049: Simplifying Complex Ideas — Masterclass with Alex Osterwalder

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello friends. Welcome back to FreeTime. I have good news and bad news for you today. Let's start with the good news. Today's guest, Alex Osterwelder is one of my favorite business authors. Many of you might be familiar with his books. He pioneered the landscape, full color, beautiful, interactive spread format with books like Business Model Generation, Business Model you and then. The subject of this conversation was his latest books, the Invincible Company and High Performing Teams. The bad news is that it took a long time. This one was not an easy one to schedule. We had a great conversation. It was super dynamic, lots of back and forth. I was so thrilled with everything that he was sharing. Lo and behold, when we go to download the audio, my file is missing. Go completely. So for months I have been sitting on this file. I actually recorded it right around the time of the launch batch for free time and I just didn't know what to do. I didn't quite have the heart to ask him to redo the interview because his comments were so good and it was really challenging to schedule it in the first place. I thought about could I recreate my questions and splice them in. But our conversation was so dynamic it would be really awkward if I tried to laugh at just the right moments and ask the question with just the right tone and remember what I even asked in the moment in the first place. So I decided to turn this into more of a masterclass with Dr. Alex Osterwalter in that you're not going to hear me asking questions. So it might sound like, and I hope it doesn't, but it might sound like he's just going on and on. What I've done is edited the file to string together his answers, which are brilliant. One of his quotes that I love from the interview, he said, we don't write books, we craft spreads. And so I ask him, how do you simplify such complex ideas? In his book the Invincible Company, there are tons of business models and how do you scale even things like licensing that I get a lot of questions about in this show. And so he talks, he goes into detail about how much work it takes to simplify complex ideas. He says they look at every page of their books as a user interface. Visuals don't become lipstick on a pig, they become an essential part of the reader's experience. Some of the values they shape their books around are simplicity, clarity and fun. So I know that any of you listening will get so much value from how they create these visual spreads. Why visuals are so important for getting feedback and communicating ideas and not just fancy ones. He actually says at a certain point, if visuals are too refined, you won't get good feedback. We also talk about tiny teams and how he has structured Strategizer, the company behind all these beautiful books. I just know you're going to get so much out of this, so I hope that you forgive me that there's no JB track on this one. I did switch software services after this snafu because I was so frustrated, but I just couldn't let Alex's side of the conversation languish in my Dropbox folder any longer. A little more about Alex and then we will dive right into what I'm now calling his masterclass on simplifying complex ideas. He is one of the world's most influential innovation experts whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. His company, Strategizer, provides online courses, applications and tech enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy growth and transformation. Alex is the co author of a suite of beautifully designed best selling business books including Business Model Generation, Value Proposition, Design Testing Business Ideas, the Invincible Company and his latest high impact tools for teams. I hope you enjoy Alex's side of this conversation and see you soon.

Things are too complicated, right? Or we try to describe them with words when it actually should be a combination of visuals and words. And you know, to a certain extent it's just also because I'm lazy and I want to understand things faster. So I kind of try to do for others what I like to get as well. So I love simplicity. It's a hard process, right? It's trying to go further when you start to understand things, but they're still pretty complex, distilling them down to a way that is very clear for others. So it actually, for me, it started with my own struggle that I get confused when I don't understand stuff. Like I can't learn things without understanding them, which is actually a handful handicap. But it became my strength. So I have to really go deep and try to deeply understand them, understand the concepts behind them, how things, you know, work together. And once I get it, then I can even, you know, explain it. But the skill, the art of making things simpler, simplifying and not making them simplistic, I learned that from a lot of people. One, of course, is, you know, my longtime co author and former PhD supervisor, Yves Pigneur. You know, he has this skill of conceptual thinking. And when you want to simplify, you know, you really need to understand the concepts behind things and how they're interlinked. Our goal was always to visualize things and to make them as simple, as clear as possible for the business people we worked with. So that's definitely something I've learned over time. I've always had fun with visuals, but the simplification of complex kind of contents, that is something I learned over time from the best. And then just, you know, never stopped, always trying to ask, can I make it simpler? Watching people when they don't understand. Like, the number of times I've tried to explain something and people looked at me with a very confused look that I see that as a challenge, right? So every time I see a confused look, I try to improve my explanation, my visuals. So it's almost like a challenge. How can we get so simple that people immediately get it right so their eyes shine with clarity and not with confusion? Here's how we approach it. We look at all the concepts in a field and then ask, are they complicated? Are they simple? And then we try to make our own. We only invent stuff when there's nothing out there that we think is good enough. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, but then we make a prototype and we actually test it with people, and you can listen to the questions and see is your concept good enough yet? So if there are a lot of questions, it's very clear that your concept isn't good enough, your explanation isn't good enough, so you need to improve. So it's the moment when the questions are not about the thing itself, but about how to apply it, in which context you can really kind of get it. So we really listen carefully to what people ask, and when they ask about the concepts, you know that your stuff is still Broken, right? So is really kind of a testing approach where you constantly improve based on the reaction you get. So you have to be a really careful listener and always think like, is this good enough? And never actually try to remain humble and just make sure you try to get a little bit better, a little bit better every time you present something. So it's this constant small improvements that lead to the ultimately clear picture at the end. It's definitely not creative genius. It's really this idea that it's always broken until it kind of works. There are two aspects to it. So one is the concepts, right? So we come up with a tool. So typically with Yves Pigneur, we would say, oh, we need to do something in the space of portfolio management to help companies manage their portfolio of products and business models. And then we would start with a tool, right? So that's one aspect. But then when we transfer that content into a book, every spread. So we don't write books, we craft spreads, double pages where we put an idea and then the text kind of emerges around it. So there's never a page that overflows. There's never text that goes from one spread to another. But here's where it gets interesting. We actually iterate with Alan Smith, who's my co founder at Strategizer, was the initial, the designer of the first book. We go through sometimes 10 to 15 iterations of a one book spread. Now, do the math. When you have 300 pages, that gets pretty intense. But we see every single page, every single spread as a user interface. And we work really hard on making that as clear and simple as possible. So there are two types of work. One is around the tools, which happen separately. And then once the content makes it into a book, every single idea presented on a spread needs to just get better and better and better. So we look at every page as a user interface and user experience, just like you would have a web page. And the moment you think like that, you really work on clarity. And visuals don't become kind of lipstick on the pig. They become an essential part of the user experience in terms of the simplicity you create. So it's this play also then with words, narrowing down every single sentence. I love to use the Hemingway app, so check that one out if your writing is too complicated and it will shamelessly tell you, oh, that's a very complicated sentence. Make it simpler. So we really work carefully on all of the things that we do. Kind of pushes you to become a perfectionist. So you have to make sure you prototype first, test that and that you also know when to stop, because otherwise you're always, always kind of iterating and you're never launching anything. So it's a fine line when people join our team. So take Tendai Vicky, who's also a very successful innovation author, he said, man, did I did not know what's under the hood, right? Because you kind of look at the books and you say, oh, it's cool, it's simple, you know, it's practical. But when you see what goes into it, like the. Sometimes I would even say we're kind of insane, you know, when we iterate on certain images for 10, you know, 10 iterations, 20 iterations, until we get the image to say what we want it to say. But that's part of, you know, who we are. At Strategizer with the authors, we're all about simplicity and clarity. And when that's your goal, you really have to go deep. And at the end, that also looks great. But again, it's not the lipstick on the pig that we're looking for to just make it shine. It's not eye candy is really functional. It's user experience and user interface. So we take that pretty seriously. And it's also fun, fun looking back, because when you're doing it, oh, it's really tough and sometimes you just want to give up. But then we just go, we just go until we feel like, okay, that's good enough. Because there's a point where they're really diminishing returns on the time invested. The original story of how we started is pretty interesting and not that many people know it. So I did a PhD thesis on business models together with Yves Piner at the University of Lausanne. And that was actually already pretty successful. So I put it online and people started downloading my PhD and nobody told me that those things are also supposed to be read. You thought, okay, maybe you have this small committee of five people and that's as far as it's going to go. But because that was already pretty visual and was a very practical topic, was business models really hot at the time. People downloaded it. So that kind of was the first spark in terms of evidence. Hey, there's something there. So Eve and I discussed after I did a couple of things, I helped build a global, not for profit organization, worked with Stefano Mastojako on a consultancy. There was a point where I had so much traction on my blog around business models that I went back to Eve and I said, let's write a book. And of course, when you want to write about business model innovation, you have to ask yourself the question, are we going to do this like every single book author, or are we going to create an innovative business model? So I really pushed and then Eve said, okay, let's do it. And we brainstormed, ideated, actually used the methodology from the book to figure out what could an innovative business model look like to publish a book. So we had these crazy ideas and then we narrowed it down to something feasible. The idea was we are going to co publish with a lot of people out there, self publish, but get a lot of people involved as kind of co authors. So what we said is I just posted the blog post and said, hey, do you want to be part of the next best seller? Not knowing that it's actually really hard to create a best seller because there are just so many books out there, business books, that very few actually sell more than a thousand copies. But then, naive as I was at the time we launched this, I already had a blog audience. So we asked people to pay us to join our endeavor of creating a book around business models. And the way we say it's going to work is we send out raw chunks of content, you pay us some money and you can be part of this exclusive club. And in return, you'll get this content in a raw form. You're going to be able to participate and you can give us feedback. We reserve the right to kind of take the feedback and do whatever we want with it, but you're going to be part of this. And that's something. From that day onward, I also realized people don't just want to consume. There are many instances where people want to participate. So this was a great way to get people involved to also earn money. So it's kind of Kickstarter before Kickstarter. And we needed that to finance the book because it was a four color book landscape. You know, we had to print it, it's not cheap. So we played around with this business model. You know, doing Kickstarter before that platform was actually out, it was a lot of fun. So we had all the rights to play because we didn't have a publisher. We said, okay, let's raise the price after every couple of people. So at the end we had 470 people. And the last price people paid was $250 to have their name in the book because that was one of the things they would get as well. So it's really fun to play with this. And the other thing which we didn't foresee but which turned out to be genius again by accident is the 470 people were so proud of being part of this book, our first one business model generation, that they became advocates and they started showing it to their friends and pushing it. And that helped the initial sales. And at one point it became almost like a thing that once the engine starts, it really works. And that's when we sold the publishing rights to Wiley. And people ask me, why didn't you go on self publishing and you're giving up on this innovative business model? Well, you have to ask yourself, what do you want to do? And I didn't want to be in book publishing. So I thought the best thing to do is to sell the rights to a professional publisher. And then Wiley became our publisher over the last decade because that's when we then moved on together with Alan Smith, who was the designer of the book at the time. We said, well, what are we going to do next? Are we going to create a consulting company? Not so much our thing. I already had one before together with Stefano. Should we create a training company? What everybody does when they have a book, not so fun, Kind of annoying to do the same thing. We said, let's build a software company, not knowing what we were getting into. So we launched an iPad app based on business model generation that went really well. But you can't create a sustainable business model based on a transactional thing where you're selling apps for $30. But it gave us the initial financing. So from the beginning.

Everything we did was always self financed through these innovative projects. So with the couple of hundred thousand apps that we sold, we financed the next phase which was the web app, which was online training. And that's how we kind of created Strategizer. And today we work mainly with established companies around the world and help them build innovation engines. And we do that not just by selling ours like a consultancy. No, we actually use technology enabled services. So it means online courses, our online platform to facilitate the remote workshops. So that's how the whole story kind of happened. It was just, you know, trying out things, throwing spaghetti at the wall and looking at what sticks and, you know, testing our way forward to scale the business model. So it's always just having fun, trying out things, being a little bit probably very naive, just trying what works.

The question you always need to ask as an entrepreneur, what do you really want? Do you want to create something that is decent size? Which in Silicon Valley they would condescendingly call it lifestyle business. There's nothing wrong with a lifestyle business or do you want to build something more scalable?

I was always fascinated by impact. And so we're trying to move towards something a little bit more scalable. Definitely not at Silicon Valley speed. We're going at Swiss speed, so scaling, but a little bit slower also because we're doing this self funded. But the goal was always to go beyond books. So books was the starting point and we continued to write books, or I'd say craft books as a marketing tool. And because we just love making these beautiful objects and they have a symbolic value, I do think the physical visual books are just a nice thing also to have in your library on your desk. So we continue to do those, but they're nothing else for us than a marketing tool. Sounds a bit mundane, but, you know, a vehicle to spread our ideas, still think is a very, very powerful way to spread ideas. And that's why we still, in quotes, craft books. But they're a little bit the foundation if you want for people to know us. So with the second book, Value Proposition Design, we shifted the name towards Strategizer and the branding idea. There was that with Business Model Generation, which was the title of the initial book, we're condemned to work on business models and it might be identified more with myself as an author. So we said, let's build a brand. So we created this Strategizer brand and because Value Proposition Design was also very successful in our second book, we started to become known as Strategizers. So it was about spreading beyond me as an author because I don't want to be at the center of this thing that we're building. I actually want to make it scalable so it can live without me. Now it's still driving the vision and I still have an important role to play in content creation. But we're really now building a brand that that is helping established companies really, really grow. And you know, the one thing I had to get used to, you were talking about operational complexity. I think there's the one thing that I didn't think I would like to do, but I'm actually enjoying it, is moving from somebody who crafts stuff like books, online courses, towards actually leading an endeavor, right? Leading a organization. Because once you move beyond 10 people, you need to start to put in place structure. So that's where we are today, really scaling. That's another thing that I underestimated which Silicon Valley is really good at, is the scaling aspect. So for me, that is the adventure we're in now. We brought in a chief operating officer working on corporate culture with the whole kind of people and growth aspect. So the scaling, I'd say was for me the most surprising, that I would have fun leading that, because I never saw myself kind of as a leader manager type of person. When you grow beyond 10 people, you start to have operational complexity. So that's where I need to make a choice. Do I want to become more of a leader manager beyond the person who crafts stuff with a small team? And we made that jump together with my co founder, Alan Smith, and we brought on a chief operating officer with Andrew Mafi. We just hired a people and culture lead. So we're really now in the scaling phase, which is a real adventure. Something in Silicon Valley, everybody kind of in the startup ecosystem gets used to it and knows what it is. In our case, we never really knew what that really means until we started doing it. So I started listening to podcasts and all that. And it's fascinating because it's very different from this stage, from zero to a couple of million, where now you're saying, okay, we need to scale, we need to expand the team so we can provide the services globally that we want to provide. It's a fascinating journey. And there's actually less content on scaling now. There's more, but there's less content on scaling than on the early phase, you know, from zero maybe to 1 million or $5 million or euro in revenue. But that other phase afterwards is actually pretty hard. And I'm starting to learn what that means. And again, I think we'll at one point come out with tools on scaling because we really, like enjoy writing about stuff that we live ourselves. You can't really craft great tools and give good advice when you haven't lived it in one way or another.

We'll be right back just after this. Hi, this is Deechan Lackman and I.

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If you take the Invincible Company, which I'm really, really proud of, what came out of that and what we were able to put into that, I think the mistake we made is probably three books in one that we should have published separately. But I think it's really crucial that you ask what's already there. And it's not that we, you know, people have been writing about, you know, the established companies having this tension between Exploit, explore, it's called the ambidextrous organization. But I think where we go try to go a step further is, you know, asking how can we make this extremely practical for business people in their organizations so they don't have to translate the content into okay, how am I going to apply this? Right, so while we always say ah, stories, stories, stories, I think all these case studies, you have to distill them down. So what does this mean for me? How am I going to apply this? So we try to actually really distill it down to a certain form where as a reader you can apply it as fast as possible. Then of course still always better when you have somebody helping you. But we try to give away as much as possible in the book so people can do it themselves with as little effort as possible. Meaning they shouldn't have to translate the content of the book into okay, how am I going to apply this in the real world? So that's what we try to do. Which means also that often we work on content. There's already a lot out there, but it might just not be as simple as it could be and as practical as it could be. So I think what you said before is absolutely spot on. It doesn't mean because there's content out there that you can't play in a certain domain. And I do think, you know, there is this shift towards making things simpler, making things more applicable. It's also fun to watch how many visual books popped up in landscape format after business model generation. So we got copied a ton, which is, you know, you always have to see it as a great form of compliment. But I think there's still so much more than can be created there. It's also a bit egoistic. I love visual books. So the more people create visual books, the happier I'll be because then I don't have to read, I can't read books anymore that have a lot of text. It's just like a punch in my face. So I need visual books, and I love people who work on visual books. The one thing I also had to accept, we try to make things simple. So then there are people who tell us that's simplistic. You just have to start to accept you can't make it right for everybody, because the moment you make it right for everybody, probably it's not really working. So we just try to follow our style and find that audience. Like yourself. You say, okay, there are books out there with a lot of data. There's an audience for that. But what we've discovered is, and that was kind of also by accident, because our first tool, the business model canvas, just took off like crazy, is we learned people really appreciate something that's visual, something that's simple, something that's practical and can become a shared language to have better conversations. You know, it's not that we didn't invent business models. We didn't invent portfolios, we didn't invent value propositions, but we provided a shared language in our books that allow people to have a much more explicit and concrete and shared understanding, because they'll take it out of their heads. They'll take it out of just the words and put it into an artifact. And it's amazing how this even works in the virtual space. So in remote workshops, if you don't use visual platforms, you just have zoom faces, obviously you're going to have zoom fatigue because we can't listen to people talk all the time. You need the visual artifacts so we can understand what we're even talking about. So we try to make concrete things like culture, business models, and value propositions. Just like you could make an artifact for a new mobile phone that you can discuss the abstract is very hard to discuss. So the more you can make these things, these big concepts, concrete, the better the conversations will be. The more we'll have a shared understanding, the more we'll be aligned. Right. And that's the topic also of team alignment in our last book, let's make these things more visual and tangible so we can share our understanding and ultimately just get better results. The visual part, it seems kind of trivial, but it's not. And we had to learn over time that that's the key aspect of what we do. So, you know, there's an exercise I used to do a lot which is getting people in big audience, you know, working groups of two. I would ask them to share their business model. One person sharing their business model, explaining it to another. And there's no chance that within, you know, two or three minutes, you can clearly explain your business model with words. It's super hard, except if you're in a very simple business. You know, like, I bake cakes and I sell them. Okay, great. But that's pretty basic. But. So we do that first to show people it's not so easy, and then we get them to use visual tools. In the beginning, that was, you know, map out your business model. And people could, in two minutes, explain the most crazy details of their business model much more precisely in a much more simple and clear way just because they used a shared visual language. So that's what we tried to do for different topics. We did the same thing for culture. We worked with Dave Gray to create the culture map. We worked on value propositions because there are a couple of these topics where people have. And I like to use Dan Rome's terminology here, Guy really was at the beginning of visual thinking. He calls this blah, blah, blah, when words are not enough. It's not that language is bad, but you can't convey the same kind of shared understanding. And after all, let's just accept it. Every human being is visual. It's evolution. We used to run away from lions on the savannah to not be eaten up. So visual thinkers survived. So some people say, oh, I'm less of a visual thinker. Yeah, might be nuances, but we all are visual thinkers. That's just part of how we evolved. But we don't do this in business enough. We talk too much in business, and we don't use visual tools enough. So using visuals will just make things a lot clearer. And ultimately, when things are clear, you will have much more alignment and you will have better outcomes. And that's where the word canvas was fascinating for us. Because on a canvas, if you take painting, what can you do? You can draw an existing landscape so you're copying something. It's like in a business, you could draw your existing business model canvas, or you can draw a fantasy landscape, something that you've dreamt of that you imagine where you would like to go. Same in business. You can draw out an idea that you have that you might want to share with others. The moment you make these things more visual, the more you get a clear understanding. It's the same with paintings Here. We're talking about more structured things like business models and value propositions. But it's the same principle. And I'm shocked how little.

Leaders today still use visuals or PowerPoint presentations with a thousand Bullet points. And not a single visual like, you know, people. There's even science that shows you people will never remember. You do add visuals, they will remember more. You get them to actually visualize something together collaboratively, they will remember for a long time. So think of strategy communication. It's terrible. We need to get a lot better at these things with visuals. And again, not lipstick on the pig, but strategic visual thinking. And I'm super, you know, fascinated about how this could change alignment. I still really don't know how to sell this to CEOs around the world. Because if I say visuals, they think, oh, you draw pictures. Yeah, it's still hard to communicate. I work with a guy called Holger Niels poll a lot, and one of the things he made me understand is when the visuals are too refined, you probably won't get feedback. So you can have refined visuals. When you're communicating a strategy, that should feel okay, this is it, right? You're the CEO, you're communicating the strategy. But when you're looking for feedback, you're having a conversation. The visuals should be pretty raw. They can actually be very ugly. You'll get more feedback. So here's a thing called value scenes. An excellent way to test business ideas, by the way. So you draw a moment of need, and you make a very simple kind of maybe stick figure. A moment of need. Oh, you know, I need to order food, there's lockdown, and my mobile phone is broken, whatever. And then you. You look at the solution. Today again, you make a very simple image with a stick figure and a speech bubble. And then you make a third drawing. With tomorrow your idea, your solution. With that simple drawing with thick figures and speech bubbles, you can get out of the building and start talking to people. The feedback you will get is a lot better than if you had verbally just shared your idea. And we actually did this. Just recently, I was involved in a project with Colgate. Can't tell you what we did, but this is exactly what they did. They took some value scenes, their ideas, visualized them. Took them maybe 10 minutes to visualize them. And then they started putting them in front of dentists and patients. And they got very powerful feedback. So this is so powerful and so underused that sometimes I just ask myself, like, why can't we get more people to use this? And the answer is clear. People think drawings need to be beautiful and you need to be good at it. No, it's just about using what is essential to human beings. We're visual creatures, so it's More natural actually than speech. So why don't we just put visuals in front of people in conversations to have a shared understanding or in interviews when you want some feedback? We just don't use them enough. It's such an underused tool. It's amazing.

And it takes off with senior leaders. So I don't think it's used enough, but I've seen it really take off. And one of the two big pharmaceutical companies in Switzerland, we have two huge ones. The board members enjoyed the visual presentations of some of the innovation teams so much because it was fresh, because it was clear that they said we need to do more of this. And now actually my friend Holger Niels Poll is doing constant trainings to help senior leaders use visuals more. And it's not just about drawing. It's about visualizing concepts, ideas, messages. So it's very, very powerful. And while a lot of people who are doing, who are into this, there it takes off. But where we really need it more is in the leadership, at the leadership level, because there's so much communication to a lot of people where you need clarity, you need alignment. Our whole book, the Invincible Company, is about creating alignment across an organization when it comes to strategic growth. So I think at the senior leadership level, this is really taking off. And I'm not talking just about drawing, but visual tools. We see that when we present our portfolio map, how it changes the way people will look at their businesses. Because all of a sudden you create transparency where there was none. And that was our initial goal with the Invincible company. We said, hey, we created at the doers level with the business model Canvas, a tool that created transparency and clarity around the business model. But when you're in a large company, take Colgate, take ge, take Amazon, you actually have a portfolio of businesses. So what's the visual language there to create the same clarity and transparency? And that's what really got us going to create visual tools at that level that would help senior leaders get that clarity. Because when you're in an organization with business units, you have hundred thousands of people. At Amazon, there are over a million employees now, like, how are you going to align that beast? It won't happen just through words, it will happen through very clear and visual alignment. So it's very, very powerful and still, I would say underused, but it's really spreading because we want more autonomous teams, which means we need more alignment. You can't. Command and control doesn't work anymore. So how are we going to get everybody to move in the same direction? In, you know, using visual tools for alignment, not for control, because command and control doesn't work anymore. People won't want to work in an organization like that. So how do you provide autonomy and at the same time keep the organization aligned? It's by using these tools that create clarity and alignment that you will be able to do that. So there's a whole shift happening in organizations today because without autonomy, these beasts will die. So you need independent, autonomous teams, which means management innovation, but also means innovation in the way we communicate and create that clarity. Across small and big companies, there are two myths. One is the path is going to magically emerge because you use testing. Well, first thing is you'll always have contradicting data and you still need to have a vision. But the difference between having a blind vision, where some of my friends say you have vision, go to the doctor, is that you need to actually have an informed vision. So you adapt the path to turn your vision into reality so you'll have contradicting data, and that's where your vision is going to drive you forward in the right direction. So it's not the clear path won't emerge, but the patterns will emerge. And the patterns emerge when you really start getting good at seeing patterns in some of that chaos. So yes, things will emerge, but their patterns are not a clear path. And that's where entrepreneurs are really good at stitching these things together to find that path forward. One of the reasons why we created the business model library is because we see that there are not enough people who are good at pattern detection. So we try to provide those patterns so you can start to connect that evidence from the field with those patterns. So that's the first myth that it'll be crystal clear. No, it won't. You still always need to have a vision, but you'll make data informed decisions. You won't just blindly stomp forward and go into bankruptcy. But the second one is there's another big myth that people think you can pivot yourself to success. So if you just test and adapt enough, you'll find the path. Well, guess what? Sometimes you just need to stop and kill a project and move on and do something else. This is not a pivot. That's a complete change of what you're doing. And the data to prove that is venture capital. Like, there is no venture capitalist on the planet who believes he or she can pick the winner. So why do managers think they can pick the winning idea? It's not possible. But what you can do is diversify your investments and when you make 10 to 25, 30 investments, you know that one will succeed and cover all the rest. So it's actually normal that some projects will fail. And you need to see that as that's great. That's just how life works. And you know, my friend Steve Blank likes to say there's one thing Silicon Valley is really good at. A lot of challenges with Silicon Valley today, but I think the one thing that's really good at is, you know how they call failure in Silicon Valley? They call it experience. Because it's normal that you fail when you were too early, your idea was too challenging, if you haven't done anything illegal, you'll actually get follow up investment. Because the venture capitalists think, oh well, look, they already did certain things, they're not going to make those mistakes again. Whereas there's still this myth in particular also in companies that you can pivot yourself to success. We just need to invest in the right team and people. No, you need to invest in a portfolio. So it's okay to fail and it's natural. The point is to not give up. You actually switch to something else. So I don't know a single, maybe one out of a thousand entrepreneurs who succeeded on their first try. So this methodology is not going to allow you to just find that brilliant idea. It's going to help you waste less time and energy and ultimately over 1, 2, 5 different projects, get to success. But just understand, you're not going to find success immediately and you can't pivot yourself to success. Sometimes you need to call it a day and say, this was it, I'm going to move on to the next.

Project, as I always like to do. I wrapped up by asking Alex if he could give all of you listening permission to do or drop something, what would it be?

Let. Let go of the tyranny of success. So there's something, you know, I always used to compare myself to, to other speakers, business people, and I don't know why and where that came from, but you know, there's no use of that. So I just shifted towards trying to get a little bit better at what I do every day and be happy and define my own success, you know, not just in terms of fame and finance, figuring out what success means to me. So I think, you know, the one thing I would recommend that everybody lets go of the outside definition of success is, you know, find your definition of success and then try to get better at that, but never compare. It sounds kind of trivial, but I think there's this success image you know, we put people on covers of magazines and we just kind of accept that. Don't accept how others define success. That's not for you, right? I think we each need to find our own way of defining success and then live that and period. Don't compare.

Last but not least, where can listeners find more?

Just go to the Strategizer website or Google my name and you'll find a lot of free content. Our vision is our paying clients are the biggest companies of the planet, but we've always wanted to create tools for millions on universal business challenges. So we put a lot out there. On our blog. There's a lot of stuff to download. You can get always 1/3 or 1/4 of every book we have. We give it away for free premium model so you can find all of the free stuff we do. And if you're interested, go for the online courses or buy the books or or just reach out.

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