Episode #671 - Reimagining Business Strategies with Kevin Maney, Partner at Category Design Advisors

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Let's just say right now, where have you found yourself speaking the most? And you know, how long are you speaking and what are you speaking on? Just general education or, you know, because like I'm out at Aspen right now. They have the Aspen Ideas Festival and basically it's a bunch of hot air. No offense, but it's a bunch of hot air from people that are not. It used to be busy doing stuff, but you know, like you have Lester Holt here and you have people that have got names and everything. They've had exposure, they've had insights. Not really employed, maybe that much right now, but I could go down through the whole list. But they have, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna learn some things and. But not really make any specific points or just. It could be this. It's like China's gonna. The next. What's gonna happen? I went to one many years ago. Like the last one I went to. Here's the direction of China over the next five years. You know, I was just like, well, you know, we were in China when the revolution and this and what's happening? I put, you know, what do I need to be wasting my time, you know, about what's happening in China? You know, I don't have a company dealing in China.

If you had a business deal in China, you're probably right.

So the thing is, yours is directed towards things that people can use and do something with now. And so how did you get to that point? You know, what's. When you're speaking to those crowds, what do you find yourself? People calling you up and they want a speaker to. Is it education? Is it explaining? Is it following up on your books or is it coming in. They want your principals to come into their company and they like bring you in to kind of open the door and get people interested in thinking this way, changing the dynamic of how they look at the situation they're in and giving them a picture of where they could be. What do people call you in for?

Almost exclusively, it's about category design in the play, bigger book. And so I just was. 10 days ago or so, I was in Dallas. I spoke to a Dallas, it's called the X Club in Dallas, which is a club of investors and entrepreneurs and business people. 300 or so people, you know, it Was basically like the basics of category design. What does that mean? How do categories work? How do you think about it for your company? So I do it for groups like that. I do it for individual companies. I. I've done it at. At, you know, broader industry conferences, you know, just all over the map. I mean, it seems to be something that a lot of people are interested in.

And how can, you know, you have 300 people out there and you're talking about category design. You've got the great point that, you know, the. The biggest fish in the pond, it gets to eat everybody else. And so there's a lot of advantage on being the biggest fish. And we've all got 24 hours in the day. You know, the way I look at it is I've always focused it on being number one, because it's like I can never rally the troops on going for number two. Let's go for number two. You know, I don't know how Avis does it, but somehow you say, we're going to go for a championship, we're going to go for number one. We're going to, you know, we're going to be number one somehow. The fastest growing, you know, in our community, in our town, in our neighborhood. You know, that's like the Beatles were talking about when they made their breakthrough. They said what bands always did where they tried to be the biggest in their town, and then the biggest in their region, and then, you know, then the biggest in the UK and then you, you know, step by step by step, you kind of grow into that dominant position. And how would you tell people if, you know, there can't be a unlimited number of new categories coming up every day, or can there? You know, how, like, if I'm in a standard service business or something, and I want to do big things, but let's just, you know, I don't even know, you know, if it's a service business. Let's say, rather technology. Of course, we have new breakthroughs all the time, but how would you get people that are in, you know, they're in the grocery business, they're in the lawn business, they're in the cleaning business, they're in, you know, plumbing, you know, and I've talked to people on here that have done amazing things in all of those areas, but, like, where do they come up with the ideas? But like real estate, you know, you go into a town, there's a thousand realtors. I'm in Aspen. It's like every other person is a realtor. And so how Would you explain get people right now to break down, thinking about kind of maybe get them to take a fresh look at what they're doing, where maybe they think category design doesn't have anything to do with me, and maybe he does. They need you to kind of like the fuse.

Well, I'll, I'll tell you a story, but let me preface it by saying that first of all, you're right. I mean, you can't. If every company in the world is creating a new category, they're like, you know, right, you can't. It's not gonna happen. But not everybody wants to do that either, right? There are a lot of thorough, thorough. It's actually, in some ways it's easier to enter a proven market. And you know, if you're okay with the idea that you're gonna, you know, you're going to scrape some market share out of that market and, you know, and you're always going to have to make an argument that your thing is a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper or something like that. But, you know, look, the vast majority of businesses get built that way. And some, most of them are, you know, perfectly legitimate businesses and some of them make people a lot of money. And you know, some of them just become lifestyle businesses. But there's nothing wrong with that. And that's what the vast majority of people do. What we're saying is if you want to be, if your goal is that you would like to be or want to try to be one of those companies that wins a market category over time and is the one that wins that, if that's your, if that's the kind of company you want to build, then here's a playbook for trying to do that. But let me answer your other question about sort of what seems like old mundane categories with a fairly recent story. So there can't be, I mean, there's very few categories that are older than bars. Yeah, you would think there's nothing new you could do with a bar.

You know what I heard, I heard this in New York. They were talking about coming out of COVID and they said there was 349 Irish bars in New York City. It's like, what?

I'm not surprised there are a lot of Irish bars in the city.

It is like, yeah, there's a lot of bars out there.

But anyway, so here's the power of even in an age old category, of finding a way to create a new category out of that category. So there was this woman in her 40s in Portland, Oregon. And she was a big fan of women's sports. So she got frustrated because she'd go into bar after bar, especially going to sports bars, and would want to watch WNBA games or the women's soccer league, one of those things, and the bars would never put them on. Or maybe if There were like 10 screens in the bar, they put on one screen, right? She's like, well, but women's sports are like growing in popularity, you know, don't you understand? They're like, no, it's not what we cater to. So she ended up starting her own bar, opening her own bar that would only show women's sports. And in fact she gave it the most clever name ever. You know, it's instead of a sports bar, she called it the Sports Bra. Yeah, and, and, and by all stories that I've read about it, this place has become super popular because it stands out, right? There's something new, something, you know, and now, you know, she's gotten so much publicity over this, she, she has the opportunity to franchise this thing. Like why not open ones in city after city, right? So even in, even in age old categories. Because, because one thing that, that is true about category creation is when, when the context around us changes, which is always changing. New technology, new social mores, new geopolitical things. As the context changes, it always creates new opportunities for new categories because it's always creating new problems to be solved or new ways to solve old problems or whatever. So in this case, one of the things that the changes in context, if you can understand the changes in context around people you want to address, in this case it was women's sports are becoming very popular. That's a new context. It didn't exist before. And yet there's been no solution to how do you go and have a night of watching women's sports if you understand that context and how it's changing and what new missing that's creating, you can actually see a space for a new category or something. And it doesn't matter whether it's an age old thing like laundromats or bars or whatever, or plumbers or if it's like something built on ChatGPT, there's always these new things because the context is always changing.

Well, I love the fact that you got a book out there that approaches how to dominate and I like the fact the title, to me you were clever in using the word play. You know, you start with play because anytime there's, there's something, you know, if you're going to do something great you got to race, you know, and you gotta. There's gotta be some competition. There's got to be some fun in there where you're. You're doing it and just starting off with the work, the play bigger, you know, it's just. It's just like play and bigger. And what I'm hearing for the fact that you're speaking everywhere and you're primarily talking about how to get huge, how people get huge, and it seems like there's a big market. This is what I've always felt, even small people want to hear about getting big. We're in a company where 93% of the people will just be in sales, the people who are trained and have offices. But 7% are the ones who really responsible for all of the growth in the company. But anytime you get on, you know, we get on stage, we are all always talking about doing it big. Doing it big, doing it big. Now, the guys in the home office that are wonderful people, but they've never made a sale in their life, they're saying, you know, you need to speak more to the 93%. And it's like, no, they know how to be small.

They wanted.

Yeah, they want. I said, go out at me. You know, we have a convention of 50, 60,000 people. Walk out in the audience and talk to people and see what do you want to do. You know, they're all 93% are, you know, doing average numbers. They're doing. Making good money and all of this, but they want to be big, you know, and they. And they all have the potential. And you and I know, and Kevin, you would know because the success stories you've seen and, and that's behind what we're doing now and behind this podcast is that the commodity of success has to. You traffic in ideas that work, not ideas that don't work. And you bet your activity on concepts that are proven winners and people can turn their lives around. If you're an animal, you're probably not going to do that, but a human being can turn themselves around and, and if they're motivated. And a lot of time, all it takes is an idea or a concept or something to trigger that. And for example, let me come back and refute my argument earlier. Like, if you're out there and you're just one of the plumbers in the room and you're hearing about being great in designing categories and you really want to do that, maybe you need to sell your damn plumbing business and get in another business, you know what I'm saying? Maybe you need to look at another business. You don't have to be in the plumbing business if you're not convinced there's a way out of that for you. Well, you know, and it can't happen in your town. Maybe you need to think about moving because if your main goal is to get big, there's some absolutes that are involved in it. And so that's. You're confronting people with things that help them make decisions where they can feel good about the track they're on and what they really want. Because maybe they say that thought they wanted to do it, but like, no, I don't want to do it that much, you know.

Right, right.

So. So I'm really excited to hear how this is playing out and that this message is being exposed to so many people. When you wrote the book making, you followed up that book with, was that the Two Second Advantage?

No, that was just before that book, actually.

Okay. Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

And what were you thinking about the Two Second Advantage?

Well, the two second advantage was I wrote that with a guy named Vivek Ranadive, who at the time was the CEO of a big software company called tibco. Vivek Sense is out of that, and he's actually the owner of the Sacramento Kings basketball team now.

That is who.

Vivek Renadive is his name.

Okay.

And so Vivek had these ideas and he and I were talking one time and I had been very interested in. I gotten very interested in brain science.

Right.

Because I was very interested in how this was long before the chatgpt kind of stuff came out about how computer scientists were trying to understand the human brain and be able to create programs or computers that work like the brain. So we got talking about this and we ended up doing this book about how basically that. About how computer scientists were learning from neuroscientists about the nature of talent and the way brains work and how could you create essentially talented computers. And so I'm actually, the book was like, unfortunately is probably about 10 years ahead of its time. If it had come out in 10 years later, when all this interest in AI started to happen, it probably would have done a lot better than it did.

Maybe it's time for a rewrite.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, maybe.

And. And so what. What is what followed up Play Bigger.

I. I started well, so again, going back to keep in mind, I thought I was a writer. That's all I was, you know, So I, I wrote Play Bigger with these guys and thought, okay, well, that book's done. I'm moving on to the next thing.

Right.

And. And, you know, by the time that book even was published, I already had a. A contract for our next book. And this was a collaboration with Amontine Asia, who's the CEO of one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley called General Catalyst.

Okay.

So we wrote a book called Unscaled, which was about how AI was going to change all these different industries, kind of tick through different energy and retail and education and all these different industries, looking at how AI was likely to change these industries. And so then we enjoyed working together so much, we actually ended up doing two more books. The next one after that was called UN Healthcare, which actually took the unscaled ideas and just focused it on healthcare itself. And then the most recent one was called Intended Consequences, which was about how to build AI and all of these new technologies in a very responsible way.

Does that get number two in the Wall Street Journal in the first two weeks, or I may have. I don't know.

I don't pay attention. I'm not being. I actually honestly don't pay attention to much of that. So I don't know if it did or not.

But he did very well. Number seven, Publisher's weekly nonfiction list. So what came from that, writing that book? What good things happened to you from that intended consequences you were trying to focus people on?

Well, on what's now called responsible innovation. Right. How do you build a company so that the technology you build doesn't harm society, actually helps society? Right.

Yeah.

And what's a playbook for doing that? I mean, everybody started over these last four or five years as AI started to bubble up and you had other things like very powerful technologies like CRISPR and blockchain and all these others, There started to be more and more conversation about this idea of responsible innovation and that people have to build these things with responsible, you know, guidelines and all that. But no, there was no playbook. There was no. Nothing you could hand to a company founder and say, if you want to build a company that has this as part of its ethos, here's how you think about it. Here's how you put it into practice. So that's what we wrote with Intended Consequences.

Well, are you. How. When you. I'm curious about when they call you and you've done a lot of this for interviews on tv, radio, cnn, CBS Sunday Morning, and npr, they're calling on you to. They're asking similar questions that you get asked so you can cover the same information you cover at Your talks, are they bringing you in as an expert on AI or what are they bringing you in to speak on? Is it a wide variety of things?

It's a wide variety of things. In fact, for instance, if you go.

On.

I don't know where it's streaming now, but about, I don't know what it was five, six years ago, CNN did a series on the 1980s. And one of the, one of the episodes of that series was about technology in the 1980s. And so they ended up pulling me and I ended up being like essentially the main talking head throughout this, you know, this whole episode of this series. And that's in that case I was drawing on my experience as the technology journalist, right, that had been a part of this, who had walked into, you know, things like, you know, Apple when it was, you know, in its early stages or Yahoo when it was, you know, six people and things like that. So, you know, but so it's stuff like that. It could be commenting about something in the news. It could be, you know, I don't know. I, I had written about a book about IBM and, And so in 2011, when IBM was 100 years old, CBS Sunday Morning wanted to do a big, you know, story about it, had me in the studio. So it was, it's been all over the place.

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