Thought Talk

If you look at the greatest innovations of this world, it may surprise you to find deviant personalities and quirky innovators behind them. Melissa Schilling, Professor of Innovation and Strategy at New York University's Stern School of Business, was inspired to do a multiple case study on serial breakthrough innovators. She didn't actually try to set out and find unusual or quirky people to study, but ended up being pretty surprised that almost uniformly, they all had this strange social awkwardness or social detachment, a sense of separateness like they didn't belong or they didn't feel connected to the social world. One interesting truth is that none of the innovators she studied placed a high priority on money. The more she studied them and the more she connected what she knew about them up to what we knew about innovation and creativity, it all started coming together that this separation is actually a big part of what enabled them to break norms, to challenge conventional wisdom, and to pursue projects even in the face of criticism.

Nilofer Merchant discusses her latest book The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World. Now that the Internet has liberated ideas to spread and scale through networks rather than hierarchies, power is no longer determined by your status, but by "onlyness"—that spot in the world only you stand in, a function of your distinct history and experiences, visions and hopes.

Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove, the founders of the Thinkers50 Conference, discuss how they search out and honor the top management and leadership thinkers from around the world – and what they have learned from them. At Thinkers50, Stuart and Des' job is to scan, rank, and share the very best management ideas in the world at work, careers, and lives in the future as they look for the bright and up and coming thinkers. They release ranking of the 50 most important management thinkers in the world every two years and rely on people bringing things to their attention.

Former Apple CEO and Pepsi President John Sculley talks about his past, present and future as an entrepreneur and technology leader as co-founder of Zeta Global, an independent marketing cloud company. John says AI is going to be as foundational to the world of business as oil and electricity was back in the industrial age, and the real disruption is applying the technology. It's a wonderful time to be an entrepreneur even if you're starting out with a very small business. Technology in 2019 is geared towards smaller companies getting on a boat on the river of consumerization and taking advantage of the major trends in technology. There will be such commoditization of technology which has exponential growth capabilities that are incredibly cost efficient that even smaller companies can build consumer services using a big cloud platform and be able to pay for it without having to raise millions of dollars.

How do people make money? What are the options? Dorie Clark, the author of Entrepreneurial You, attempts to answer those questions in her book, as well as a few others like if you want to create multiple income streams in your business, what are the possibilities, how do you implement them, and how can a regular person add to their arsenal so that they can become more successful? Dorie discusses why everyone needs multiple income streams and how to create them in today's social media and online world. She shares it's essential to differentiate yourself and strive for a more lasting success rather than the easy fish in the barrel.

Over the last ten years, we've seen a huge transformation of technology in everyday life, especially on the types of devices that people are using to connect to the internet and how people consume content. One of the biggest changes has been the shift from traditional cable satellite or terrestrial antenna television to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Go. That means now the average consumer is using the internet almost every hour of every day when they're home. The access to information has become unprecedented. Nick Weaver, co-founder and CEO of Eero which provides essential Wi-Fi solution for the home, discusses how technology in our homes has changed in the last ten years and what the future may bring.

As a developer of new work and a foodie, director and choreographer, Marlo Hunter, has always been trying to look for a way to marry her two passions, words and food. Her most recent project, the Theatrical Culinary Project, was baked from her goal to see if chefs and playwrights could speak the same language and creates a play with words and food that was greater than the sum of its parts. The Theatrical Culinary Project is an immersive play in development which allows five esteemed playwrights to collaborate with Chef Carla Hall of Top Chef. The play aims to incorporate all five senses where the audience would be submerged in a restaurant setting. As the play takes place around them in the room, they're also experiencing a four-course meal created by Carla that mirrors the dramatic themes of the play. Marlo hopes to have a production in New York, but also loves to run the play in various cities around the world.

Bernardo Moya is the founder of The Best You EXPO, and editor-in-chief of The Best You magazine. He navigated economic adversity during the 2008-2009 recession by seeking opportunities, where others saw obstacles. Bernardo runs Europe's largest personal development trade fair. In this episode he discusses the future of conferences and how to get the most out of them.

A lot of leaders and business people turn to technology these days as the easy fix to everything. While that is the intention of technology, we have so much dependency on it that when a certain technology fails, we blame it and don't look at the human element that was also involved in the process. President of No More Cold Calling Joanne Black is asking people to stop and step back from technology and see that we can seal the deal by having a conversation with the client. Sending emails is the way to go in business these days, but the trend of software technology is making sales people look like they are there for making a demo. Joanne explains how referrals solve this problem for leaders and the organization.

My guest today is Liz Wiseman. She is the founder and the president of The Wiseman Group. She's also the author of the very popular book, Multipliers; How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. The book has just been released in its 2nd edition with new refreshed and new content including:

Accidental Diminisher chapter Dealing with Diminishers chapter Building a Multiplier Culture section of the "Becoming a Multiplier" chapter. Multipliers Experiments in appendix

I spoke with Liz about her research over the past 8 years on what the best leaders do to build up the people around them."The most intelligent leaders, really smart, capable people, don't always engender intelligence in those around them," says Wiseman. "Their presence as a leader costs the presence of others. They often take up too much space."

Wiseman calls these scene stealers "diminishers" and points out that when they walk into a room, it often goes quiet. Why? Because their employees know that the leader has to be the smartest person in the room. Wiseman jokes that anyone who has ever worked for even a week knows the type. But it's not funny when you consider that Wiseman's research shows that under diminishers, people work at 50% of their capability.