In this solo book‑tip video, Nick Hutchison urges viewers to embrace the unprecedented pace of change and cultivate creativity, positioning Jeremy Gutsche’s Create the Future: Tactics for Disruptive Thinking as a practical guide. Nick outlines the book’s core premise—using hands‑on workshops to train the brain for innovation—and highlights a standout exercise where leaders imagine how unrelated giants (Google, Uber, Amazon, Patagonia) would disrupt their industry, focusing on each company’s distinct value proposition (speed/insight, simplicity/connection, heavy customization/lean, mission‑driven impact). He explains how the book includes an Innovation Handbook workbook that walks readers through these scenarios. Nick then shares how he is applying the framework to his own company, Book Thinkers, citing a Patagonia‑style mission‑oriented example that sparked concrete discussions and potential changes. Concluding with a strong recommendation, he encourages the audience to read the book and experiment with its workshops.
Chapters
You are about to experience history's highest rates of change, disruption, and opportunity, which means that you are that much closer to having a breakthrough because it's more possible today than it ever has been before. So ask yourself, are you in the right place? Are you consistently cultivating, uh, a sense of creativity and innovation in your brain? And if not, then this is a good book for you. Today's book tip is going to come from Create the Future Tactics for Disruptive Thinking by Jeremy Gucci. People ask me all the time, hey Nick, hey Book Thinkers, how can I cultivate a better sense of creativity? Or how can I tackle the ever-changing opportunities that are in front of me? There's so many. And so I would recommend this book to those people. I've read a couple books that can help cultivate those things, but I think that this book does a very nice job. Jeremy is the CEO of Trend Hunter. A company that is dedicated to identifying trends and to learn more about how you can predict them. And so as I was going throughout this book, it took me a little while because there were a lot of different opportunities to reflect and to think and to journal and different workshops that you could go through as you were completing the book. And so about halfway through the book, there's one that I thought was really interesting, and I'll open it up here. The title to this little subchapter says, Effective Workshops Lead to New Ideas. While training your brain to be more creative. And that's the whole purpose for a book like this, right? And so as somebody who's conducted more than 1,000 workshops at major companies, Jeremy is somebody that you want to listen to. So in the book, he lists out, uh, some popular trend hunter workshops sort of in menu format. And there's one that I wanted to highlight here because I think it's something that all of us as entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs should be completing. He says, how might Uber approach your market? Amazon? Google? Facebook? Patagonia? In a workshop setting, I typically get CEOs and their leadership teams to work through scenarios of how certain unrelated companies might disrupt them. If, for example, you learn that Google AI had allocated $1 billion to disrupting your industry, what do you think their strategy might be? And so if you're having an issue like in your business where you're not predicting change enough, or you think you're behind the 8-ball, then you should walk through this. And he has a little chart set up where he has the names of the companies on the left side, and then he has their value proposition. So for example, if Google was to come into your industry and they were to apply AI, which is speed and insight, to your industry, what would they do with a billion, uh, a billion dollars? And what would those disruptive features be? That's what gets me so excited, because when you dream about these other companies, it gets you outside of the box that you've put yourself in. It gets you outside of your day-to-day thinking and disrupts that pattern. And then what is the key offering as a result of those disruptive features? Okay, now you're way outside of the box. How can you apply that to your business? Maybe you should take some action on those things. What about Uber? Simplicity and connection. What about Amazon? Heavily customized and lean. Very, very, very lean. Willing to lose money for over a decade in order to eat up market share. What about Patagonia? Saving the world. And so I love this workshop because it gives you the opportunity to step way outside, like I said, and disrupt your way of thinking. This entire book is full of opportunities to do that. Now, if you actually flip it over, this way. On the back, the Innovation Handbook says the award-winning Exploiting Chaos revealed and revised and updated. And so there's an actual workbook for you to go through all these exercises attached right to the back of the book. I didn't go through the workbook yet, but I definitely will, and I'm going to apply all of these workshops to Book Thinkers. I've already had a lot of really interesting conversation with my co-workers at Book Thinkers now that we're growing the team Talking about these different situations. Okay, let's use Patagonia as an example. Patagonia comes into the book space, into the educational technology space, the Bookstagram space, and they say, hey, we want to make this about being mission-oriented and giving back to the world. And then all of a sudden they're donating a massive portion of their earnings to a charity that helps people educate. Like, we should be doing that too, and so we are. And I can't really tell you what yet because we're still in the process of deciding, but this book caused me to take real change in a bunch of different areas of the business, and that's why I found a lot of value in it. I think you should get a copy of it as well. So thank you for sending this over, Greenleaf, and thank you for working with me, Jeremy. I'm really excited that I had the opportunity to read this book. And with that, I'll end my video. Go out there and read something like this book and have an amazing day. Bye!
