Conversation (SalesGlobe Sage with Mike Figliuolo and another speaker) about how they track social and broader trends. Mike describes using uncurated Yahoo and Google newsfeeds and YouTube to scan a wide range of stories (from elections and climate to celebrity news) to spark unexpected insights. He recommends deliberately avoiding overly curated leadership feeds and instead exposing oneself to far-afield topics (magazines on pottery, motorcycles, knitting) to stimulate creative problem solving. Speakers give examples (Snoop Dogg/Tyson fight and potential entertainer investments; seeing grocery-store stocking as analogous to an emergency room) to show how cross-domain exposure enables novel solutions. Emphasis on breadth, serendipity, and combining parallels/history to generate creative ideas.
Chapters
What mag?
Oh, this is a good one. I want to know this. What magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc. Do you read to track social and other trends?
That's a good question.
I know, right? I read the Wall Street.
Yeah. You know, I'm. I'm. It's. It's kind of funny because people ask me all the time, like, what. What leadership books do you read and what leadership blogs? And it's like, I'm kind of tapped out on the leadership thing because I live it, breathe it, and teach it every single day. So I try to get away from that stuff. It's not to say that I don't read it, but what I actually do is like, this is going to sound really bad, but my daily newsfeed, the starting point is my Yahoo Newsfeed and my Google newsfeed, and I go through it top to bottom. I don't read every article, but I will scan it top to bottom. And what's great about YouTube is like, it's. It's everything from the election to climate change to Cardi B and her latest controversy and TikTok and privacy concerns there. And it's just like all this random junk. I don't have a curated feed in Yahoo, and it's deliberate, and my Google feed is not curated either. And it's deliberate because that's where that random stuff starts popping in. And it's like, wait a minute, like, what is this, you know about Cardi B and what's this controversy? And who is she and why does anybody care? And there may be nothing there, okay? And usually with Cardi B, there's not, but every once in a while you may run across something and you go like, holy cow. Late Snoop Dogg, like, comment was the commentator for the fight the other night for the Tyson fight, and now he's getting into the boxing industry in a meaningful way. And there's investments there. And I wonder, are there opportunities for entertainers to other fields? And like, how can personalities care? And it's like I'm reading about Snoop Dogg and the Tyson fight, right? But it's like random thoughts get sparked there. So I like going really far afield with my learning. You know, I. I heard one exec back in the day, back in the. In the Before Times. That's what I'm going to start calling it. Before COVID It's like before times, when people traveled, I heard of one exec who used to, before he got on a plane, would stop at the newsstand and buy a magazine about something he knew nothing about. And I'm talking like, one time it was about pottery, the next time it was knitting. Next time it was motorcycles. Next time it was heavy metal music. And he would just buy a magazine about something totally far afield from him, and he would read it cover to cover. And 99 times out of 100, it was just a good get your brain away from work exercise. But every once in a while I was like, oh, wow. I didn't realize, like, how much this, you know, the motorcycle industry has grown in the last few years, and we've never pursued that as a, as a customer segment. They may actually be interesting and exciting. So what I'm saying is get out of whatever box you're in. Get out of it. Get. Get out of the curated feed. Like, you get enough of this stuff every single day. Go look elsewhere in weird places. Right.
In terms of creative problem solving principles, Mike, one of them we talk about is combining parallels, looking for parallel examples in other places, and also being a student of history. Right. And the whole idea behind both of those is that you're doing exactly what you're saying, which is you're referencing many different diverse areas of information that a lot of times will hit in combinations. And when you're trying to solve a problem, you go, oh. And something is sparked because you saw something that was totally unrelated that can be applied to that problem solving. So I think it's a brilliant idea that you're talking about.
Yeah. You know, bringing those different perspectives. Again, it's, you know, same issue, different industry, or same, same problem, different function. And one of the funniest times I had as a consultant was we were serving a grocery chain and we were looking at their inventory turns in the center of the store, crackers and cookies and stuff. And. And as we're walking down aisle seven and the store manager is explaining how they're doing inventory and stocking and everything, I was like, oh my gosh, this the emergency room. And they're like, are you okay? I'm like, no, it's the emergency room. They're like, no, you're in the grocery store. I'm like, no, this is the emergency room. And they said, what are you talking about? I said, I had a client, like three clients ago. We were looking at their emergency room and how they were stocking the fast turning stuff in there and they were having problems and they were having stock outs and they were doing this and that. That is exactly what you guys are doing. And he's like, oh my gosh, this is the emergency room. I was like, I know, right? But being able to take that prior experience from healthcare into a grocery store, but see something, to see something. And the only way you can do that is if you're exposed to a breadth of different things. I mean, you see my bookshelf back here? You can't tell what these books are, but, man, it is the most eclectic collection of stuff, like everything from Marcus Aurelius and the Meditations to Calvin and Hobbes and everything in between. And it's just. Most of it's garbage in terms of being able to look at intersections, but every once in a while, a really cool intersection pops up, and there's some great creative problem solving there.
