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? What are you speaking on? Just general education or. Because like I'm out in 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 that used to be busy doing stuff. But 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're going to learn some things but not really make any specific points. It just, it could be this. It's like China's going to have the next. What's going to 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, it's just like, well, you know, we were in China when the revolution and this and what's happening, in fact, what do I need to be wasting my time about what's happening in China? I don't have a company dealing in China.

If you had a business deal with 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? When you're speaking to those crowds, what do you find yourself? People calling you up and they want a speaker to talk. Is it education? Is it explaining? Is it following up on your books or. They're 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, giving them a picture of where they could be. What do people call you in for?

Almost exclusively it's about category design and the play bigger book. It 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. 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've done it at broader industry conferences, 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 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 in 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 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, then the biggest in the uk and then step by step by step, you kind of grow into that dominant position. And how would you tell people if there can't be a unlimited number of new categories coming up every day or can there? How? Like if I'm in a standard service business or something and I want to do big things, but let's just. I don't even know, you know, if it's a service business, let's say rather technology. Of course we have do breakthroughs all the time. But how would you get people that are in. They're in the grocery business, they're in the lawn business, they're in the cleaning business, they're in plumbing. And I've talked to people on here that does 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 it does. They need you to kind of light the fuse.

I'LL tell you a story. 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, right, okay, you can't suck it out. But not everybody wants to do that either. Right.

There are a lot of, there are.

It's actually, in some ways it's easier to enter a proven market and if you're okay with the idea that 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. 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 you, 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.

Right.

With a fairly recent story. So there can't be, I mean, there's very few categories that are older than bars.

Yeah.

You 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 New York City.

And it's 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 would 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. Instead of a sports bar, she called it the Sports Bra.

Yeah.

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 new. And now she's gotten so much publicity over this, she has the opportunity to franchise this thing. Like why not open ones in city after city, right? So even in age old categories. Because one thing that is true about category creation is 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 changes in context, if you can understand exchanges 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 that didn't exist before. And yet there's been no solution to how do you go and have the night of watching women's sports. So 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 of 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 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 something, if you're going to do something great, you got to race. There's got to be some competition, there's got to be some fun in there where you're doing it and just starting off with the work, the play bigger, it's just like play and bigger. And what I'm hearing for the fact of your 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 even. You know, we're in a company where 93% of the people will just be in sales, you know, other people who are trained and have offices. But 7% are the ones who are really responsible for all of the growth in the company. But anytime 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 need to speak more to the 93%. And it's like, no, they know how to be small. They want it. 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. They're all 93% are doing average numbers. They're doing making good money and all of that. But they want to be big and they all have the potential. And you and I know, and Kevin, you would know because the success stories you've seen and that's behind what we're doing now and behind this podcast is that I the commodity of success has to you traffic in ideas that work, not ideas that don't work. And you, like, 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 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 and you're just one of the plumbers in the room and you're hearing about being great in designing category and you really want to do that, maybe you need to sell your damn plumbing business and get in another business. I'm saying you need. You might. Maybe you need to look at another business. You don't have to be in the plumbing if you're not convinced there's a way out of that for you. Well, 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. 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, 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.

Okay.

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. 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 so what followed up? Play Bigger, 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 by the time that book even was published, I already had a contract for our next book. And this was a collaboration with Hemant Tanaja, 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. So then we enjoyed working together so much, we actually ended up doing two more books. The next one after that was called On 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 these new technologies in a very responsible way.

And then hit number two in the Wall Street Journal in the first two weeks. Or it may have. I don't know.

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, Publishers 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.

What'S now called responsible innovation. How do you build a company so that the technology you build doesn't harm society, actually helps society? 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 guidelines and all that. There was no playbook. There was 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 and here's how you put it into practice. So that's what we wrote with Intended Consequences.

Well, 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. 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 episodes of that series was about technology in the 1980s. So they ended up pulling me in. I ended up being like essentially the main talking head throughout this whole episode of this series. And 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 things like Apple when it was in its early stages, or Yahoo when it was six people and things like that. So it's stuff like that. It could be commenting about something in the news. It could be, I don't know. I had written about a book about IBM and in 2011, when IBM was 100 years old, CBS Sunday Morning wanted to do a big story about it. Had me in the studio, so all over the place.

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