Before she became well known as a builder and host on MythBusters, Kari Byron was an artist. She was a sculptor actually, trying to get a day job to pay the bills. How was she to know that her day job would make her an entertainer and a star?

Further, it would hone her storytelling skills. After MythBusters, she went on to author Crash Test Girl and co-found EXPLR Media. She hopes now to create empathy in the world, searching the globe for stories that will bring us together.

From Kari, we learn that the secret of MythBusters was its permission-less science. No one told them how or what to think. They had to create and run the experiment to see the result. As she says, "We blew stuff up, and used a lot of explosives."

Today, Kari makes art at home with black powder. With meticulous care, she tailors the black powder, the paper, and the grain of the ignition system to the image in mind. Chaos makes the final piece.

Knowing that this high energy artist shares an interest in blockchain and non-fungible token (NFT) technology, I had my friend and podcast collaborator, John-Michael Scott (BloxNexus), join me as co-host. We found fertile common ground.

In the first half of my interview with Don Peppers, we heard the story of how he met Martha Rogers at a talk in Ohio and agreed to write a book on a handshake.  Eventually Don and Martha would come to write thirteen books, give thousands of talks and spawn a consulting firm with over 1000 alumni.

But the book that everyone remembers is their first, One-to-one Future, because it makes ten predictions that change direct interactive marketing forever. Landing just months before the first web browser was introduced, they had the guidebook that would lead an entire generation to create the future around their principles.

Every major point gets built out except for one - our privacy was invaded.  That’s what we are going to talk about in this second half of my very special interview with Don Peppers.  It still sits wrong with him.  There are reasons that he and Martha made the prediction they did in 1993.

In the next 40 minutes, you will hear what they thought was going to happen, the reasoning behind that, and what the future can and should be now.  If the best way to predict the future is to create it, let’s hear what Don would have us build today.

In 1993, Don Peppers and his co-author Martha Rogers, released the book One-to-0ne Future, and caught the imagination of a generation of Internet-based marketers, who could now build brand relationships one customer at a time.

Encouraged by testimonials from Tom Peters and other leading strategists, Don and Martha would go on to co-author 13 books on the subject of one-to-one marketing, and launch, the Peppers and Rogers Group consulting firm, which still today, drives customer-centric thinking into brands around the world.

What I want to share with you in parts 1 and 2 of this interview with Don Peppers is the prophetic nature of the first book that Don wrote in collaboration with Martha Rogers. In One-to-one Future, Don and Martha essentially created the direct marketing future we live in today.

Of the ten predictions they made, all came true except for one.  They fully expected that businesses would emerge to make money protecting consumers’ privacy rather than threatening it.  It still gnaws at him that this doesn’t exist today, as he sees trust to be critical to an authentic company - customer relationship.

As we recorded this interview, it became clear that we would need to split it into two parts.  In this initial segment you get the chance to meet Don, learn what drives him, and begin to understand the power of his authentic approach to sales, marketing and life.

With respect to privacy, we decided to go deeper into possible paths that marketers and governments can take now to bring us back to a more trusting relationship.  This important conversation comes in part II.

In early January 2020, I had the delicious opportunity to share a leisurely lunch in Paris with three of my fellow Berkeley Haas MBAs.  One of them, Carlos Gaviola, took me up on the offer to record an interview for Product Storyteller.

Carlos works on the durable edge of capitalism as a volunteer for #leplusimportant.  As you will learn from Carlos in this interview, business people in Europe, and Paris in this case, understand the need to retrain people who would otherwise be left out as technology relentlessly moves towards higher productivity.

As we in the US consider our own issues with worker displacement, it should prove useful to hear how this group of French business people have approached the problem with entrepreneurial flair.  They don’t see government as an enemy, but rather as a partner who can deliver the solutions that they propose and test.

This is a quick episode that will leave you wanting more.  Let’s listen now.

My very special guest for this episode is Erica Blair, brand messaging expert and world traveler. Earlier this year, Erica helped me refresh my personal brand.  Through our time together I came to see her process as one of many paths one must take on the way to the durable edge of capitalism.  That’s why I asked her for this interview.

There are two very important points to take away from what you are about to hear.

First, Erica calls for each of us to express why our products matter.   We usually say what we offer and how it works, but we need to paint a very clear picture of why the thing that we have created matters in the world.  Our clients and customers are bombarded by messages all day.  They simply don’t have the time to translate the technical details of what we offer into a solution to their problem. They need an anchor, which is our brand.

Second, we should be thinking big. What is our audacious vision?  Erica sees a vision of decentralization, of reconfiguring the way that we distribute value in community.  Though you might know this vision as blockchain or crypto, Erica reminds us that there is more to this movement than technology.  There is enormous opportunity to add value and create wealth here, but we need to express this opportunity in terms of why.

So, what makes positioning and vision a path to the durable edge of capitalism?  As economic value builds from value then we can imagine ourselves better off as a community when everyone in the community is engaged.  That means we all add value to meet unmet needs, and have our own needs met.

Erica is constantly, persistently working with clients to get them into a hyperniche, where they are special, and valued.  This is their positioning, where they add the most value, which can be seen where their solutions relieve the pain of the customers they target. Everyone wins.  Her clients make more money and work efficiently.  The client’s customers with unmet needs are now satisfied.  

Such win-win outcomes are the foundation of civil society, and are especially important when companies are introducing disruptive innovations.  The big audacious vision that changes the world needs to make sure that no one is left behind.

That is why Erica’s brand messaging practice matters, and why I am pleased to call her my friend.

This week my very compelling guest is Soren Juul Jorgensen, a lawyer and civil servant of Denmark, who moved to Palo Alto in 2014 to open the Innovation Center Denmark.  With his work Danish companies have accelerated their engagement with Silicon Valley and Soren has grown into the role of innovation leader.

We first met when I led the pitch night for data privacy companies at his first ever Responsible Digital Leadership workshop. The global business leaders in attendance talked about the need for companies to build good social practices into their products from the beginning.  I wanted to know more, so I asked Soren to sit down with me for this conversational interview.

We talked about how companies need to move on from breaking the rules, to a place where people make new rules responsibly.  Does that come from industry regulation, or from an industry that self regulates?

From his European perspective, Soren relates an ethical approach to durable capitalism that comes from shared understanding and the setting of community standards.  I hope that you appreciate our conversation as much as I did.

In this interview, Dr Pamela Jolly of Torch Enterprises tells the story of people who build generational wealth on their own initiative guided by their relationship with God.  They follow her NarrowRoad, and make better business choices based on faith.

I believe this to be a durable edge of capitalism where spiritually led innovators hold themselves to a higher standard, a moral constraint, defined through a relationship with their Creator.  They pursue wealth beyond that which is material, even as the monetary gain they create sustains their work in the material world.

This interview was recorded in June 2019, with Annanda Barclay, my partner on the Applied Wisdom podcast series.  We found Dr. Jolly to be an inspiration, a wise person who chooses her words very carefully.

Within the context of Facebook hearings and rising criticism of social media, I moderated a panel on Storytelling in Disruptive Innovation, at Node Worldwide, 1011 Kearny Street in San Francisco, on June 11 2019.  Four storytellers with very different backgrounds joined me to discuss storytelling approaches that work in times of disruptive innovation.

On the panel are Erica Blair (brand communication expert and blockchain advocate), John Michael Scott (enterprise product developer), Byron Bland (international conflict negotiator) and Cybele Zufolo Siegel (word performance artist and master communicator).  

This panel session will change the way you look at business, and give you new tools for building sustainable brands.  I introduce the event and frame the conversation around Facebook and the opening it has left for disruptors.  Each person on the panel introduces him or herself, and then the questions begin.

My very special guest this week is Mike McGuire, VP Research at Gartner Group in mobile marketing.  He’s a good friend with a voice for radio, but before he reached his esteemed position at Gartner, he was a surfer,  a journalist, a PR guy, and an innovator.

Our lives intersected at Geoworks, at the very beginning of the handheld mobile device revolution, where we were part of a crazy awesome turnaround, in which a company known for competing with Microsoft Windows for the desktop GUI pivoted massively and took on the Apple Newton PDA.

Though we have many stories together, we used our time in this episode to talk about the structure of story itself, specifically how we use story in marketing, and how story has changed with the revolution in technology that we saw first hand.    For Mike, this is a perspective that informs his work at Gartner today.

From the start of the interview, Mike talks about the advice he gives to his clients.  It isn’t that they should have a set of tactics for mobile marketing, but that they should leverage the fact that every single person out there is mobile and make their brand available at every phase of the customer journey.

Butt does that fundamentally change the narratives that we use to speak to our customers?   As a product storyteller, I look for the thread that integrates the work of the developers, the marketers, and the sales people who bring a new product to market. Does mobile marketing and news cycle acceleration change the story structure that they use?

Our conclusion was that technology accelerates and amplifies what we say, so we had better start with a solid foundation grounded in authenticity.  The better we know ourselves and our teams the more likely we are to deliver a strong message in the moment that stays consistent as it evolves.

This interview was done on the outside patio at the Village Bakery in Woodside, California.  Music almost immediately starts playing in the background.  So, I must apologize that the audio quality isn’t up to the quality of my guest.  But the good news for you the listener is that there is no deep fake here.  You get the raw take, and that can be a very entertaining thing.  Enjoy.

This week my exceptional guest is Tom Lyon, serial entrepreneur and Internet legend, who takes us on a journey to the leading edge of distributed computing.  This is a very special interview for Product Storyteller, as it explores the origins of our current IT economy from an engineer’s point of view.

For software to take over the world, Tom and his cohort had to lay the foundation of Unix and TCP/IP.  And his cohort is impressive, including Ken Thompson, Eric Schmidt and Bill Joy.  These brilliant technologists wrote reliable and efficient software for their own use, enabling the many products we use today.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise then that the entrepreneurs who disrupted networking 40 years ago, would be the same ones to commoditize it today.  Tom now builds the kind of next generation products that the Cisco’s of the world can monetize, which gives his companies excellent acquisition exits.

His current focus is DriveScale, a company he founded with Satya Nishtala in 2013 to commoditize the endless server SKUs from Dell, HP and others.  With DriveScale, one can create, deploy and adapt servers on the fly to meet the demands and distributed nature of containerized applications. It’s a perfect match for Kubernetes.

This interview puts you in the mind of an engineer who has repeatedly broken down the walls between networks and systems.  From the origins of Unix and the Internet to the virtual machines that run all of IT today, we cover it all.  I hope you enjoy the trip.