Leveraging Thought Leadership featuring Jeremy Utley

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on this LinkedIn Live, which is an extension of our podcast, Leveraging Thought Leadership. And today, and today only, is my guest. My guest is Jeremy Utley. Jeremy is the co-author of Idea Flow, which just came out last week, and he is a director of educational executive education at Stanford's d.school and an adjunct professor at Stanford's School of Engineering. And he is a friend. So welcome, Jeremy. So here we are. You are now a published author for what, 6 days now?

8. It's been a long 8 days, Peter.

It's been a long 8 days. Okay, so tell us what those first 8 days have been like, because it's been What, a year of writing the book, 6 months of planning, and then 8 days of nonstop stuff. So what's that been like?

It's been incredible. I mean, the book has been in my heart and the stories have been in my head for so long, mine and my co-author Perry Kleban, that it's been really fun to get it out in the world and to have people interacting with the ideas. We've been cherishing these memories and these stories and this research for so long. that it kind of— you become overly familiar to it in a way. And so to be hearing from friends from high school and college and grad school and, you know, former clients and, you know, people in the neighborhood and church and all sorts of people, you know, reaching out, you know, it's, it's, it's a huge compliment to— I have a construction worker friend, for example, who just the other day sent me a photo. He bought a new notebook and a pen and he said, thank you for writing a spectacular book that I could understand. And I thought it was, yeah. So all that to say, people coming out of the woodwork to really say thank you, to appreciate, to resonate, and to start applying some of the tools that we teach has been really rewarding.

So one of the things I always find interesting once a book is released is the authors are typically close, too close to it to be objective, number one. And sometimes because the way publishing cycles work, you finished writing it almost a year ago, it's not as top of mind as it was, right? Because there's this calm before the storm. Are there things that are resonating with folks that you didn't expect? Any surprises in terms of people saying, wow, this is the thing that stood out the most for me?

I would say the thing that's been most surprising to me has actually been how my own thinking has continued to evolve. What I've learned is a book is almost a snapshot of your knowledge at a point in time. But you keep learning. You know, and as we recorded our audiobook more recently, and I'm reading through it, and in my mind, you know, we have a subject like experimentation, you know, as kind of a core mindset and toolset. I'm reading the chapter, you know, in the studio for the audiobook, and I get to the end, I'm like, wait, we don't tell the, you know, blank, the Netflix story? And I realized, oh, I learned that, which is a perfect encapsulation. after the manuscript's locked, right?

Right.

So my mind's not locked in the same way that the manuscript's locked. So I continue to interact with the world, with inputs, with inspiration, with stories, and they become a part of my repertoire, so to speak. When I'm talking about a topic, I can't help but mention the Netflix experimentation story. And yet when I look in the book, I had this experience last night. I was at a big dinner with a bunch of VCs and entrepreneurs, and one of the VCs was talking to me about procrastination and how important he finds it. I said, oh, there's a whole section on, there's this amazing research, Donald McKinnon, You know, World War II spymaster studied creativity. He found that delaying decisions is a hugely effective strategy. And I go to the index of the book. I'm like, let me show you where it is. It's not there. It's this whole thing.

Well, you're pre-selling volume 2. That's what you're doing. There you go. So a couple of thoughts on the book, because you and I have been working together for a little bit over a year on the book and a bunch of other things, is that the d.school is— there's no place better when it comes to innovation.

Yeah.

Right? Yet when we look at the business literature on innovation, part of it, there's been a couple of issues that I've seen, right? As the outsider. One is everybody loves innovation. There aren't too many anti-innovation people. Like, let's go back to the fax machine, or I love the rotary phone. Haven't met those yet. Maybe the Amish a little bit. No offense to my Amish friends, right? But there isn't an anti-innovation crowd yet. very few people actually own the function in their organization, right? Where it's like on their business card, SVP, Director of Innovation. So it's really hard to find that place where it fits. And one of the things I love about the book is the subtitle, which we can see it here, The Only Business Metric That Matters, because a lot of the literature on innovation in the past has been not bad, but it's abstract.

It's cool.

the creative part is really, really sexy. This is really somewhere between sort of Six Sigma meets like whiteboarding or something, right? So do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, definitely.

What's that?

It's meant to be pragmatic for sure.

Yeah.

Which is implemented.

Yeah. So when most innovation books aren't that, so do you want to give sort of a teaser or the highlight of what might that only business metric that matters be? Yeah, I mean, it doesn't excuse anyone from buying the book. Go buy the book now.

Yeah, well, thank you, Peter. Yeah, the basic premise is when most people think about the task of coming up with solutions to problems— ideas are simply solutions to problems— they think in terms of good. And what the research would suggest is instead of thinking in terms of good solutions or good ideas, one should first think in terms of more. What I need is actually a volume of solutions, a volume of possibilities. The single greatest determinant of the quality of an idea is actually the quantity of ideas.

And so— Part of that problem, though, is, well, now I'm self-aware, right? Because every idea I put out, I want it to be good. If I have to, if the metric is volume, uh-oh, I'm going to be vulnerable. I'm going to put out stuff that's silly. It might not be my best idea.

Well, I would say if you want to focus, if there's an area to focus on volume, it's actually generating bad ideas. And people go, wait, what? Bad ideas? I go, yeah, be like Steve Jobs. Every day he'd sit down with Sir Jony Ive and he would say, you want to hear a dopey idea? And Jony said most of the time they were really dopey. In fact, a lot of times they were truly terrible. But every once in a while they take the air out of the room and leave us breathless in wonder. And the point is, when people try to come up with good ideas, That's the wrong goal. The goal should be to increase the volume and variation of your thinking. And actually pushing yourself to come up with bad ideas is a great way to increase the variability of your thinking.

Mm-hmm.

Jobs knew that dopey is how you get to delightful. You know, when we think of Steve Jobs, we don't think he's dopey. We think of disruption and redefining categories. But every day he's sharing what he thinks are dopey ideas with a really smart collaborator. And so if you want to come up with more ideas, actually allow yourself to come up with bad ideas. And in so doing, you actually give yourself permission to increase the variability of your thinking and you increase the likelihood of discovering really tremendous ideas as well.

Got it. So the metric is the volume. And do you want to give the secret sauce of what it is? Because you actually have a metric here.

Well, it's very simple. Ideas over time. You can measure it in a minute. You can measure it in an hour. You can measure it in a month. I mean, a simple activity that we recommend in the book is find an email that you need to write that you haven't written yet. Ordinarily, if I'm going to write Peter a note, I put Peter in the To field and then the subject line. I start writing the subject and then I move on. And I don't ever even think about alternative subject lines. We say, hey, for an email you know you need to write, set a timer for a minute. And come up with as many subject lines as you possibly can.

That is your— That's interesting, right? Because we're all writing hundreds of emails a day. A minute in the context of a subject header for an email would probably— I have to try it, but would probably feel like an hour, probably feel like a long time.

Right. Why would I spend a minute, right? But it's just a minute. What you learn really quickly is what— I mean, it exposes a lot of cognitive biases that keep us from creativity in a lot of other places, which is When you think of a solution, it's called the Einstellung effect. When you think of a solution, your brain stops looking for other solutions. And yet there's no evidence that suggests that our early solutions are our best solutions. And in fact, there's evidence that suggests just the opposite, that identifying one solution prevents us from seeing better solutions. But when you turn the goal to quantity rather than quality, you actually change the definition of success.

And that's really the flow part of idea flow is letting yourself get into that place where you can just sort of not crank them out for the sake of cranking them out, but being in the zone.

That's right.

Yeah. Awesome. So thank you for that highlight. So give us a sense now of— I think I want to spend a couple minutes here, if you would. So I've talked to lots and lots of people over the years about how hard it is to write a book. So we're not going to go there. But I want to talk about how hard it is to get ready to get a book to market. And then you're in the very early stages with a very full calendar of activities. So talk about sort of how— I don't know if difficult's the right word, but how much energy, effort, et cetera, and the teams involved in thinking about what needs to be done to get this book out there, tapping into your friends, tapping into your network, tapping into your communities. Because this is the stuff that people don't really talk about enough, in my humble opinion.

No, there's a tremendous amount of coordination that happens on the backend. And you think, well, the publisher markets a book. And definitely they're a tremendous and incredible resource. There's a marketing team, et cetera, publicist, you probably have PR folks, et cetera. And even with all of their effort, there is an enormous amount of responsibility on an individual author to galvanize their friends and family and their followers and their clients and help people understand that the opportunity is out there. And I think, the tendency, at least for me, is to feel very self-conscious of mentioning the book or because I go, oh, people already know. And the truth is I already know, but actually very few people do because the way social media algorithms work and otherwise, even email open rates, it's highly unlikely that a message that you put out there is being consumed by anything more than a very, very, very small percentage of your audience or your—

Sure, sure. Stay with this for a minute. So a lot of— because I think you touched on a key point— a lot of folks are reluctant. It feels awkward. I'm not in sales of asking their friends and such to help them promote the book and spread the ideas and, and get it out into the universe. And I think what most are pleasantly surprised about is how receptive people are to helping you. They know you, they love you, they're a fan of the work, they appreciate you, and it's no big deal for someone to post something about the book or whatever. So how was the perception of that, or was that difficult at first, and have you gotten better at that?

Yeah, I think I underestimated how many people would be enthusiastic to contribute, to be invited into the effort. And so that's been a delight to realize, is it's a joy for people who love you, for people who feel close to you or who feel close to the work, It's a joy for them to get to contribute and to get to be a part of it. And there's no limitation on the number of people who can be involved, right? So to have a launch team, for example, you can have a lot of people on the launch team, but people really enjoy being able to be a part of a launch team, for example.

Yeah. So a launch team for folks is, you know, you recruit folks to help you launch and it's not a compensation thing. It's rooting for you and they're doing, they're not doing a lot of heavy lifting, but it's promoting on their social networks, engaging people that they know about it, putting up pictures, et cetera. And then what happens is it's like rooting for your favorite team. When you're on a launch team, even though you don't have a financial horse in the race, you're like, I want this book to win. It's really cool when it's picked up on LinkedIn. It's really cool when another thought leader comments on it or whatever. And now you've got this whole sort of cheering squad that's behind you, and all you really had to do was ask and they're happy to do it.

And the thing that I would say has been really surprising to me is to see how much other people's enthusiasm refills my tank.

Yeah.

I didn't realize, like, it is a tiring endeavor. You know, you work— I actually was just talking to an author on a web series that I run at Stanford, and he was saying, I love this quote, he said, the launch is like the sprint at the end of a marathon. He's like, you don't have the energy for it, it's exhausting, but if you don't sprint, Then it's like you didn't run the marathon.

Right.

And he said it'd be a real tragedy to not sprint at the end. And I get it, which is to say, you know, you think about the, like the end of a marathon, right? There's all those people with the little cups of Gatorade, right? Everybody in my life, they're just carrying this little cup of Gatorade, you know, and they give it to me and it's, it just, it's refreshing. And, you know, I get on the phone call, I'm, you know, doing all sorts of stuff and I get with my launch team, it's my people and my people are rooting for me and they're excited about what I'm doing and they, they're coming up with harebrained ideas. And just when I feel like I go, you know what, let's just go to bed, they're like, we got to try this. And that's— it's an incredibly special community that you have the opportunity to rally around you that you don't really realize it. Yeah.

And I think the other thing is that most books, and certainly a book like this, is an evergreen book. So yes, there's a sprint element to the launch to get that flywheel going.

Right.

But my instincts are with this book, and I know it quite well, is that we're gonna see this book around for several years. It's not time sensitive. It's not like, oh, it's gonna go out of vogue and, oh, more people are talking about work from home today than they will be in 6 months from now or something like that. And when you could connect thought leadership, and I think there's always sort of 2 variables here is What are the evergreen principles? Well, they're chock-full of them in the book, right? And then what's going on in the real world that you can connect to? So now, for example, if we're going into a recession, well, what does recession mean? Well, it's Latin for do more with less. It's not really Latin, right? Well, if you have to do more with less, what better time to innovate, right? We get out of a recession, we go back to growth mode. Great. Now we got all this capital to experiment. Great.

Right. Innovate.

So it's making sure that you can connect to what's going on in the real world and the business cycles and all that sort of fun stuff. You know, when we had challenges last year with supply chain, there was some really interesting innovation going on of people now onshoring and having to manufacture in this country things like books. Publishers really quickly realized like, uh-oh, I can't get a book out there if it's sitting in a port in Long Beach for 9 months. We forgot how to print in the States, right? Uh-oh, we better figure out how to do that quickly.

Right.

Yeah, cool. What else would you share with us in terms of— I mean, it's early in the journey, but what else would you share if someone's out there thinking, there's a book I should write?

Well, for me, one of the things that's come up a lot, people say, why'd you write the book? And I say, one part of the equation is it's an expertise I've been cultivating for the last dozen years, an obsession I've been cultivating for the last dozen years. So I am uniquely qualified to write the book. But the other reason I wrote it is, as they say, write the book you want to read. And for me, this, like, I had the experience while reading the audiobook that multiple times I had to pause the recording because I wanted to take notes in my own book, right? Which is to say what? It's a book I wanted to read, right? And I mean, there's nobody's walking around with a book in their head, right? So I'm stumbling over stories and research that I had forgotten I knew at one point, right? So that was exciting. But to me, if you're thinking about writing a book, then the question is, well, what kind of book do you really wish was in the world? And for me, this book is a book that I wish was in the world. I remember the old Men's Hair Club, that New Yorker, I'm not just the president, I'm also a member.

Yeah.

And I feel like I'm not only the author, I'm also the student. And there's a part of it that is guru-esque in that there's a, unique and differentiated knowledge that I've been fortunate enough to acquire through collaboration with Perry and many others over the last dozen years. But then it's also, it speaks to a need that I have. And one thing that I've seen in my own life, I mean, I had this experience the other day. I'm driving around running some errands and the car is packed full. And I had a cooler that was probably a 50-pound cooler that was like a sitting there like a Jenga brick of death right over my right shoulder. And every time I turn to the right, it slams into my arm and I'm just, ah, ah. And I kind of jam my arm there while I'm driving to kind of give myself some relief. I'm honestly thinking, I'm in the car for an hour. Is this going to damage my rotator cuff? I mean, it was really painful.

Yeah.

My brother called me. He's in construction and roofing in Texas. And he called me and we're chatting on the phone for a couple minutes when he Said a very brotherly thing. He said, why do you keep grunting? And I said, oh, I've got this stupid cooler. You know, it's just like, it's killing me every time I turn. He goes, have you buckled it in? And I go, oh my goodness. He goes, yeah. I mean, whenever I got a bunch of gear in the truck, I don't want it to roll around. I just buckle it in. And I, in 1 minute, my problem that I thought I was going to deal with for an hour was solved.

Right.

I actually took a photo of that because, by the way, I've already written a book on creative problem solving. There's a whole chapter on seeking input from people from different disciplines. And exactly, I— if anybody knows to ask my construction-working brother for help in a moment of need, it's me. And yet in that moment, I fall prey to the very same cognitive biases that everybody else does. And so—

Sure.

which is to say, I need the material as much as anybody else. And I think if you're thinking about writing a book, writing the book you need and doing the work to assemble the research and the expertise to be able to be a credible contributor to that sphere is really, really a powerful source of motivation and source of inspiration.

So let me ask you this, because a lot of folks say, you know, this is work you've been deeply, deeply involved in for a dozen years. So there is more that exists in your head and your life experience than made it to whatever, 200 and whatever pages. So one of the things that I hear from folks after the book writing process is, wow, it forced me to get concise. It forced me to codify my models and methodologies in a really tight way because in order to write it, Right? You can't— like, when you're teaching or you're, you know, in front of the whiteboard, you can kind of bounce and get it out there. You got 20 different stories to draw on, whatever. But you've got a chapter on a topic and you've got, you know, 2,000 words or whatever the allocation is.

Yeah.

You're on a budget, right? You know, a budget of words, right? So did you find that constraint of the printed page helpful or challenging, or how did that work for you?

You know, the challenge, a lot of the work is actually in sequencing. You know, how— what is the proper kind of, you know, progression of ideas that leads someone to appreciate what we're trying to express?

Mm-hmm.

And one thing I noticed is the way I would approach a lecture, for example, and the kinds of things I'd emphasize in, say, a TED Talk, you can't— the transcript to a TED Talk is an HBR article, which is great, but it's not a book. And you're not laying out your thinking like that. And so while you should be able to take a book and put it into a TED Talk, to take a TED Talk and try to extrapolate it to a book, it's a totally different animal. And the way you approach the challenge of expressing the information is very different.

Well, and a lot of books have done that. expanded a TED Talk, you know, 18 minutes or whatever, to a book, and there's, there's a lot of breadcrumbs in the meatball. You're like, okay, I kind of got it, I kind of got it. Like, this, this was fine as a TED Talk, and that it's, it's not a reflection of the quality of the thinking per se, but it's like the format. A book is, you know, 50,000, 60,000 words. A book is 250 pages. Like, right, right.

It's very different. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but having the space actually to tease apart those things and to put them in their proper place is a real gift, is a real luxury.

Got it. Cool. Any other, as we start to wrap up here, thoughts, reflections, things you want to share on the journey? And I know it's early. It's very early in the process, not in terms of time of day, but any other things that come to mind as you're going down this path?

Well, I will just show, I'm in my home office here, but you can see ideas are everywhere, right? And I would say in the journey, one of the things that was phenomenally helpful for me is to develop a habit of writing just a daily blog. It's something Seth Godin has mentioned. It's something that—

Yeah.

Austin Kleon, many have mentioned. But the value of learning to express your ideas in writing, you can do it today. A book isn't the first thing. No, heck you let it. Start writing some things down and don't think about what's the outline or what's— what are— for me, I give myself a challenge of 30 minutes a day. Can I crystallize an idea, an observation, a piece of research or an insight or a story, 30 minutes a day? and share it. I share it with the world on my blog. I write a blog every day, but it's very useful to get in the habit of committing things to paper or things to the page because then beyond getting in the habit of actually writing, you have a wealth of material that you can start to draw on and say, well, how does this fit? And how does this fit?

Yeah.

And things like hyperlinking, for example, I find my blog is basically an external hard drive for my brain. And there's so many links there that if I go there, I start linking to stories and ideas that I had forgotten, the connections that I had made, right? That's so funny. And so having a place like that, it's a little bit different. You know, I've got Evernote notes. You know, if you talk to Steven Johnson or Dan Pink or, you know, famous authors, they've got, you know, logs, they've got notes, they've got files where they keep inspiration. I find there's something about the hyperlinking functionality of a blog that's actually really useful and allows you, even as a researcher—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Track streams of thought in an unexpected way.

No, that's awesome. Well, I appreciate your time. I appreciate you. It's a great book. You should run out, not you, because you already have one, but everyone but you should run out and buy a copy of it.

If folks go to the website right now, ideaflow.design, they can also get a free chapter of Bonus chapter called How to Think Like Bezos and Jobs, which is a really great kind of summary of some of the ways in which Bezos and Jobs approached problem solving. And that's free on the website.

Cool. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate your time today, Jeremy.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.