In this episode of Beyond Business and Branding, business innovation strategist Donna Brown addresses entrepreneurs, SMEs, and large corporations navigating the upheavals of 2020. She frames the current crisis as a period of collective mourning for lost business norms, urging leaders to release their tight grip on outdated practices. From this place of reflection, she advocates courageous, creative re‑imagining of categories, delivery systems, and purpose—suggesting that businesses can reinvent themselves while staying true to their core mission. Donna emphasizes the value of external perspectives, recommending a “magpie” approach of gathering ideas from trusted friends or new collaborators to break blinders created by experience. She also calls for a cultural shift in how we view work and downtime, arguing that over‑work stifles creativity and that purposeful rest fuels innovation. Finally, she ties innovation to social responsibility, urging businesses to create truly equal opportunities across race, color, and denomination, and to operate with greater enlightenment. Throughout, she invites viewers to engage, share ideas, and connect virtually for deeper conversations.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Donna Brown. I'm a business innovation strategist, and this is Beyond Business and Branding. It's a series, hopefully, to get everybody to think a little bit about, about what's going on in their business and different ways that you can dig a little deeper and go beyond maybe what your traditional business practices or business thinking is. Because I think that this is a time of innovation and for as disruptive as it may be, it may seem right now or the last few months, 2020 has been and it continues to be a big challenge. It's also in the midst of all of this, we need to kind of find our bearings as to how to move forward. So I think one of the biggest challenges that most businesses have, whether you're an entrepreneur working sort of on your own Or whether you're a small-medium enterprise, even the large corporations, and sometimes even especially them, there's that moment of disorientation, like what's going on, what's happening? And there's that reaction of panic and anxiety or fear and sort of grasping to maintain what you have. But if you think of the hands of grasping, you can see that they're not really open to too much else. And no matter how hard you grasp, hold on to something, if it's going to disappear, if it's going to change, that will happen no matter how tightly you hold on to things. So the reaction then ends up being one of, you know, you kind of have to, you know, you're maybe still in a little bit of shock and you're in mourning. I call it, it's really a sense of mourning for what you're losing, for what was lost, for what has disappeared without understanding What could replace it that could be possibly even better? And I don't mean always more money, more, more, more, but qualitatively better, because I also feel that we're moving towards different ideas and habits and consumption, hopefully, because we tend to overproduce and overconsume. So once you have that sort of feeling of mourning, then your hands can kind of relax a little bit and sort of your You can relax your grasp and your grip on what you feel should have been or what you had or what you'd finally figured out and was really working for you or company maybe, or you were finally seeing some traction. And to start thinking, and then there's that moment of reflection of like, how do we move forward from here? And quite often it's hard to rethink your own business, especially if you've been in business for a while, or rethink even your category and to defining a new category that takes very courageous and creative thinking that it doesn't always come necessarily from, let's say, the owner-founders and sort of the core team, the C-suite, just because you've brought with yourselves a lot of experience, but that experience can also in some ways put some blinders on. And that's where generally where somebody like me comes in to help you sort of see things in a completely different way. What if we approach things in a completely, with a different mindset and, you know, what defines you all of a sudden, what defines you can be a limit but also can be an opportunity. What if we were no longer defined ourselves by what up until now has been, let's say, the thing that we've been known most for? What if all of a sudden we were to reinvent, let's say, delivery systems and products while remaining true to our essence and to our mission and possibly even Creating a better one. So I feel that creativity, even though it's sometimes hard to be creative when you're maybe anxious or you've had to lay people off or you're downsizing or you've, you know, a lot of people had their business disappear, you know, almost completely, if not completely. And I can understand how that's hard to just sort of reimagine what next, right? But the question is gonna come sooner or later, and I would really encourage all of you to find that space for yourselves of imagining a little bit outside the box, as if you were not thinking about your own business, but as if you were looking at it from the outside. And if you have difficulty doing that, finding someone, and like, you know, I'm— that's my absolute favorite thing, but, and what I've been known for my whole business life, but anybody, it could even be your best friend. Find somebody, find somebody that you trust, find somebody new, somebody, Look elsewhere, start gathering ideas like a magpie and seeing how they can fit and how maybe you can, as I said, redefine your category either by splintering or by a paradigm shift even around what the purpose of your whole business is. So it's really an invitation, I guess, today. I think I wrote tips in the description, but I would say more than anything, it's an invitation to open-mindedness, to allowing yourself to let go and to play and to create and to play the game of what if and see where that can lead you without judging your ideas, without judging your, you know, one of the keys to brainstorming is to not judge any of the ideas that come up. There's no idea that's silly because following the path to silly can also lead to some incredible gems and some— very innovative ideas. And I think now what people are worried about also is jobs disappearing, but they don't know what they're gonna be replaced with. So if an entire industry sort of shuts down or, you know, like travel has been a big thing, so hospitality has taken a huge hit, what then? Like what happens to that industry? What happens to the people that were hired, you know, that were working in the industry? And how do you redefine yourself, especially if you're not the business owner? So I feel that also there's that, there's a lot of a sense of responsibility on the part of business owners who have teams and employees. And there's a lot of fear and anxiety for those who are working for a company just to understand what's next and what's gonna happen to them. But I really feel that now we're going to be redefining work. Redefining work, redefining how much time we should be spending at work, whether at home or in an office, what that looks like, how we live, how we put in our creative efforts. I was looking at somebody today who had written a book about time off, you know, and it's downtime that has been so criticized, and people would take pride on never taking a day off and having all these, having all these all these holidays sort of stacked up. I haven't taken a holiday in 3 years or something, as if it's a source of pride and a badge to wear, but it's not. That's not where the creative ideas come from, of working yourself to the bone and being constantly overtired and stressed out. So wherever you place yourself in a business or in the business world, You know, innovation doesn't have to come from the top and it doesn't, it can come from anywhere. So maybe put your thinking caps on and you'll end up with your own business or you'll end up completely redefining what you thought your business was because there are some sectors, some industries that are gonna have to take a big, hard, long look at who they are and what they are and what they're, and how to continue to thrive and flourish as a functional and let's say positive contribution to society. And of course, within all of that, this context is how can we provide more equal opportunity, truly equal opportunity to all races and colors and denominations, and how can we truly become a little more enlightened in the way we conduct our businesses. Anyways, that's Beyond Business and Branding for today. I'm Donna Brown. I'd love to hear your comments. Share with your friends, tag somebody, enter in the conversation. I always love a good discussion. If you wanna have a talk, it's like, you know, Have a coffee, a virtual coffee, because now everything's virtual. You know, you can send me a message. I'm happy to connect. I feel that this is also building relationships and being curious about the world and about people is is a big part of where it's at. Bye for now.
