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

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/

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.”

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

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/

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

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” label―damaging and devastating on its own―can 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 one―and 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/

It is known as the bible for startups and the best investment a startup can make.

A startup without customers is like a day without oxygen, and the Startup Owners Manual helps founders get it right and shows you how to get, keep, and grow customers, literally every step of the way.

This manual walks entrepreneurs step-by-step through the proven, world-renowned Customer Development process for getting startups right the first time.

The Customer Development process was developed by a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur-turned-educator and based on his eight valley startups, four of which IPO’ed.

He joined with serial entrepreneur Bob Dorf to build the Startup Owner s Manual as a sequel to his first book, which sparked the Lean Startup movement.  The Startup Owners Manual lays out the best practices, lessons and tips that have swept the startup world, offering a wealth of proven advice and information for entrepreneurs of all stripes.

We also discuss innovation within larger, established organisations.

The manual:

• Guides startups of all types in their search for a scalable, profitable business model
• Explains the 9 deadly sins startups commit most often and helps you to avoid them
• Incorporates the business model canvas as the starting point for any startup
• Provides separate paths and advice for physical versus web/mobile products
• Explains how to test and iterate your companys road to product/market fit
• Details strategies and tactics for how to get, keep and grow customers
• Teaches a new math for startups — metrics that matter
• Includes detailed checklists at every step of the process
• and provides hundreds of ideas, watch-outs and how tos for founders and innovators

I am delighted to welcome the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, the legendary Steve Blank

‘ZEST’ equates to zing, enthusiasm, energy, gusto, eagerness, zeal and fervour.

It also suggests a tang, a sharpness. It’s the opposite of bland.

Today’s book called ZEST is not just a book on personal development. There are an awful lot of those.

Zest is a catalyst, a spark that ignites your remembering of what makes you, in a word, you.

It drives you to rethink, rejuvenate and reinvent. It also contains a touch of the revolutions.

Have you, as a grown-up, fallen into the trap of becoming a Groan-up?

You know you should try to make the best of things, but oftentimes you don’t know what your “best” is anymore.

It’s strange.

You used to know. What happened?

Was it the years of social conformity?

There is a whole beige generation out there – a generation that has lost its identity and forgotten who they once were – buried under the crushing, stifling facades of adulthood.

If only there was a way to unearth your passions, recover the zest for life you once had. Maybe there is.

Zest is a wake-up call for you to explore the formative moments that define your life. It challenges you to believe that your best days are still ahead, to search your soul, to shake things up and bask in the warmth of glorious individuality.

Today’s episode will help us:

• Explore the pivotal, defining moments in your life
• Examine both the good and bad experiences that define you
• Reconnect to the essence of who you are Embrace your quirks, qualities and peculiarities
• Determine to be the person you always wanted to be Zest is your permission to play, your licence to wreak the right kind of havoc.

It’s not about pretending to be someone you’re not, it’s about squeezing every drop out of who you already are.

We welcome, the Author of Zest: How to Squeeze the Max out of Life, Andy Cope

Why are we obsessed with the thing as we want – only to be bored when we get them? 

Why is addiction perfectly logical to an addict? 

Why does love change so quickly from passion to indifference? 

Why are some people, die-hard liberals and others hardcore conservatives? 

Why are we always hopeful for solutions even in the darkest times—and so good at figuring them out? 

The answer is found in a single chemical in your brain: dopamine.

Dopamine ensured the survival of early man.

Thousands of years later, it is the source of our most basic behavioUrs and cultural ideas—and progress itself. 

Dopamine is the chemical of desire that always asks for more—more stuff, more stimulation, more surprises.

In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality.

We welcome the author of “The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and will Determine the Fate of the Human Race.” Daniel Z. Lieberman

More about Daniel here:

http://www.danielzlieberman.com/