way of describing— you're just trying to put yourself in the other person's position. And by the way, that is hard. That is a hard discipline among anybody who would describe herself Or himself as entrepreneurial. And I'm sure that's true in the military. You're, you're looking to change something and don't change it. You're initially trying just to understand it. The second and the third step will teach you ways to change it. But if you are biased toward wanting to change something immediately, you will not really see what people are experiencing.

Yeah. Just real quick, I'd like to say thank you for saying the word anthropological. Because I couldn't say it for whatever reason. I was, I was stuck on it.

It's a toughie.

I was like, I hopefully he says the word. So once we've observed the problem for a while, right? Like it's, then you, you dive right in with the solution, right?

Well, you dive right in tentatively. You have very good setups to this. There's all sorts of techniques in the second step of the process that I teach where you use all sorts of things to enable you To solve the problem iteratively on a small scale, where you're not going to layer on big resources. You're simply going to try because you're not going to get it right the first time. In fact, one big mistake I see people make, and especially in big organizations— I don't want to judge the military, but I could see this happening— they leap right from the first step where you're defining the problem all the way to the third step. where they start to deploy a lot of resources, money, people's reputations, maybe the supply chain, all the logistical capabilities the military has. That's a big mistake because it's inevitable that you're going to fail on some level in the second step. And fail, I know, doesn't sound very appealing, but it's inherent in the way you have to do the second step. You're going to make a few steps forward, And then you're going to take a few steps back. And cumulatively, you'll make some progress. But you don't want to start layering resources until you're really sure, or at least a lot more confident, that you've got a solution to that problem you found in the first step that is worth scaling. And so be very careful of that tendency to be so enthusiastic about your supposed first solution that you layer on too many resources.

You know, one of the things that I've done for the last couple years is I've worked with senior leaders on writing documents together. And one of the best lessons I've learned in doing that is it's better to have something on a starting point on paper and then to have that iterative process to go back and forth, to have the dialogue. Because too often, a lot of times, especially when it comes to things like that, I'll see people try to get it completely perfect. And then somewhere in the process, they realize that they're off the mark. And in doing so, in doing all that work, A, you wasted a lot of people's time working on something that was off the mark. And 2, you wasted time in general. So now there's less time to get it right. So I think that's a key part of the process too, is that iterative working things out.

One of the things you said there that's really important is trying to get it perfect. A good friend of mine and a good collaborator, and one who's actually mentioned in the book, Dan Weiner, Has this golf approach, and he says, don't try to set up and line up and spend time aiming a perfect first putt, because no matter how well you do that, it's just not going to go in the hole. Instead, just acknowledge that you're going to need 3 putts to get to the hole. And the first putt's going to get, you know, sort of directionally toward it, the second putt a little closer, and the third putt, you know, you'll probably hit it in the hole. But in the process, you'll be able to do it more nimbly, more quickly. You won't be investing, as you said, a lot of people's time to try to preliminarily aim the perfect putt. Again, I see this especially in big organizations. They try to aim perfectly, they assume they've done it, and then they start layering big budget toward launching that product. And it's foolhardy because they're not going to get it in the hole on that first putt. And so instead, I say, Don't invest a lot in the first few attempts. Do it beneath the radar. There's not a lot at stake reputationally. You're acknowledging that the first few attempts are going to be relatively crude, what Eric Ries and Steve Blank call a minimally viable product, an MVP. And if you do it on that basis, even better if you do it on the drawings basis, a blueprint. So much better, so much easier to move things around on a piece of paper or on a computer screen when there's nothing invested, and even in a minimally viable version, a prototype, but even just on paper. And then you realize, oh, well, that wouldn't work. And here's why. And by the time you start to make a prototype, let alone a final product, it'll be in such better shape. You'll have taken several putts toward the hole. I don't know if this golf metaphor works for people, but You know, it's a way of making sure that you are making good progress, again, iteratively, so that by the time we get to that 3rd step, you're in a much better position to predict success and justify layering in some serious kinds of resources. In the 2nd step that we're talking about now, there's all sorts of guidance about even related to who should be at the table. and on your team when you are engaging people to help solve the problem. Diverse and inclusive teams. One of Bob Johnston and Doug Bates and Marta Reese's other adages that I love is, people support what they help to create. So if you're in the military and you're imagining solving a problem for people on the front lines, engage people who are on the front lines in the process of understanding the problem and, uh, Solving the problem.

Yeah. And there's a line in here that I highlighted, and it was complementary ingredients improve the taste of the creative soup. And, you know, like with From the Green Notebook, you know, for years we've had a pretty diverse team of folks coming together and working together, you know, with different backgrounds. And so, you know, for me, for a few years, I've been writing with Cassie Crosby, and both of us, you know, completely different backgrounds in the military. You know, she's a woman, I'm a man. You know, she's a mom, dual military family. My wife's not in the military. And so as I was writing, just the back and forth, because of the diversity of our experiences, I felt like my writing was a lot richer for that because I wasn't trying to write pieces with somebody who had the same experiences with me, who looked like me, who thought exactly like me.

Really smart, Joe. Yeah, and that's a good example. A lot of what I talk in the book about is how the most significant variable for influencing entrepreneurial success is team composition, and in particular, how diverse and inclusive your team is. 65% of new venture startups of all kinds, in nonprofits, in military, in the arts, in medicine, everyone you can think of across the board, 65% of them fail because of something related to the team composition. And so I spent a lot of time guiding people to help them avoid those mistakes. And one of the most significant pieces of guidance I give is what you just described. And that is that diverse teams produce the kinds of creative abrasion, where you're abrading against somebody who's a little bit different from you, that leads to breakthrough solutions. And that means, as you just said, teams that come from different backgrounds, contributing different skills, embracing different points of view. comprising different personality types, you know, like introverts and extroverts, races and genders, certainly. And the important thing, though, is it's not diversity alone that will do this. In fact, there's some really good research from a professor at Harvard Business School, Frances Frei, who, with her colleague Anne Morris, talks about how if you are just a diverse team, but you don't invite people to share their authentic selves, who like all of what I just described, and you're only looking at the, you know, the middle of the Venn diagram where people overlap, those diverse teams will actually underperform homogeneous teams because homogeneous teams have much more overlap among everybody who's at the table. The key is to be both diverse and inclusive. And if you could imagine the Venn diagram where you're bringing everybody's contributions to the table, their backgrounds, their personality types, races, genders, experiences, they will outperform homogeneous teams by a lot. And so diversity and inclusion are really an important message throughout the book.

And one more plug with that is there's a great book for leaders who are just trying to wrap their heads around how to do this. And it's It's a book called Just Work by Kim Scott, which is a great— I would say if Danny's book is a textbook to entrepreneurship, Kim's book is a textbook for leading and integrating and being inclusive for diverse teams.

I love Kim's work, Radical Candor, and this latest book. In fact, we have the same editor at our publisher, St. Martin's Press. So You know, wonderful to be mentioned in the same breath as Kim. One thing I want to mention briefly is that some of these things we're talking about, about like corporate immune systems, about, you know, being a diverse team but not an inclusive team, there are 11 classic mistakes that I've cited through going through the research and in my own experience teaching and doing entrepreneurship. that I call out in the book that are a function of cognitive bias, which basically means we're just being human. Our brains are wired in a way that help us make mistakes. And so I warn you about 11 of those classic mistakes. And not only do I warn you and call them out in, you know, big letters throughout the book or in a funny sound throughout the audiobook, But I show you some very specific ways to, to recognize them, and then to avoid them. And so, you know, the team composition is one in which I again spend a decent amount of time. And it's not just to tell you that this is what you should have. It's to give you some very specific advice about how you can recruit a diverse and inclusive team, what you should do when you have recruited them. And it's definitely not as simple as, you know, mining your contacts in your LinkedIn networks or Facebook networks. In fact, it's just the opposite. I talked about the strength of weak ties, not strong ties who are already in your networks, because those people will tend to look and behave and come from similar backgrounds as you and your strong ties are the opposite of what you need to mine, you actually have to mine your weak ties, not your strong ones.

I would argue that weak ties is what's made this podcast so successful. It's, it's the friend of a friend that's been willing to help out and come on the show and, you know, put me in contact with somebody. And so I just have to echo that. That is, that is huge. And it's also been huge in my military career too, is the power of weak ties to get stuff done.

Well, and think about it. You're absolutely right. I didn't know you, right? I don't know that I ever would have known you, except this book came in a way that brought us together. Now we know each other. And now through you, I have access to all sorts of people in the military I probably would never have met, and I'm eager to meet. And you might not have, I don't know, seen people in my network. But the weak tie between us initially will lead us to much more diverse kinds of access than we would have if we just mined, you know, the alumni from our where we went to college, or the people who live in our neighborhood, or the synagogue where we pray, or any of the kinds of typical places. And the real scary part, and this is actually one of those mistakes that are a function of cognitive bias that I call out, despite the fact that all of what I just said, over 50% of venture teams are recruited from friends and family. And those friends and family are birds of a feather. They're going to look and behave and, you know, act very similar to you. And so most people actually don't do what I'm saying, and that's why I spend so much time in the book holding your hand to know how to do it.

Hey folks, it's Joe here, and I would like to thank our newest sponsor, my alma mater, the University of North Georgia, located in Dahlonega, Georgia, home of the Mountain Phaser Ranger School. If you are looking for an education, this is the place to go. They are a top-rated senior military college offering over 70 degrees, including critical languages, international affairs, strategic studies, and an award-winning cyber defense program. Their Corps of Cadets is an Army-only program with 24/7 leader development. They have consistently been ranked as our nation's number one Army ROTC program among senior military colleges, and this is the institution that I credit with preparing me to be an Army officer. So if you want to learn more, go to their website at www.go.ung.edu/armyone and learn more about the University of North Georgia, the Military College of Georgia. Now back to the episode. Shifting gears a little bit before we talk about the, the final portion of CSOL of Scale, I'm really curious if we could talk a little bit about the importance of having a value proposition.

Sure.

Because that's another thing I think that, you know, we have a great idea, we've seen these unmet needs, we've got a solution for it, but then I see the value proposition being an important piece of actually getting people to buy into that.

You're right. Value proposition is really part of that second step, the solve step. In fact, the shorthand way I describe that second step is develop a value proposition. Value proposition is designed to answer 3 questions. What is the product or service? Those are kind of the features, you know, the features of the product. Who is it for? And be really specific about who the target is. And much more important than any of those is why, or the benefits. Why would somebody care? Ted Levitt, who I quote in the book, was the publisher of, or I think the editor of Harvard Business Review. He was a very well-known Harvard Business School professor of marketing. And he would say, nobody cares, nobody goes shopping for a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole. And that's kind of the difference between a feature and a benefit. It's important to describe both. But Simon Sinek is another thought leader here who I absolutely adore and who I quote in the book and spent some amazing TED Talks. And he says, he actually wrote the book Starting with Why. And why is the most important part of the value proposition. It expresses in great detail, and in psychological terms, why somebody's going to care. And too often, again, I see people talking about the solution in search of a problem, or they fall in love with their technology, or they fall in love with the features of something, or even when they're marketing it, they just describe things in terms of the features and, you know, the drill bit instead of the hole. And so value prop— I have a number of exercises in that chapter. One is one that I have all my Brown students do. And it's a very structured, like, you know, couple paragraphs that help you define very clearly the answers to those 3 questions. And it's an interesting exercise, by the way, for established organizations to do for their own existing portfolio of products or services. It would be an interesting exercise. I'd love to see this happen in the military. You know, what's the value proposition for this particular kind of service, or, you know, in quotes, product that the military uses to serve its constituents. And often when I'm working with a big company or big organization, I ask them to do that. They have a hard time explaining what the value proposition is, because they've just been so used to, you know, cranking out widgets and not really thinking it through that way. So I'm glad you asked me that, because it's such a really important way of grounding and clarifying, and then communicating what the solution is that you're proposing. And remember, value proposition The second word, proposition, implies that you're proposing this, and that's why it's iterative, because you might propose it and then realize that's not exactly what people need. It's not exactly serving the purpose I wanted to, to address that unmet need.

I'm a solution producer, and I'm always looking for problems. And so again, like, this book—

You're a born problem solver, and now you have the methodology through entrepreneurship to be applying the methodology to solving those problems.

Yeah. Again, I read the book, I was thinking through the exercises, and you've completely ruined the way I see the world now. So thanks, Danny.

I hope for the better. I hope that means the world will be better off for it. But I also think, look, we shouldn't ignore the fact that especially the second step, although I have fun with the first step, you're right. Now that this is in your blood, you can't escape it.

No, you can't. I can't see it.

Right. You said wherever you looked, you were finding unmet needs. And then even better, you were figuring out ways to solve them using some of the techniques. In the book I talk about, and I guide you through something called nominal group technique. Once you have that diverse and inclusive team at the table, make sure you're engaging them in ways that appeal to different personality types. Not everybody actually wants to work the whole time in a group setting. So Nominal Group Technique helps you navigate some part of the solution process that should be done in team, like the whole group or subsets of the group, and then a very significant part that should be done in isolation. And, and that's often something that's forgotten. And then there's a whole section that I absolutely love called Systematic Inventive Technique. which is something that was invented by a colleague named Amnon Lavav and a few of his collaborators. And it's surprising, it's very structured. You would think that creativity should be open-ended brainstorming. That's not true. It's actually not a great way to figure out solutions. My suspicion is in the military, systematic inventive technique, which is 5 very common patterns of creativity that have led to the most significant breakthroughs in innovation and entrepreneurship. And they know that because they studied thousands of them and then figured out which patterns of creativity they followed. I have the secret sauce here that was summarized through Omnone. In fact, the two of us do a little bonus content in the audio version of CSolve Scale. And I'm thrilled that in this case, through my book, I'm able to popularize it.

Yeah. You mentioned that, you know, again, that creativity is not this just kind of free-flowing thing. And I, I have a quote here that I wrote down. Moonshots don't begin with brainstorming clever answers. They start with the hard work of finding the right questions.

Yeah, exactly. Boy, you read this book really carefully. I really appreciate it.

I did, because, you know, one of the things that, you know, I see is that there's problems all around us. And a lot of times it's just how do we, how do we actually solve them? And again, this, this book is a very clear way to do that. And I think that one of the issues that a lot of us run into is that, yes, this solution would have solved this little piece of it, but as soon as you get beyond that, it starts breaking down, which then transitions us to the 3rd step, which is scale.

Yeah. And it's important to differentiate between where we've been so far and where we're headed. In the first 2 steps, I didn't say it explicitly, but I'd like to, because I do cover it explicitly in the book. There are these 2 divergent themes. One is the benefits of scarce resources. And the second, which I think the military probably falls prey to, as well as big companies, big governments, big organizations, is counterintuitively the burden of abundant resources. And it's that especially when you're looking for new problems to solve, and initially when you're trying to solve them on a very small scale, having fewer resources can be a benefit. I'll give you an example. The Casper Mattress Company, which some of you may be familiar with, was started by 2 of my former students, Luke Sherwin and Neil Parikh. They knew nothing about mattresses except that you slept on them. And they were able to completely reinvent the way mattresses are manufactured, the whole supply chain, how you buy them, how you are distributed and delivered a mattress, how you can return it if you want after 100 days. They completely reinvented the mattress industry, not because they knew more than anybody, but because they knew less. And they had fewer resources. to deploy in the early days. And those constraints helped them to be more innovative, more entrepreneurial than they would've been. The established incumbent mattress companies had way more experience. They had way more established manufacturing and distribution channels, brands, and yet they weren't able to get out of the way of those. Those abundant resources were a burden. So I clarify that, and I talk about a number of other, you know, students in my courses who were able to innovate in ways that they wouldn't have been able to if they had more resources. And by the way, when I'm teaching in disadvantaged places, or places in the world that feel disadvantaged, like Ramallah, Palestine, or Kingston, Jamaica, or rural China, I see people's body language get more, you know, upright when they hear that actually the fact that they have fewer resources can work in their favor. I say that to your question, because now we're starting to shift gears to you've found and validated an unmet need. You've basically figured out what problem you're going to solve by being anthropological. There's that word again. You've got the right team at the table to leverage people's diversity through inclusion. You've got people at the table who are going to care about this because people support what they help to create. You've used nominal group technique that helps you engage introverts and extroverts. You've used systematic inventive thinking because this is a way that will enable you to use those SIT templates, systematic inventive thinking templates, that will help you be creative but in a structured way. Once you've done all that, now is time to start to layer in resources. And I talk about how to raise capital, and that can be in any context. It doesn't have to be a for-profit context. It can be raising money for a nonprofit. It can be in a research lab and raising grants, all sorts of things. I mean, the military is a good example of this. I also do something that I think is necessary, as I've found through the years. It is hard for people to think big. I think people are biased to think that thinking small is a way to mitigate risk. It's actually the opposite. I provide some data and research in the book that in some ways came from my own professor in business school at Harvard Business School, who says that thinking small is actually more risky than thinking big. Because if you are dominating a niche or an industry, you're actually going to ward off the competition. But how do you do that? So I share a technique that, again, I've modified that came originally through my mentor, Bob Johnston, of Strategy Innovation Group. And he talks a lot about this approach to thinking big called the landscape exercise. And we don't have the capability on a podcast to teach it in great detail. But it helps you break what I have learned is something called mental fixedness. Fixedness is your brain operates in a limited capacity because it's used to seeing the world in certain ways, and you need something to break your fixedness. And landscape exercise, which asks you to draw metaphorical pictures projecting yourselves 50 years into the future, and then inventing backwards, is a way to have a mental stretch beyond some of those fixedness mental limitations. And again, in the book, I talk about all sorts of circumstances where people use that technique, and it had dramatic impact on their ability to think big. And without it, they would have had a value proposition from step 2 that might have been meaningful, but limited. And so I don't, I don't assume at all that people know how to think big, even if they knew that they should. And so a lot of the technique in the 3rd step is about how to stretch your mind so that you can do that.

Yeah. And that was, you know, a lot of times in the military, one of the things that we talk about is planning for success. So like, what happens if this all does work out? Are we prepared to be able to go forward and make this thing, you know, even bigger than it is? And I remember when I published a book last fall and I offered up like a box of books. You know, I was able to get them at discount prices and I was able to send the book out, My Green Notebook, to people and their teams. And what I didn't think was, was that a lot of people would actually want to do that. And so I quickly found myself with like 8 large boxes stacked on top of each other, going to the post office to get these things out, multiple trips throughout the week. And so, you know, as we're developing solutions, you know, can we scale this thing if we do achieve success with it? The other piece of it too is sustainable. That was definitely not sustainable for me to continue doing that, you know, after that few weeks window when the books came out.

Well, I'm so glad you used the word sustainable because I don't use the phrase business model here. I use the phrase sustainability model. And it relates back to the first step. In the first step, I qualify that you should be looking ideally not just for any old need, but a need that has the following 2 characteristics: it's strong and it's enduring. Strong needs are ones where, you know, it's a hair-on-fire need. You have to address it because we're all faced with choices of what to do all day long, where we're going to pull out our credit card. You want to ideally— it doesn't mean you can't develop a venture that's focused on a want or a weak need. But all things being equal, a strong need is going to attract somebody's attention more. And enduring means that it's a need that's going to be consequential, you know, like climate change, or a healthcare challenge, or systemic racism, or unfortunately, some of the military challenges that you're facing. Those are all things that are going to be around a long time. And so Strong and enduring needs are also reflected in the third step, where I say a sustainability model is you're going to have big impact— that's addressing the first part of that need, it's strong— and you're going to do it over the long term, which means you're going to address the enduring nature of that need. And so a sustainability model I describe as having both of those components. It's going to have something that will help it scale really quickly, And over the long term, it will have enduring impact. In fact, what we're looking for in our center is students who are going to be creating solutions with impact, and that's also what I teach throughout the book.

I know we're getting short on time, but do I have time for one more question?

You do, and I hope I'll at least be able to introduce the Japanese word ikigai because that's one that I hope is really important for everybody. But go ahead, let's see what Your last question is, and then I'll maybe end with the last one.

That's perfect. So, there's one thing that you talk about in the book that you do every single year in November, and that's the Thanksgiving exercise. And I'd love for you to just share that because I think that is such a great idea.

Well, I hope it will now travel throughout your podcast listeners. Every Thanksgiving, and this was actually an idea that I was inspired to do through that professor of mine who taught me about thinking big. I ask all of my students to think of somebody who in their life to this point has had meaningful impact on them and send them a handwritten thank you note. Handwritten stands out. Like, how many handwritten anythings do we get these days? It could be a coach. It could be somebody who wrote them a recommendation to get in college. It could be a family member who had some meaningful— whoever it is. And It's incredible the kind of stories I hear. You know, sometimes students are like, ah, it sounds a little hokey. What do I do? I say, just trust me, do this. And through the years, I've had thousands of students do this. And not only do they do it, but now they recommend it to people in their networks. Often it's, it's become a tradition at people's Thanksgiving tables. And if they don't celebrate American Thanksgiving, whatever they're doing at this time of year. In fact, it's been such a meaningful part of people's lives for these 17 years. And it's now a cumulative list that's growing. If that first few days of the week of Thanksgiving, I don't send out the reminder, people get anxious and they email me and they say, Professor Warshay, you're not going to forget to do the Thanksgiving letter exercise this year, are you? But it's so wonderful to hear what I hear back from some of these students. You know, I wrote to my 2nd grade teacher. I hadn't been in touch with her in, you know, all these years. And I told her that it was because of her that I took an interest in creative writing, and that's how I got into Brown. And now I'm going to be a professor, like all those kinds of stories. And the amazing things that they hear back from whoever they wrote to, you know, that they really made their day, they made their, their career. I love hearing back from my students. So I hope no matter whether people read See, Solve, Scale or not, and there's detailed instructions on how to do what I just described. I hope everybody listening to the podcast, you don't even have to wait till November, write a hand thank you note to somebody in your life who's had some meaningful impact on you. I guarantee it'll be a worthwhile experience.

Well, speaking of impact, we can go ahead now and finish with the Japanese concept of ikigai.

Thank you. You know, it's related. This is not intended to be a dry, you know, academic guide. You mentioned text. It's, it's definitely not a textbook. It is designed to be inspirational, motivational, and yes, a guide to help you actually do entrepreneurship. One of the concepts that I teach in the course and that I speak about in length wherever I go, and that I write about in some length in the book, is this Japanese word ikigai, which roughly translates living a purposeful life. And it comprises 4 components: drive, or do what you're good at; passion, or do what you love to do; purpose, or do what's going to have meaningful impact on the world. And do something that will enable you to make money in a way that'll pay you fairly for the value you're adding. And I find that if I guide students in this direction, and they do all 4 of those things, they're really happy and satisfied. And they feel fulfilled in what they're doing in their life. And I find that entrepreneurs need to follow all 4 of those things. And if one is missing, no matter which one, their venture's not going to be worth supporting, let alone be successful. And I talk about that in the book with when I was a venture capitalist and people would come to me with really beautifully buttoned up business plans. It looked like something out of a Harvard case study that could be publishable, but they didn't actually check off the other things. I didn't support them. But if they could demonstrate to me that they were going to do something they were really good at, that they loved doing, that was going to have meaningful impact on the world, and that was going to pay them fairly. That was a good litmus test for me to judge whether they were worthy of my support. And I find my students reflecting on those 4 as a good guide to help them figure out what they should do. Because let's face it, the world is full of problems. And even if you do all 3 of these steps, you identify one anthropologically, you use all the techniques in the second step I teach to develop a value proposition, a small-scale solution, and even if you have a plan that seems pretty valid to scale it, if it doesn't actually fit all 4 of those ikigai components, I advise my students not to pursue it. And so that's usually a really good overriding framework for helping anybody who wants to solve a problem to figure out whether it's a good fit for them to solve. And I think it's probably useful for people in the military as well. You'll have to tell me.

It is. I mean, you know, like, I've been, I've been in the military now for, for 18 years with tons of dark days behind me. But, you know, it was the, the passion piece that kept me going. Same thing with, you know, this podcast and the blog. From the Green Notebook is now 9 years old. And wow. You know, just continuing on, it was the passion for leader development that was able to kind of get me through some of the times where I was tired, didn't want to do it anymore, and, you know, led me to this great opportunity right here. So—

Well, you're a really good model of all 3 of these steps, whether you knew it back then or not, right? You identified a key problem in the See step, you developed an initial small-scale solution in the Solve step, and now you're 9 years later scaling and having big meaningful impact over the long term. And so, you know, maybe no wonder that this book, See, Solve, Scale, has resonated with you because it's a reflection, even again, if you didn't know it, of what you were probably doing all along.

I appreciate it, Danny, and hopefully you can now count me in as one of your former students.

I can and I will. I'm happy to. In fact, I have LinkedIn networks for the readers of the book, people who have taken an interest in it. You're certainly welcome to join that. And I hope this will just be the first part of a longer-term relationship where I can maybe do some teaching. As I said, I do workshops in all sorts of places all over the world, and I've done some for government and some for military, but you are doing really good work to keep us safe. And so It'd be an honor to see how else I could be helpful. Thanks so much for having me on today. I really appreciate it.

Ah, thank you. This was, this was a blast. Hope you have a, a great rest of the day.

Thank you, Joe. Take care.

Thank you again for listening to another episode of From the Green Notebook podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps us gain visibility and the opportunity to help more people on their leadership journey. Also, make sure you check out our website at www.fromthegreennotebook.com. There you can listen to past episodes, read leadership articles written by military leaders from around the world. You can sign up for our monthly reading list email where you can learn about new books that are coming out, and our Sunday reflection email that comes out every Sunday morning is really short. It's a 2-minute read, but I guarantee you it's gonna start your week off on the right foot. Finally, make sure you follow us on Twitter @FTGNotebook, and you can find us on Instagram and Facebook by searching for From the Green Notebook. Again, thank you so much for coming on this journey with us. I am humbled by the opportunity to learn these lessons alongside you. So please join us next week for another episode of From the Green Notebook, where we're going to help you lead with the best version of yourself.

I came from the mud. There's dirt on my hands. Strong like a tree, there's roots where I stand. Oh, I've been running from the law. Hope they won't shoot me down soon.