Outthinkers #56—Lisa Bodell: The Value of Simplicity to Strengthen Your Strategy
FutureThink CEO Lisa Bodell ranks among the Top 50 Speakers Worldwide and is the best-selling author of Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins. She’s a global leader on simplification, collaboration, and innovation, whose keynotes leave audiences inspired to change and arm them with radically simple tools to get to the work that matters.
Lisa brings a compelling perspective to the sought-after topics of simplification and innovation to over 100,000 people each year. A thought leader and serial entrepreneur, her transformational message has inspired executives at top-ranked organizations such as Google, Cisco, Citigroup, and the U.S. Navy War College.
Lisa provides a provocative yet practical approach that enables organizations and individuals to eradicate the unnecessary complexity and time-sucks that hold them back from more meaningful work, and allow simplicity to become their new operating system.
She has also contributed her expertise to a wide variety of media. She is a monthly contributor to Forbes and has frequently appeared in other media including: Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, FOX News, and CNN. She has taught innovation at both American University and Fordham University, and has served on the board of advisors of several organizations, including the Global Agenda Council for the World Economic Forum, the United States National Security Agency, and the Association of Professional Futurists
In this podcast she shares:
- Practical tips to get your organization to simplify … that is to stop doing the busy work that is not strategic so you spend more time focusing on the work that actually matters
- How to run a “kill your company” exercise and why doing so can unleash innovation and new thinking
- Why changing culture should not be a top down process, indeed is should neither be top down or a process at all, and what works instead
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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Introducing Lisa + The topic of today’s episode
2:39—If you really know me, you know that...
3:06—What is your definition of strategy?
4:00—Can you talk to us about how we do things that are strategic vs. not?
5:02—What are people spending time on if not strategic things?
6:08—What are practical things people can do to encourage a culture that has the space and room to say no to things?
8:27—Can you illustrate effective ways other leaders have created a culture of simplicity?
11:26—We often think of change as a top-down process, could you describe how you think of it differently?
13:05—How can the SWT analysis tool best be used to make strategic decisions?
16:08—Could you share some practical tips on how to run an effective strategy meeting?
17:13—If someone wants to start implementing the shift toward simplicity, how do you get started on that path?
18:29—What are the first steps to addressing risk aversion?
19:47—Where can people follow you and learn from you?
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Additional Resources:
Linke
Thank you to our guests, thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
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