Why the Best Idea Isn't Enough | Gavin McMahon | 672

Why do great ideas so often go unnoticed? Gavin McMahon learned early in his career that the world doesn't reward the best ideas, it rewards the best packaged ones. And that realization transformed Gavin's path from engineer to storyteller, and eventually he became the author of the new book, Story Business. In today's episode, we explore how Gavin discovered the power of story to move ideas forward and how his journey shows that storytelling is a skill that every thought leader needs to master. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Gavin.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So I've been enjoying your new book, Story Business, and we'll be talking about that because one of the things that I love is there's a connection between what you talk about with story and what we talk about with idea and simplicity. I'm looking forward that. My first question though is how does an engineer who works on submarines write, wind up writing a book on story? How did you get here and how did this come to be?

Uh, the short answer to that is very slowly. That's how I, I write. You know, I, so we sometimes do this thing called a 6-word story and we, when we're working with people, we'll get them to do this autobiographical 6-word story.

So It's almost an adaptation of Hemingway. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Except apparently when you dive down the rabbit hole of the internet, Hemingway never actually said for sale baby shoes, never worn. It was just attributed to him anyway. So my autobiographical short story is Lapsed Engineer Now Tinkers with Brains. So I was an engineer a long time ago. I worked in the defense industry and other industries. Left that 30-odd years ago, and most of what I've been doing, uh, fast forward, we're a company where we basically deal with leadership and storytelling, but we use those two vehicles to help drive change in an organization. So that's how I got into it. And storytelling has always been fascinating to me, mostly because not so much for the story itself, but I'm endlessly fascinated by how people make decisions. And I think that happens at, you know, multiple levels. How do you individually make a decision? What are the organizational dynamics behind making a decision? And I think if you think about a company, a company is as good as the collection of decisions it makes. So tho— those could be small decisions like how do I answer a call in a customer service center? Or big decisions in terms of direction and strategy. And all of that is influenced by our people making decisions and it's, and they're influenced in some way. And I think that's how I got to storytelling.

That's quite the journey and we'll be digging in more. I wanna start with a piece that's in the book where you talk about where good ideas aren't guaranteed to win, that story in some ways trumps idea, right? And so let's begin there and I want to spar with you a little bit on it because I agree, but I think we're coming from a little bit different perspective. So can you unpack how you see the relationship between story and idea?

Yeah, I think, well, first of all, let me define story because I'm not I don't think I define it in the way that a Hollywood screenwriter would define a story. I think there are elements that are the same, but for me, a story is a piece of information wrapped in emotion, and we're using it for commercial purposes. So if you, if you are thinking about story and story business, you are really saying, how do I get this piece of information, wrap it in emotion, and then use it to take an action? That's, that's essentially what you're trying to do. So that lets me have this kind of infinitely variable definition of what a story is to, to use it to my own ends. I think when I was writing the book, uh, I had a lot of help and one of my early kind of coaching person helping me coach, coaching me to help write the book, said, you gotta think of like, what is the single theme? And that became, that came out of that, this theme, or if there is one idea in the book, it's really the idea that it's never the best idea that wins. It's always the best packaged idea. And I guess you don't have to work for that long to realize that's true. I think the reason it takes a while for people to twig to that, to get onto that, is that As parents, we lie to our children. We were, we were lied to by our parents. My parents definitely lied to me 'cause they, they basically told me a variation of something like, if you just work hard, if you just try hard, if you just do the right thing, it'll all be all right. And I pretty much told that to my kids too. And I'm pretty sure every parent everywhere says the same thing, but it's, you just know it's not true. The world isn't a meritocracy. It's never the best idea that wins. It's the best packaged idea. And you see that over and over again. And you know, in the book, I mean, the classic example that I mentioned in the book is, you know, Steve Jobs and Apple. I think he was a master kind of remixer of ideas. The iPod, they didn't really invent the iPod. They, but they built the story around the technologies that became the iPod and told that story really well. And he did it again and again.

You see that with the mouse, right? Yeah. And yeah. There's a storytelling and theatricality element of the Apple conferences and the Jobs presentation where everybody was like, what is he going to tell us about next? Right?

Yeah. And it moved the stock price. And you know, when I went down that little rabbit hole in researching the book, I, you know, I was thinking, well, how do people come up with these eureka moments? And so the whole story of Archimedes and the eureka moment in the bathtub where he suddenly figures out, oh, okay, that's how I figure this equation for buoyancy out. That never actually happened, or at least we don't know that it happened because the historian that wrote about it was 500 years after Archimedes' death and he was Roman, so he was probably making some of it up.

But when— Roughly wasn't there in the bathtub with Archimedes anyway.

Yeah, it definitely wasn't. And, but we're fascinated with the story and it's the story that lives on more than anything else. So I think for me, this, you know, story and idea are kind of like chicken and egg. You never really know what comes first.

So when I look at it, and we can bounce back and forth for a moment here, one of the things that I borrowed, having married a spouse who's a lawyer, is there's a phrase in Latin that's applied to law of res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself, right? Is the literal term. Okay. And I think my perception when it comes to an idea is that the idea does not speak for itself, right? Others speak through it. Either it's you telling the story of your idea Or figuring out how do you enable others to tell that story easily so that you don't have to be, and I guess we're in Greek, not only history and fable, but be the one pushing the boulder uphill constantly to get that story going, right? 'Cause it takes a lot of work to get velocity for a story.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's so true. I mean, you just have to be in a room. I'm often in rooms with, senior leaders and, uh, talking about innovation and they're talking about the strategy. What's fascinating is how many times something really interesting gets said, but then the conversation just moves on. Yeah. And, and it happens all the time. And it's really because, you know, that, that person that said that thing doesn't have storytelling power, so they're not able to kind of craft it or say it in a way that grabs people's attention and makes people say, ah, That is, I haven't thought of that. That is a different way of doing it because, and there's a whole different side, but you know, if you think about an organization, a business, a corporation, there's only really two types of power. There's organizational power where you are in the hierarchy and storytelling power, how much you are able to kind of influence through your words and actions. And so those two things kind of go hand in hand for me.

So let's talk a little bit more about storytelling for a moment. And one of the things that I love about the book is it's hard to go a few pages without a diagram or something that's very visual that will make you smile or illustrate an idea. Okay. I can see this book being one that I flip back to again and again. So kudos to you on that. But I want to dial in on a phrase that you use, which is grandma language. And you use an example of it in, and I think it's for cybersecurity, where you use, how do you sound credible and yet accessible? Because that's a tough challenge in business. We don't wanna sound like simpletons, right?

Right. Well, first of all, good to just to mention the illustrations. Full credit. Uh, I work with this amazing lady, Eugene Yoon, who does the illustrations, and I used to do them myself, and then I met Eugene and she does them so much better. And she, we worked together to, to put those in the book. She did a fantastic job. This idea of grandma language. So I, I guess I'm a bit like a sponge because I pick stuff up from everywhere. And there was a CEO of a, major security firm who I would say is an excellent storyteller. And I noticed over and over again, he mixed what I call credibility language with grandma language. So credibility language is the kind of language we use to say we know our stuff, we have a right to be here, and you should listen to me 'cause it sounds like I know what I'm doing. And then grandma language is, is what makes it accessible. Grandma language is Anyone can understand it. And the, and I think in business we, we just tend to over-index massively on credibility language. So we use long words. So instead of using the word use, we'll use the word utilize, and then we'll have a whole bunch of acronyms that we use. And I've been in so many rooms, I'm sure you've been too, Bill, where you're in the back of the room, you're talking to someone that's fairly senior, you're listening to some presentation and somebody uses an acronym. And you lean over and say, what's that mean? And they'll never actually know what the acronym really means. They'll just give you a rough approximate, oh, it's something to do with, you know, revenue and something. I'm not, yeah, I'm not quite sure.

I've also heard examples where the acronym is used, the term has changed, but the letters in the acronym did not. So even the letters don't represent what it actually talks about anymore. It's like, Oh, you're speaking in code. Yeah. Yeah.

And that, that gets a, a whole different trail about the connection with culture and language. But to come back to grammar language, so the phrase I heard Sandro say, he's the CEO of Commvault, and, and he said, he was talking about basically cyberattacks and he said, this is a new vector for the bad guys. Now, if you, if you unpack that sentence. No one goes to the pub and say, this is a new vector to get into the pub. They, they will just say, here's a new way into the pub. We, a new way in to, to go to the pub. They, that, that would be grandma language, a new way in. But in the, in the security space, you talk about vectors. So a new vector, a new way in to, to get attacked. The bad guys. Now, if you were being completely credibility language, you'd say it's a new vector for bad actors. Which is all security, or I could even say malicious actors, right?

Yeah. And make it more complex.

Complicated. Yeah. All the terms of art. And when you say that, you say, I'm one of the club, but you're also making what you are saying and your ideas really inaccessible. And this is what Sanjay does so brilliantly is he mixes the two together. And so this combination of grandma language and credibility language, a new vector for the bad guys. Because even if you didn't understand what a new vector was, you would get it from the context around. There's enough simple language around it that you can get it. And, and I, I just think it's a brilliant way of phrasing and, and making complex ideas more accessible.

And that focus on simplicity, I think one of the things that I've come to learn over my career is it takes a lot of work to simplify the idea so that people can not only grab onto it, but then share it on their own. Right?

Mm-hmm.

And so whether that's a developed skill, like you talked about the CEO who does the combination of credibility language and grandma language. Or sitting down and pausing and saying, okay, what's the idea I need to get across to people? And how do I break this down as simple, as clearly, and as accessible as I can? Because, and you and I have both done consulting for many, many years, smart people are smart until you put them in stressful situations with cognitive load. Give them a deadline and distract them with email and phone and everything. And then you just watch, you know, their capability ratchet downwards. And so one of the questions I ask is, can somebody remember this in the middle of chaos on a bad day?

Yeah. Well, it's funny, when we were scheduling this, we, I think we were both talking about a book that we both read, Don't Make Me Think. Which is this, it's a classic from the user experience. I think it was first written in 1999 or 2000 by Steve Krug, but the title says it all. We make people think too hard when we're communicating and we don't want to because, because if we wanna get the idea across, why would we wrap that idea in so much extra stuff and extra padding that it's really difficult to understand what the core idea is. So to speak to one of your points about like why, why are people making it complicated? You're, you're in the thought leadership business. I honestly think it's because they haven't got to the end of their thought. The reason that a lot of it is still complicated is you are still thinking about it and you haven't really got it fully baked. It's actually one of the reasons I ended up writing this book is, is I, I would talk a lot about storytelling and but a lot of the ideas were half-baked and it took the actual act of thinking through it and writing to get it fully baked, to get it to be simple. And that takes work. And people are really good at simplifying things. It's not a gift, it's work. And it's also a sign that they've actually, they really know what they're talking about. They've really thought through all of it all the way through to the end.

You say that and I smile and laugh having a book in manuscript form behind you. You know, you're on launch now and I'm waiting for line edit back, but I had the exact same experience. And I think there's a combination of, if you're a consultant with a little bit of charisma, you can toss up an idea on a slide. Package it as story, get people to nod, but they don't poke at it with the same level of care and with critical thinking as when it's in a book and they're looking and they have the time and you're not in the room moving the conversation forward. And I have felt that pressure of the, oh boy, I need to have my ducks in a row when I explain this.

I think that's 100% true. I, an old business school professor of mine said something like this to me. He said, you know, you can say all this stuff, but you gotta write it down if you want to add some rigor. And I think to get to stress test the idea to, you have to write it down. Now the good news is, I mean, I, it took me a long time to write this book. I started writing it 7 or 8 years ago, pre-AI. But when I got to the editing stage, AI was really helpful in saying, does this even make any sense anymore? And kind of as a second editor to my actual editor who'd come back and said, you know, I think I got, I don't know, I don't know if I broke a record for how many comments and red lines I had through the first manuscript, but I had a depressing amount.

It's amazing that first iteration where you, even if you look back, between final manuscript and that first draft, you're like, what was I thinking?

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was— it's this journey. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/podcast. LTL, and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So you mentioned that you worked on this book for 7 to 8 years on that.

Yeah.

What got you starting? On that book. I mean, that's a long time to have it sort of noodling and working. So describe the journey of what did it take you, what sparked you to say I should write a book, and then what kept you going?

Yeah, I think anything you end up doing that's a, I mean, it's a fairly significant chunk of time, uh, anything you dedicate a lot of time for, there's there's always, there's never really one starting point. There's always a bunch of them. I can remember having one starting point. I remember a long car ride with a colleague and we were talking about really bad PowerPoint and how when you have really bad PowerPoint, there's all sorts of bad karma that comes with it. And we thought this conversation was hilarious and that should be a book. But I didn't want to write a book about PowerPoint 'cause I felt like it was, it's important because I think most, certainly most of our clients, they speak to each other in PowerPoint. So the PowerPoint piece is important, but I thought that was, it was too small an idea. And it, you know, probably 3 or 4 years would just mean not actually putting pen to paper at all, but just thinking. And I couldn't really start until I thought of for me it was thinking about, I had to have the title. I didn't have the subtitle, but I had the title and I had the first line. And you know, most of my, I've, I've, I don't know if this is a technique or just something that I'm telling myself that actually really works, but for me mostly if I go to sleep thinking about something, I can wake up with the answer in the morning. And it was one of those mornings where I'd gone to sleep thinking about it and I woke up with Story Business. And the, the line, the opening line was, the first stories were wild. That was the, that's the first line of the chapter. And you know, from there I kind of had the idea and then I, I, I went through again because an engineer, not writer, I, I got a, I went on a, a writing kind of coaching course, uh, which was kind of a bootcamp for how to write a book. I would say I, I mean, the, the lady that ran that was brilliant, but I would say I probably only did half the things she told me to 'cause I couldn't do the other half. I mean, really focusing who's your real audience? And I'm like, well, everyone, 'cause it's such a brilliant idea. So, you know, it's really hard.

8 billion people on the planet. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. To do all these things. But yeah, that's, that was the process. And then along the way I really discovered I liked writing. I ended up with. I don't know, 70,000 to 80,000 words by the time the first draft was done. And then there was a long process of whittling it down.

So you allude to, or you quote the first line of your book, but if I take a step back on that and move to the opening inscription of that, You're, you're citing Plato right before the first stories were wild, right? And if I look through this book, there's references to Victor Hugo and really an entire body, and probably will offend a number of philosophers here, I've been calling Plato a storyteller, but he was in many ways. How do you balance that storytelling tradition and that richness and really the acknowledgement of so many different threads of storytelling in a business book? How did you figure out what fits, what doesn't? Because this doesn't read like your average business book.

Well, first of all, thank you for that. I was desperately trying not to write a book that felt like a business book, but it is for business people. I, you know, it's funny, I basically along the way I discovered I really like writing and one of the things that amuses me is when I can amuse, when I can write something that I just think is funny or I think is a clever reference. And I remember there's a strategy book called Better, Simpler Strategy by a Harvard professor called Felix Oberholzer-Gee, which is also extremely well-written book and I think a genius idea about how to understand strategy. But I was, I remember reading that and I don't know if it's true 'cause I've never actually spoken to Felix and I hope one day to have this conversation with him. But I remember reading it thinking, I bet you who's laughing when he wrote that line, 'cause I have the same feeling when I'm writing something. So for me, there's a, there's a line in the book where the storyteller says, calling the, calling the stick a spear was a particular point of pride. I just love that line. And it was like, I'm definitely gonna keep that one in. You can't, you can't take that one out. So it's, it's full of stuff like that, just it's just amusing me and then hopefully it amuses someone else.

Well, and you get to something here that I think in some ways talks about the authorship journey that not only are you, you're you the writer, but you're your first reader, especially as you're revising, determining. And yeah, there are moments where you create basically an Easter egg for yourself and it's like, Yeah, that's staying in there and I'm gonna fight on any hill to make sure that stays in there. I know I have some of those myself, right? Yeah. Because they delight me.

Yeah. There were a few I lost. I mean, I couldn't keep everything cuz I couldn't stay at 80,000 words and keep everything I liked, but, uh, right, right. Yeah, it definitely does that. I, you know, I mean, I, I don't know that I'd love it if it became a, a bestselling book. I don't know that it, it will be, but it's, I think if you don't enjoy the process, why are you even doing it?

So it's a really long time to spend a lot of that time miserable if, if you're not enjoying it. Right.

Yeah.

So I wanna come back to that question that you said from the person who was coaching you. Who is the book for now? Who, who's your target audience now that you've actually got it book in hand?

I think the book is written for someone I think is working in corporate America that really thinks that they have some good ideas and really is confused about why some of those good ideas are not really getting the airtime that they should be getting or the recognition that they should be getting. The book is a little bit for that. I think it's also for leaders of all stripes who really want to kind of magnify their leadership. I think ultimately leading, uh, whatever function you're leading, HR or product or engineering, doesn't matter. It's really about making choices. And it's about inspiring people to want to, if you look up inspire, it's about wanting to do something, getting people to want to do something. And I think getting people to want to do something, the best way to do that is to tell stories.

And I think that nuance and having a story library that you can draw from becomes important. Right?

Yeah.

Because different people respond to different stories packaging the idea. So the story that may engage you might be different from me or a third person that we're telling. And you almost have to craft the story for the individual or the audience as much as you can to make it as accessible. And when you don't know the exact audience, simpler is always better.

Yeah, I, I, simpler is almost always better in, in every, every case. There's a chapter in the book, so the back half of the book is organized by these, these what I'm calling genres of story business. So, right.

In your 6 genres, right? Yeah.

So value storytelling, product storytelling, brand storytelling, sales storytelling, leadership storytelling. And culture storytelling. But that idea, one of the ideas that's in the leadership storytelling genre or chapter is this idea that good leaders are really good at kind of passing on this lore, passing on this repeated wisdom and thinking about how do you, 'cause you package all that into something. So we worked, we've worked with Verizon as a client for a long time. And it's no secret 'cause I think it's, I don't know how many people there are, 100,000 people that rotate through that company at any one time, or 80,000, I don't know what the number is now. But they have a saying that is, it's not written on the walls, but it reverberates in the halls. It's kind of inspect what you expect. And it's those little sayings, you find this over and over again in companies where you have They've immortalized little phrases that shape how people do things. And Verizon, whether you like them or not as a customer or as a company, they are an operationally excellent company and they do things in an operationally excellent way. And inspect what you expect, 4 little words, is a kind of little credo that helps you package that idea of operational excellence and tells a story to to others around you?

So the power of just a few words, I don't think can be overstated, right? So I think to an example which amuses me, but Einstein, when asked why his energy mass equivalence equation, E equals mc squared, became popular, he's like, I don't know, I really don't understand why it's taken off in the same way. But if you think about that, that's a handful of characters and symbols that, you know, almost have become the shorthand for genius, right? How many college dorms and posters are out— or posters on college dorms are there out there, right? It's countless, right? And so that distillation, that simplification takes work, takes effort. And also, if I was just the one person at Verizon saying inspect what you expect, yeah, maybe if I had some positional authority, people would listen. If I was the CEO, more. That doesn't weave it into the DNA in the same way. Of a company.

No, no, it's, it's leadership storytelling is really shared context. And so what you're trying to do all the time is to get people to, you're just trying to line people up in the same direction because I think most people want to be engaged. Most people want to be productive, but if you're engaged and productive and everyone's at cross purposes, that's, that's difficult. So the alignment, that shared context, is absolutely huge.

So I want to ask you, as we're recording this, this is a couple weeks before book launch on this. Look ahead year or two, what do you hope for the book? What do you hope for in terms of impact, either for others, yourself? What are you looking to see as signs of success?

Well, I think first of all, by the time this drops, it's probably available. At the worst, it'll be like Amazon's taking a few days longer than it should. So you could, you could pretty much get it now. The signs of success to me honestly would be people coming to me and saying, hey, I tried this idea, or I, your idea gave me another idea and I did this. Because I think that's what it's all about. It's this kind of collision and sparking of ideas and this remixing of ideas. So I hope, I mean, I think it is a little bit of a how-to, the book, but I don't know that it needs to be followed religiously. I think hopefully, you know, to me, anecdotally meeting people in the course of my work where they say, hey, I read the book and I tried this idea. That's probably gonna make me happiest.

So to that, I know this will be a book that's sitting on my shelf and I will be grabbing and flipping through, you know, when I have a storytelling challenge and looking and saying, hey, what does this spark either with a diagram or term of art or language that you've used? So between the two of us, mission accomplished for you on that. And hopefully others pick up this book and take a look at it. I find it fantastic and it's one that I know I'm gonna be referencing for years. Thank you. That's—

do I see mission accomplished?

Exactly. So as we begin to wrap up, Gavin, I have A question for you in terms of practicing thought leadership, what advice would you give your younger self and what would it have taken for you to listen to that advice?

That's a really good question and a tough one. I think, I think if I could probably travel back in time, I would say be nicer to people. I know that sounds really weird from a context of thought leadership, but I think at the end of the day, you know, we're gonna do what we're gonna do. We're gonna have our, you know, our ideas. We're gonna try and do our best work, but all the time you're really trying to do that work through other people. And if you fall in love with your precious idea and that kind of divides people, or somehow you, some, something you think to about one person, you think, well, they don't get it, but because they don't get it, that it's not my fault, it's clearly their fault. I don't think that's, I've definitely trodden that road. It's not good. And I think just being nicer to people is a good start.

So you sparked something within me on that, that story there for a moment. I've spent a fair amount of years pausing when I see someone not getting it. And this started when I was teaching at university, but even since, and I've tried to create a circuit breaker. Which says it's not them, it's probably me, right? And my explanation, I'm not meeting them where they need to be met. That's not always proven true. Sometimes it is them, but it gets me to that point of humility and to move to try. So I very much resonate.

With that, be nicer, especially on the packaging and the communicating of the idea, because what's clear to you may be bewildering to the person on the other side, or, or just not the right time, or yeah, a whole bunch of things going on, or absolutely, there's a context that they have that you just don't understand. It's all sorts different things. But I think that's, that's, if I could travel back, that's what I would do. There's a little story I wrote that I, again, talking about things that were desperate to keep in the book. There's a little story I wrote that I originally had at the beginning of the book. My editor wanted me to cut it out completely. I managed to shoehorn it at the very back of the book and it's, It's in the section that nobody reads where you thank a bunch of people that help you. And I wrote something like, if I've always dreamed of being an author, if my cunning plan for doing that was to invent the world's first time machine, travel forward into the future, find a couple of really great novels that had been written, but by someone that wasn't alive in my time, borrow them, bring them back, copy them, and then publish them as my, and pass them off as my own. And the amusing line that I wrote to myself was that this is a terrible idea for commercializing the world's first time machine. But that was, that was it.

No, that's good. That's good. And I think the persistence of getting an idea out It's not just about the idea, it's the stories that you package the idea with is a much needed concept. Gavin, I want to thank you for joining us today and talking about your journey in thought leadership as well as your new book, Story Business. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you, Bill. Thank you for having me.

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