Barry O’Reilly and Jeff Gothelf have been best friends ever since Jeff reviewed Barry’s first draft of Lean Enterprise and told him it sucked. They have worked together as co-authors of the Lean series, and as consultants to Fortune 50 clients. Jeff joins Barry on the Unlearn Podcast this week to talk about his new book, Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You.  Push vs Pull The higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the fewer the jobs and the fiercer the competition. You have to constantly push your way through. Jeff woke up on his 35th birthday and made the unsettling realization that he would soon be battling younger, better-skilled people for a job. He understood that this was untenable, so he vowed that he wouldn’t look for jobs anymore, rather he would have jobs look for him. He tells Barry that pulling job opportunities means telling the world explicitly who you are, where you could help them, where people can find you and what problems you can solve for them. First Steps Why do you exist? How can you help people become successful? Being forever employable involves self-assessment. Jeff says that the first step he took was to examine what he was good at and what value he had provided up to that point. Then he thought about his audience and where the market was trending. “...if you're going to plant a flag somewhere you want to plant it in a growing market rather than ... one that's shrinking,” he points out. Your Personal Brand You have a story to tell that no-one else has: storytelling is how you differentiate yourself. Jeff tells listeners that we all have a unique perspective, and it’s how we build our personal brand. He and Barry talk about sharing their stories and fighting the impostor syndrome. “People massively underestimate themselves,” Jeff says. He coaches people how to find the self-confidence to pursue their goals, a trait that is critical if you want to be successful. Barry says that doing something you enjoy gives you confidence because your passion shines through. Catching The Wave Recognizing a problem, tracking the trends, then adopting a position and sharing it, orients you to catch the wave of new opportunities. Jeff describes how sharing his ideas attracted many unforeseen opportunities. “All of a sudden this conversation goes global and that begins the pull,” he shares. “All of a sudden I start to attract new opportunities because the story and the conversation and the sharing has become so powerful. Giving all this stuff away starts to attract all these new opportunities my way.” He shares how each new opportunity gave him the confidence to take another step, until he could confidently transition into full-time entrepreneurship. Barry comments, “One of the things people also need to unlearn is this isn't like from 0 to 100% overnight.” It takes small, continuous steps and a constant process of experimenting, evolving and reinventing and growing the things you already do. Counterintuitive Leadership A great leader does not purport to have all the answers, Barry says. Instead, it’s someone who is authentic and vulnerable and willing to learn. Jeff says that he is unlearning the fear of becoming vulnerable in public. He finds that his personal struggles resonate with people. He is becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, which Barry notes is the mark of a successful leader. Jeff is driven by enthusiastic skepticism as coined by Astro Teller: there’s always a better way to do something the next time around. Looking Forward Jeff is looking forward to the launch of Forever Employable and the new opportunities it brings his way. Resources JeffGothelf.com Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You

Barry O’Reilly welcomes Kanika Tolver to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Kanika is the bestselling author of Career Rehab and founder of a consultancy business of the same name. She has coached hundreds of clients, helping them discover opportunities to do their best work and to find higher performance roles that are better suited to them. How To Break Up With Your Job Despite fear and anxiety about job security, especially in this COVID-19 pandemic, Kanika says, that you shouldn't be afraid to seek the right job or to break up with the wrong one. She and Barry discuss practical advice:  Turn your anxiety into accomplishments. For example, you can upskill by getting a new certification, and expand your network. Connect with recruiters or hiring managers who can help you get a new position. Join a new online community. Apart from learning new skills, you may be able to connect with experts. Fearlessly resign when you know you’re prepared. To prepare, think about what you need to do to get ready, what you can learn, and who you can connect with or who you know that can refer you. Taking these small steps builds your confidence to fearlessly resign. You Are The MVP Whether you're thinking of changing careers or starting a business, think of yourself as the product. The first step is a Career Rehab Diagnosis, a self-assessment of what is and isn't working in your career. Make adjustments based on what you discover. Next, Kanika says, list your career, education and personal goals. The next step is to think about financial goals and culture fit. Barry comments that it takes so much unlearning for people to recognize that they deserve to have a fulfilling career in a place where they’re recognized for who they are and what they bring to the table. Kanika cites Barry’s book about reevaluating past behaviors. We need to stop thinking that we should conform to fit the company culture. Instead we must recognize that we’re the MVP (minimum viable product), and negotiate job offers with this mindset. She remarks, “They should be just as happy to have you as you are to have them. So I think when we shift our mindset to looking at ourselves as products and services - we have unique offerings - then it changes the direction of the conversation. Instead of you just praising the company, no - praise yourself and then get with the right company.” Divorcing The Job For The Dream Innovating your behavior is imperative to live your dream. Incorporate continuous feedback as it helps you to continuously improve. Another key point is that you should never settle in your career or your business. You have to be resilient in order to be successful. Kanika also shares the following advice: You have knowledge and skills from your job that you can transfer into your new business. Start creating your personal brand: you need a track record before you can divorce your job and marry your dream. Don’t overthink it. Just do it. Consistency is all it takes. Looking Ahead  Kanika is excited about the future of the workplace. The current crisis has proven that workers can still add value working remotely, so she expects more companies to transition into remote. She is also looking forward to more virtual events so new speakers can get an opportunity to spread their message. Information sharing and online networking is being normalized, she believes, and she is looking forward to seeing how businesses and careers pivot during this period, as people develop new communication skills. Resources Website: KanikaTolver.com  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Career-Rehab/dp/1599186519/

Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of The Coaching Habit. He is part of the Thinkers 50 and has been named the number one Thought Leader in Coaching this year. Michael joins Barry O’Reilly on the Unlearn Podcast this week to share insights, including how to measure success and pivotal lessons that shaped him. An Unconventional Career Path There is a saying that inspiration is when your past suddenly makes sense. Certainly, several experiences in his early career showed Michael that he needed to work for himself in order to be at his best. He recounts that the turning point for him was 20 years ago when he was fired from the last company he worked with. That’s when he started his own business. Three Memorable Lessons Barry asks Michael about the lessons he’s learned over the years. Michael responds with the three pivotal lessons that he remembers to this day: You need to understand who you work best with. He is a great leader to his ideal clients, Michael says. “I'm great at having people's backs; I'm great with people who take responsibility and accountability; I'm great with people who have just been waiting... for the wind beneath their wings… In terms of figuring out who influences and nudges and helps shape people's journeys, you’ve got to get the right match between the right people.” The power of No. “Part of what I've learned is that the more courageous I can be about what I say no to and the fewer things that I say yes to, the more likely it is I'm going to make a difference in the world.” A lesson that stands out for Barry from The Coaching Habit is that if you’re going to say yes to something, that means you have to say no to something else. There’s great discipline in being able to say no. Be careful about what you measure as success. Barry and Michael talk about the insidiousness of vanity metrics: sometimes the metric becomes the target and you do anything to achieve it, oftentimes destroying the bigger win that you’re looking for. Michael says that how he measures success is to constantly keep in mind “the bigger game.” He describes how he used this principle with his book.  Serendipity or Intention? Is success intentional or serendipitous? How do we create success? Barry posits that it starts with systems: when you have big aspirations you need to think big but start small. Michael agrees that “intentionality is what allows serendipity.” Taking steps towards your goal is what prepares you to notice opportunities that you can capitalize on. Advice That Has Shaped Michael’s Life A question from his Latin teacher helped Michael decide to become a Rhodes Scholar. Commendation from a past employer helped him see himself as a force for good. And a frustrated directive from his friend to focus helps him “find the focal point that allows [me] to play but also creates the boundaries in which [I] play so that there's a coherence to the stuff that [I] do.” Barry adds that we all need to have a system for who gives us feedback and helps us become aware of our blind spots. Michael comments that the deepest level of feedback is to speak to a person’s being rather than their doing. “To speak to somebody's inherent qualities as to how you see them and how you experience them is a very powerful active leadership,” he remarks. Looking Ahead Michael has launched a podcast called We Will Get Through This, where he talks with interesting people about building resilience at the personal, team and organizational levels. He says that he is still figuring out how he will serve next, but he is disciplining himself to say yes less so that he has the space to see what emerges. Resources MBS.works TEDx Talk: How To Tame Your Advice Monster   Michael’s new book The Advice Trap is out, and it's pretty good. Don’t forget to get his international bestseller, The Coaching Habit.

Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Amy Jo Kim to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Amy is a game designer, startup coach, and author of Game Thinking. She has worked on the early design teams of games such as Rock Band and The Sims, and has helped many companies, including Netflix and eBay, find their customers to help them scale. A Cooperative Designer Amy describes herself as a social game designer. She is enthusiastic about teamwork, having learned many lessons about creating a collaborative environment from working in music bands and modeling great bandleaders. One of those lessons that she now teaches in her Team Accelerator program is how to “make everything gel so we don't even remember whose idea it was… just getting the work done in a really focused yet creative way.” Many opportunities opened up for her Amy when she found a tribe of like-minded people. She tells Barry that she found mentors that she could click with and saw a way that she could contribute immediately to a much larger team. Go After The Early Beachhead “...If you're innovating you can't just go after your average customer in that market,” Amy posits. “You have to capture this narrow early beachhead market first.” As early as 1961, Everett Rogers of Bell Labs found that innovations always start by capturing the early market before going into the early and later mainstream. Amy has taken these insights from innovators like Rogers, Jeffrey Moore, and Will Wright, and made them accessible through a step-by-step program. She shares how these principles were lived out in building out The Sims, and in companies such as eBay and Netflix. “...There's so much you can learn and get out of iterating ideas with [your early beachhead] that it gets you to a point where you can get a vector in the direction and build out for the next layer of people around them,”Amy adds. Early adopters or beachheads have these three characteristics: They actually have the problem that your product solves; They know they have the problem and are willing to try anything that might help; They're taking actions that demonstrate they're trying to solve the problem. Game Design Is About Customer Journey The best game designers create a customer journey and then use mechanics such as gamification to deliver that journey. While shaping behavior with rewards - the basis of gamification - may deliver short-term lift, it does not provide long-term engagement. Barry comments that tapping into intrinsic motivation is a delineation towards game thinking. Step one in designing for intrinsic motivation, Amy says, “is understanding that the best use of any game mechanics or progression mechanics is to support a journey.” The framework Amy details in her book gives a synthesized approach to building an engaging customer journey. The core, she says, is how your product transforms the user into the person they want to be. “If you think about creating a product that gets better as the customer becomes more skilled, you'll be really getting to the heart of it.” Barry comments that Amy’s work is about helping the person to be the best they can be, realizing that struggle is part of the journey. “All the best things we do in life,” Barry says, “requires to test our character, to cultivate skills and behaviors in ourselves that we don't have, to grow as individuals.” The mental model - the story that’s unfolding in the customer’s head - is at the heart of intrinsic motivation, Amy points out. She advises mapping out the story building up in the customer’s mind to understand their point of view. This will drive retention, she says. Looking Ahead Amy is excited about the explosion of creativity that’s being unleashed because of the pandemic. She says that it’s “so much good that’s happening for the planet.” Resources GameThinking.io  https://amyjokim.com/  https://twitter.com/amyjokim  https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyjokim/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jS5pCo5v8MoF6GjpGiXBw

Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Temi Ofong to the Unlearn Podcast. Temi is the Chief Operating Officer for Corporate Investment Banking at Absa, South Africa’s most influential bank and one of the largest banks on the African continent. Temi describes his journey to his present role as an incredible learning curve. He shares the lessons he learned and unlearned throughout his career, in particular, the importance of putting people first to achieve success. Empathy As A Superpower “If you're not able to connect with the person's journey and history and context, it's very difficult to get the best out of them because you don't really understand what motivates them,” Temi points out. Barry calls empathy a superpower. People who develop empathy always get the best information which informs how they behave and helps them to be successful in different environments. “Ultimately business is about people,” Temi adds. “Life is about people… The biggest thing you’ve got to unlearn or learn… is people and what motivates people, what makes them tick…” He illustrates how this principle helped him in the build out of their corporate banking business. Unlearning A Common Leadership Myth  One of the most common myths about leadership is that a good leader does it all on his or her own. However, Temi points out that his biggest breakthrough actually came as a result of his coach. Many times the attitudes and behaviors that brought you success thus far, are not the same ones that will take you further. The right coach, he argues, can lead you on a journey of unlearning which will help you enhance your performance. Barry says that getting a coach helped him accelerate exponentially.  Leaders also need to unlearn: How to be vulnerable; How to harness EQ; What motivates their people. The Notion of Collective Success A leader’s job is to create the environment for other people to succeed. “Ultimately it comes down to the notion of collective success,” Temi adds. People need to feel that they are part of the team, that their work is contributing to the success of the organization. “It’s about trying to create as many points of connection and collaboration where everybody feels that together they can achieve more,” Temi says. Temi shares insights about what led to his bank’s successful multi-year transformation program: It was a bank wide effort. There was a specific deadline. The team was willing to use a new approach. They trusted one another. They revamped how they tracked success and how they dealt with failure. They started with one project, then iterated. They invested in training colleagues. Frequent Evidence of Success Nothing builds trust faster than seeing evidence of a new way of working, Barry says. When they see regular progress, leaders feel more confident about new methods. This kind of collaboration builds trust, momentum and rapport. “That’s where you see real transformation in organizations, where people go through an experience together and deliver something beyond their expectations,” Barry comments. Looking Ahead Temi says the next step is to take what they learned in this project and implement it throughout the bank. Now that they are emerging from this multi-year project where they were focused internally, they have to make up any ground they lost in the market and accelerate past the competition. “The pieces that I focus on are the human parts,” he says. “I see my job as being to help them think through problems but without diminishing their accountability… it's a team sport and in that team we all play our part and I think that's a very important perspective to have as a leader.” Resources Temi Ofong on LinkedIn

Karen Tay, Smart Nation Director for the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore, is on a mission to transform Singapore into the world’s leading smart nation, where technology is used for maximum public good.  She chats with Barry O’Reilly about how she is helping to modernize government by applying product development thinking to policy, organizational and talent development. She shares how this is changing the way the Singaporean government works.  [note: this was recorded before the coronavirus outbreak in the US. If you want to chat about how these insights pertain to Government management of the coronavirus, Karen is happy to chat] User-Driven Design In charting directions for a country, being responsive to citizen sentiments is important, but there is also a place for Governments to exercise leadership in decision-making, eg. the decision that investing in preschool education is critical to social mobility, decisions on how to manage crises such as the coronavirus. Regardless, how the central government implements their decisions should be driven by user behavior. Karen points out that using an iterative process is beneficial in many cases. She relates that they combined user research and iterative testing for policies in the Ministry of Education and found that stakeholders felt more engagement and ownership of the new policies. You have to be willing to listen to what your educators need and want from your product, and change it to something they are willing to implement, Karen says. Barry agrees that you should use user data to reframe your problem, then look at ways to improve. Make Customers Feel Valued Karen and Barry discuss several unlearning moments in Karen’s career. She points out that in government it’s not about what ideas you have, rather whether you can execute them. She says that she was surprised by how little she needed to get something done. She found that it was often as simple as listening to her potential customers’ needs and designing around them, instead of feeding into prevailing assumptions. “You want to make [your customers] feel that you thought about them when you designed the product,” Karen says. Go Deep First When you’re trying to build a policy or product, you must “go deep first,” Karen says. “You need to really get to know the people you're trying to serve… Focus on building that relationship and that trust with the community. Everything else - the dividends - come later.” As you respond to those needs, you learn more about how to scale later on. Barry agrees. He argues that a one-size-fits-all solution never works because each company and culture is different. “The way to scale innovation is actually to descale it, to start with a small group of people. Go very deep with a narrow focus and demonstrate new behaviors. Show what works and doesn't work in your context,” Barry emphasizes. It’s All Relational Building talent pipelines and communities is all relational. Magic happens when you get to know people as human beings, Karen says. You achieve outcomes by connecting on a human level: people feel inspired to change when they have an emotional connection to the change you’re trying to make. Barry comments that the most successful leaders role model the behaviors they want their employees to adopt. Looking Ahead Karen outlines several differences between engineering culture and management culture. She wishes that more hierarchical organizations would adopt the hands-on approach of engineering culture. This is the experience economy, she argues: people want to feel that your company is thinking about them, that they are valued. In fact, you should see all your customers and your employees as ambassadors. As such, you should treat them well and create an amazing experience for them. Resources Karen Tay on LinkedIn

This week’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Eric McNulty, head of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard. Eric is a crisis leadership expert who has worked on crises such as the Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Sandy and Deepwater Horizon, the BP oil spill off the coast of Mexico. He offers valuable insights about making decisions in crisis situations, in light of the Coronavirus pandemic that has gripped the world. A Helpful Decision-Making Tool The leaders who respond best to a crisis are those who can weave several disciplines together to see three-dimensional patterns others miss. Such leaders see what’s missing, and can make connections between different domains to come up with a new solution. Host Barry O’Reilly says that it’s important to recognize the effects of your decisions. He asks Eric about tools to discover potential obstacles when implementing decisions during a crisis. Eric says his colleague, Peter Neffenger, created the Situation Connectivity Map for this very purpose. This tool helps you map out secondary situations that may arise, and allows you to connect the dots and get a richer picture of the overall impact. He says, “You think you're solving for problem X, but around that are different stakeholders, different aspects of that, and the extent you can map them... and to say What's gonna play off in this? How are they connected? Who are the stakeholders? Then you begin to really figure out where you need to put your attention.” How Can We Be Our Best? This is a time to be aspirational, Eric says. Your old bureaucratic process will keep you from innovating, and actually prevents you from doing right by your customers. Ask yourself, “How can we be at our absolute best right now?” He encourages leaders to make changes, to rise above the situation to come out better and stronger. Barry adds that when you empower people to be their best, you will be amazed by what you can achieve together. Eric shares some interesting stories of resilience and innovation that he saw during crises. It’s About Creating Order In a crisis, Eric says that he is “completely uninhibited about asking stupid questions.” He wants to understand why things are done in a certain way. Sometimes, his questions help others open up to doing things differently. He always asks these questions first: Who or what has suffered here? Are they being taken care of? Who should we have helping us who’s not here? He says that failure often happens when you try to control everything. However, the very nature of a crisis is that it’s partly beyond your control. As such, you should aim to create order, not control. You only impose control when it brings more order, he says. He advises leaders to trust their people and delegate as much as possible. That’s how you give yourself space to contemplate the bigger decisions and understand the potential unintended consequences.  Looking Around the Corner “If you're looking around the corner what's coming next actually is pretty obvious,” Eric says. He gives some practical tips to help leaders look ahead during a crisis: Think about what’s likely to happen and the future consequences, based on the evidence you have; Micro-journal your decisions and the information that led to them. Resources Eric McNulty on LinkedIn

Alberto Savoia had a successful career as Chief Technology Officer in major companies such as Sun Microsystems, SunLabs, and was Google’s first Engineering Manager. As an entrepreneur, however, he realized that building the right thing was more important than building things right. He chats with Barry O’Reilly about the pivotal unlearning moments in his life and his new approach to product development. The Beast of Failure You work hard to create a great product, you launch it and the market rejects it. That’s one of the most painful experiences for any software developer. Alberto relates his first experience with ‘the beast of failure’: even though the market told them “if you build it, we will buy”, they did not actually buy. Alberto says that this failure felt as if someone had pulled the rug from under him. However, it was also a seminal unlearning moment for him. The first lesson he took away was that if you’re building the right ‘it’, you will find a way to succeed in the market. The second lesson was that you have to own your failures before you can move forward. Unlearning Market Research There is an 80% chance that the original version of any idea will fail. As such, Alberto now goes into a venture expecting failure, and the market has to prove him wrong. Optimizing to be wrong rather than to be right, flips traditional market research on its head. Barry comments that it’s at the heart of the scientific method since you have to conduct experiments to invalidate your hypothesis; if you can’t invalidate it, then it’s probably a good hypothesis. Alberto’s most important experiment to test his ideas is his ‘skin in the game meter’. Asking the market if they will buy if you build is due negligence, he argues; that’s just promises and opinions. Instead, he tells them, “If you buy, we will build.” The ultimate demonstration that someone wants a product is when they put down a deposit. Money is the ultimate skin in the game, as Elon Musk’s example proves. Pretotyping Engineers usually know whether a product can be built. The uncertainty lies in whether it should be built. Alberto says that when he looked at how creators approached this problem, he saw many examples of pretotyping. A pretotype is something you build before you start to build something that works; for example, how Jeff Hawkins developed the Palm Pilot. The only data that is valuable, Alberto says, is YODa - Your Own Data. Just as Hawkins did, Alberto only counts YODa that is backed up with skin in the game. Barry adds that YODa has the ability to shift mindsets. He has found that the people who own their results, and are continuously learning and unlearning to enhance their product, get exceptional results. Change Takes Time Logic does not convince people to change their age-old thinking. It takes time and dedication to get people to buy in to new ideas and methods. Start with one project, Alberto advises, and incorporate some traditional techniques. Let them experience the results firsthand: that will start to open their minds up to a different way of thinking and acting. Barry agrees that logic is not enough to change minds or behavior. “You have to act your way to a new culture,” he says. “You start to see the world differently when you do things differently, and that’s what challenges your mental model and shifts it.” Looking Forward Alberto has written a book to teach entrepreneurs and innovators about pretotyping, so they work on ideas that are likely to succeed. He advises them not to depend on luck and to assume failure. If you iterate enough, however, you will find the idea that succeeds, he says. That is how to play in a systematic way. “Unlearning is learning. It just takes courage to flip it around.”  Resources AlbertoSavoia.com

For 20 years, Jen Grace Baron has sought to discover the secrets of sustaining inspiration. Her findings are the subject of a book which she co-authored with Allison Holzer and Sandra Spataro, entitled Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life. She chats with Barry O’Reilly about his interesting topic in this week’s show. What makes it worthwhile? In entrepreneurship, as in life, there are going to be tough days. Jen says that she and her co-authors asked each other, “What is the difference that we want to make that will make bad days worthwhile?” Inspiration is a muscle and a resource Jen’s research proved that the traditional view of inspiration is erroneous. Inspiration isn’t something that happens to you. In fact, it can be generated: inspiration is a muscle that you can build and it’s a resource that organizations should manage. She outlines three ways we get inspired:  We inspire ourselves; We are inspired through, with and by others, mainly in relationships; We’re inspired through situations.  Jen adds that there are predictable pathways, or engines, that people use to inspire themselves. Rituals and culture Barry and Jen talk about how simple ‘reset rituals’ spark inspiration and prepare us for success. Systematized rituals are essentially the building blocks of great culture. Culture, Jen says, is the hardest thing you’ll ever build in your company, but it’s the most precious. Barry adds that exceptional leaders role model the behaviors they want their people to adopt. Sustained change does depend on leaders, Jen agrees, which often means unlearning past beliefs and behaviors. The desire for the change has to be stronger than the fear of changing, she says. Am I inspiring? Many leaders believe that they are not inspiring, or that being inspiring is the same as being charismatic. Jen describes the strategies and tools she uses to help her clients see their strengths and uniqueness. Barry comments that our capabilities are often our blind spots because they come so naturally to us. However, we inspire others just by being ourselves. Inspiration is about being authentic; it’s about knowing our strengths and how to use them, Jen adds. Situational leadership is also an essential element of inspiration as leaders today must be agile. Some engines of inspiration We’re inspired by people who share their fallibility and vulnerability with us. Jen comments that just needing other people, and expressing that, is magnetic and inspiring. She shares an important unlearning story from her own life. It was humbling, difficult and uncomfortable, she says, but it taught her how to be a better leader. Another engine of inspiration is overcoming adversity. Past constraints have motivated and inspired many people to succeed. Jen explains that a surprising engine of inspiration is failure, loss and grief. She shares the story of Dr. Joe Kasper to illustrate that grief can be a deep source of inspiration and can be channeled for good. Finding your inspiration If you can reflect on traumatic events, failure, loss or grief, Jen says, and find ways they can serve you, you will grow stronger. This is called Post-Traumatic Growth. Barry asks the best way someone can figure out what will inspire them. Jen responds that inspiration helps you have your best days more often. As such, write down what your best day looks like for you, and why. What’s next for Jen Jen wants to work with companies to measure inspiration and build inspiring partnerships to increase it. Resources Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life

Testing Business Ideas with David J. Bland David Bland’s work includes the product death cycle, a classic anti-pattern innovators and entrepreneurs fall into when trying to create a new product. He highlights that building what customers say they want is not the way to be successful; instead, ideas need to be tested to see what they need to succeed. In this week’s show, Barry O’Reilly and David discuss his new book, Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation, including what it takes to do experimentation right. Stick To Your Vision or Walk Away? “It doesn’t matter how beautiful something looks, or who you think your customer is, if they don’t want it they don’t want it.” His early experience in a financial services startup taught David this valuable lesson. He says that at some point you have to decide whether to stick to your vision and pivot to another segment, or walk away. Having the market reject your hard work is humbling because you personally attach yourself to what you’re creating. However, David comments that the way to move forward is to listen to the data. Being Open To Being Wrong Your vision may need to be tweaked in some way for you to be successful, David says. As such, leaders should adopt the mindset that they’re testing their vision against reality and that they might be wrong. Unlearning Ideas About Experimentation Barry asks David to comment on what organizations need to unlearn about experimentation. David responds that much of it boils down to leadership mindset. People usually become leaders because they are experts in some area and have proven that they can produce results. It’s an ego-driven path, David says. If you’re not careful, you can become a CEO who still thinks that it’s all about you. Building a culture of experimentation means however, that you have to create more leaders around you. Barry adds that so many leaders are used to managing to output-based measures of success. Asking them to measure outcomes seems an alien concept, so they are resistant to the idea. David says funding is another area organizations need to unlearn. He contrasts the traditional method of annual budgeting for projects with the concept of internal VC funding, and explains why the latter is better suited to experimentation. Big Leadership Questions Technology is changing the world so quickly that organizations need to be able to adapt. The static business model that can run for years without change cannot survive in today’s market and economy, David comments. A very important question leaders need to consider is, What would happen if a startup is created today that would make us obsolete? Barry adds that another question leaders should ask is, What would stop us investing in this idea? It’s not enough to optimize only for the happy path; pairing it with metrics that tell you when to kill an initiative creates a clearer picture of what success would look like. Start Manually David shares the story of an SMS dating app to illustrate that you can use manual processes to test the validity of a business idea without building sophisticated features. You can use what you learn to find a strategy or automate a process to scale. It also de-risks the process, Barry comments, as you find out if anyone cares about your product, if anyone would use it, and if you should build it. Starting manually makes for safe experimentation since you’re only investing your time, but you learn so much. Looking Ahead David hopes to influence change in funding startups, as he believes that it should be based on evidence rather than emotion. Resources Testing Business Ideas book David Bland on Twitter