Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems with Stephen Shapiro

Unprecedented access to infinite solutions has led us to realise that having all the answers is not the answer.

From innovation teams to creativity experts to crowdsourcing, we’ve turned from one source to another, spending endless cycles pursuing piecemeal solutions to each challenge we face.

What if your organisation had an effective and systematic approach to deal with any problem?

To find better solutions, you need to first ask better questions. The questions you ask determine which solutions you’ll see and which will remain hidden.

More about Stephen here: https://stephenshapiro.com/invisible-solutions/

WHY simple WINS: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters with Lisa Bodell

Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. 

Complexity is killing companies’ ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time.

Our guest today helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today’s corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm.

By learning how to eliminate redundancies, communicate with clarity, and make simplification a habit, individuals and companies can begin to recognise which activities are time-sucks and which create lasting value. 

Simplification is a skill that’s available to us all, yet very few leaders use it.

Simplification is the right thing to do–for our customers, for our company, and for each other.

Operating with simplification as our core business model will make it easier to be respectful of each other’s time.

Simplification drives culture, and culture in turn drives employee engagement, customer relations, and overall productivity.

More about Lisa here: https://futurethink.com/

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future with Scott D. Anthony

It is always a pleasure to welcome friend of the Innovation Show Scott D. Anthony. In his new book, he proposes a practical and sustainable approach to one of the greatest challenges facing leaders today: transforming your business in the face of imminent disruption. 

Dual Transformation shows us how a company can come out of a market shift stronger and more profitable, because the threat of disruption is also the greatest opportunity a leadership team will ever face.

Disruptive change opens a window of opportunity to create massive new markets. It is the moment when a market also-ran can become a market leader. It is the moment when business legacies are created.  That moment starts with the core dual transformation framework: 

Transformation A: Repositioning today’s business to maximise its resilience, such as how Adobe boldly shifted from selling packaged software to providing software as a service.

Transformation B: Creating a new growth engine, such as how Amazon became the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services.

Capabilities link: Fighting unfairly by taking advantage of difficult-to-replicate assets without succumbing to the “sucking sound of the core.”

Scott with his co-authors Clark Gilbert, and Mark Johnson address the characteristics leaders must embrace: courage, clarity, curiosity, and conviction.

Without them, dual transformation efforts can flounder. 

We discuss: Kodak, Nokia, Xerox, Netflix and Microsoft.

Scott pays homage to the late and great Clayton Christensen and we discuss what skills we all need to ride the gale of creative destruction.

More about Scott here: https://www.innosight.com/team_bio/anthony-scott-d/

Serve with Style: Customer Service in the Age of Experience and AI with Carlo Pignataro

Today’s guest invites us to focus our attention on a theme central to the development of all companies and professionals: customer service, or rather, the overall experience we offer customers. We live in the era of experience, and against a growing number of chatbots and automated systems, we paradoxically expect businesses to invest more and more in human traits such as listening, willingness, and values.

So, what has customer service become today?

What path should you take if you work in direct contact with the audience but do not want to be engulfed by the tsunami of technology?

How should companies get ready for this if they do not want to be caught unawares?

Serve with Style raises vital questions for every market player. It offers a specific path to help develop methods of organisation and professional skills which are becoming increasingly priceless in today’s business world and will be essential tomorrow.

More about Carlo here: www.carlopignataro.com

Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation with Alex Osterwalder

7 out of 10 new products cannot deliver on expectations.

Our guest’s book aims to reverse that statistic.

In the tradition of his global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas.

Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project.

It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-colour format to:

Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas

Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation.

Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas.

The book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses.

Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organisation and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

More about Alex here:

http://alexosterwalder.com/

 

Series Excerpt 1: Visa Founder and CEO Emeritus – Birth of the Chaordic Age with Dee Hock

This is an extended excerpt from the upcoming multi-part series on Dee Hock and the founding of the world’s first trillion dollar business VISA. Dee is notoriously private and he has given the Innovation Show the privilege of interviewing him in a multi-part series.

52 years ago, our guest foresaw and implemented the foundations for the world’s first trillion dollar organisation. Back then, Visa was little more than a set of unorthodox convictions about organisation slowly growing in the mind of a young corporate rebel. Today, according to the Visa 2019 annual report, payments and cash volume for the year was a staggering $11.6 trillion dollars, transactions processed on Visa’s networks totalled $138.3 trillion dollars and the year saw some 3.4 billion Visa cards in operation.

Our guest is the man who imagined this reality, who had a once-deemed-impossible vision 52 years ago, a vision that has become a concrete reality today.

He is a man who has a different view on what the next 50 years can deliver, but that vision will require a radical shift in mindset for every single one of us.

This excerpt is of Dee Hock recounting the story of the conversation that enabled VISA. Dee worked for a man named Maxwell Carlson. Dee describes Mr Carlson as the best listener he had every met and Dee states “Let there be no doubt about it! If Maxwell Carlson had been a lesser human being,Visa would never have come to be.”

FRICTION: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage with Roger Dooley

Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Uber all have one thing in common: They have built empires on making every interaction effortless for customers.

In today’s high-speed, customer-empowered world, speed and efficiency with which business transactions are made determine ultimate success or failure. In 2016, $4.6 trillion of merchandise was left in abandoned e-commerce shopping carts.

Every year, the U.S. economy loses $3 trillion dollars in productivity due to excess bureaucracy. Red tape and over-complicated licenses have contributed to China’s GDP exceeding India’s by $82 trillion over the span of just three decades.

If you’re a business leader, these statistics should give you nightmares Today’s episode dips into a groundbreaking guide which makes the case that every business can gain a competitive edge by reducing the points of friction that impede smooth business exchanges. 

We will explore how to identify roadblocks, alter them for the benefit of both business and customer, create positive, lasting change, how to build friction awareness into your corporate culture, and how to build employee engagement at the same time you are increasing sales and customer loyalty.

We welcome author of FRICTION: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, Roger Dooley, welcome to the show

The Innovator's Book: Rules for Rebels, Mavericks and Innovators with Dr Max McKeown

Dr Max Mckeown delivers concise advice on how to move from original insights to new ideas, and from new ideas to valuable real-world innovation. You’ll learn how to increase creativity, understand the psychology of thinking differently, encourage collaboration, co-create with customers, overcome indifference, create an idea-hungry culture, rid yourself of creativity zombies and get to innovation paradise.

Drawing on over 30 years of the author’s research and experience, this honest, straight-to-the-point playbook can be dipped into or read cover to cover, giving you important reminders and guidance in how to make new ideas useful. Are you ready to change the world?

More about Max here:

https://maxmckeown.com/

The Second Curve an evening with Charles Handy

Charles Handy is one a giant of contemporary thought. His books on management – including “Understanding Organisations” and “Gods of Management” – have changed the way we view business.

His work on broader issues and trends – such as “Beyond Certainty” – has changed the way we view society. 

In “The Second Curve”, he builds on a life’s work to glimpse into the future and see what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.

He looks at current trends in capitalism and asks whether it is a sustainable system. He explores the dangers of a society built on credit. He challenges the myth that remorseless growth is essential. He even asks whether we should rethink our roles in life – as students, parents, workers and voters – and what the aims of an ideal society of the future should be. 

Provocative and thoughtful as ever, he sets out the questions we all need to ask ourselves – and points us toward some answers.

I was fortunate to spend an evening with Charles in his home in London. He is an incredible man with an intriguing view of things. This was a memorable moment for me as I met a personal hero.

We discuss:

  • Disruption
  • Efficiency v Effectiveness
  • Management v Leadership  
  • Purpose
  • Shamrock Organisations
  • The Doughnut Projects
  • Communities in Organisations
  • Education
  • Parenting and so much more

The End of Mental Illness with Dr. Daniel Amen

Today’s episode introduces New hope for those suffering from conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, addictions, PTSD, ADHD and more.

Though incidence of these conditions is skyrocketing, for the past four decades standard treatment hasn’t much changed, and success rates in treating them have barely improved, either. Meanwhile, the stigma of the “mental illness” labeldamaging and devastating on its owncan often prevent sufferers from getting the help they need.

Today’s guest is an innovator in his field, a Brain specialist and bestselling author on the forefront of a new movement within medicine and related disciplines that aims to change all that. Today, we will draw on the latest findings of neuroscience to challenge an outdated psychiatric paradigm. It will help us all take control and improve the health of our own brains, minimising or reversing conditions that may prevent us from living a full and emotionally healthy life.

The End of Mental Illness will help us discover:

  • Why labelling someone as having a “mental illness” is not only inaccurate but harmful
  • Why standard treatment may not have helped you or a loved oneand why diagnosing and treating you based on your symptoms alone so often misses the true cause of those symptoms and results in poor outcomes
  • At least 100 simple things you can do yourself to heal your brain and prevent or reverse the problems that are making you feel sad, mad, or bad
  • How to identify your “brain type” and what you can do to optimise your particular type
  • Where to find the kind of health provider who understands and uses the new paradigm of brain health

It is a great pleasure to welcome Dr. Daniel Amen, multiple bestselling author, changemaker and author of “The End of Mental Illness: How Neuroscience Is Transforming Psychiatry and Helping Prevent or Reverse Mood and Anxiety Disorders, ADHD, Addictions, PTSD, Psychosis, Personality Disorders, and More”.

More about Daniel here http://danielamenmd.com/

and his free 6-week brain course is available here:

https://endofmentalillness.com/brainhealthchallenge/

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