The Most Important Metric For Entrepreneurial Consultants

The single biggest determinant of how good your ideas are is the quantity of your ideas. Entrepreneurs get stuck so much on the quality of their ideas when they should just be doing more ideas. Have options and quantity in everything you do. You’re not just going down one narrow straight path. It’s okay to deviate from that and pave your own path. This is exactly what our guest today did.

Join Michael Zipursky as he talks to the Director of Executive Education at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, Jeremy Utley. Jeremy is also a keynote speaker and the author of Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters. Learn how he got rid of this “If I could, I should” mindset so he can do what he truly loves. Discover more about inspiration, innovation, and creativity, and start creating and pursuing more options today!

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I’m very excited to have Jeremy Utley joining us. Jeremy, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

You are the Director of Executive Education at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. You teach classes on disruptive innovation and design thinking. You’re also a speaker and author of the upcoming book, Ideaflow, which we’ll talk more about. The subtitle there is The Only Business Metric That Matters. Is that correct?

That’s right. I am a prolific blogger. To show my thanks for being on the show, I’ve put together a free gift called How to Think Like Bezos & Jobs on our website. If the audience wants to check it out, it’s in IdeaFlow.Design. You can learn how to think like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs or how to avoid that if that’s something that you don’t want to do.

We’ll get more into that here. On your About page, you call yourself a recovering investment analyst and management consultant. Take us back to those days. What were those experiences all about? Why do you position yourself or state that you are a recovering analyst and management consultant?

It was a challenging time in my life. I’m sure a lot of folks can relate as well. For a lot of us, ability starts to be the primary determinant of what we should do with our lives. If I can do it, then I should do it. It could be a level of school, organization, or a type of work. I call it the Ricky Williams Syndrome. For the football player who was a phenomenal athlete, the problem was that he was drained by playing football. He didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t give him life.

Start questioning the 'if you could, you should' mentality. Don't should on yourself. Click To Tweet

A lot of people can relate to that. A lot of us are straight-A or Type-A individuals. There is a narrowly defined path for what being the smartest person looks like. What I came to realize with thirteen-plus years of teaching at the d.school is that we have permission to deviate from that path. It requires changing a lot of the rules around what we believe about ourselves and what we believe is smart and intelligent. It gets to the very core of the narrative we’ve been told about how to succeed in the world.

That’s so powerful. People see it at many different stages of their life. Back in high school time, I was involved in sports and was training six days a week in a track and field club. I woke up one day going, “I don’t love this. I’m spending so much time between the gym and training. I don’t see myself doing this in the future.” You’re right. I had good abilities in athletics, so I felt like that should be the path for me to go. Do you see that pop up in a lot at different stages for people? That’s one question. If that resonates with them, how can they start to explore what they could do if they’re in that situation when they want to figure out how can they escape or make some changes in their lives?

It’s especially true for folks coming into college. I was talking to a friend at South by Southwest a few months back. He was telling me he’s on the scholarship panel for a students of color scholarship at UNC or one of the East Coast colleges there. He was telling me how they were welcoming 100 new scholarship recipients to this welcome dinner. He said, “The thing that struck me was they all knew what they were going to do with the rest of their lives.” We put a lot of stock in having a plan and knowing what the plan is.

I talked to my friend, Aisha. She is a former student and now the CEO and Founder of Bossy Cosmetics, which is one of Oprah’s four favorite products. Aisha and I had this amazing conversation where she was telling me about how she grew up in Section 8 housing. From her neighborhood, if you get into Harvard, you go, which is great. If you can get into investment banking, then you do.

She found herself on what she described as almost a soul-crushing path because if you’re able, then you must. She ended up in the hospital because of stress and all sorts of other factors at play there before she came to Stanford for a graduate program and rediscovered her love of color among other things. It sounds basic, but she ended up creating a cosmetics line that’s all about empowering women and giving them confidence.

She only had permission to do that after twenty-plus years as a managing director of an investment bank. It took her a long time before she realized, “This isn’t what I’m meant to do.” I see that. If you rewind all the way, it’s because there’s a very clear script that’s been given from the beginning of what we should do and what success should look like. I have a friend who says, “Don’t should on yourself,” which I love. Question some of those shoulds, especially if they’re coming from your community or from folks around you. Question, “Is that the path that I’m meant to go down?”

 

Back to your About page and calling yourself a recovering investment analyst and management consultant, how far did you go down that path? What happened for you? What was the trigger where you decide to maybe explore some changes in your life?

I was studying Finance. I worked as an investment analyst in the fund at my school at the University of Texas at Austin. It was an interesting experience. There was nothing against the study of Finance or anything like that, but for me, I found that with every class I took, I thought, “I hate this class more than any class I’ve ever taken.” I then get to the next level and go, “No.” I was top of my class. I did well, but enjoyment or interest was never even a variable. It’s a multi-varied equation. If the question is, “Should I blank?” there’s probably more than one variable at play.

The question of enjoyment or interest was never even a consideration for me, honestly. It was only, “Can I do it?” I learned pretty quickly that I wasn’t cut out for the investment banking world. I did the next most or maybe even more significantly prestigious thing I could do, which was management consulting. That job wasn’t a fit for me. There were a couple of projects that I was invigorated by and enjoyed. It takes two to tango. There could have been wrong attitudes and things like that in my mind.

I expected that I wouldn’t enjoy work. It was about being excellent. I wanted to do things well. I wanted to do the best things that I could do well and choose those things. There was no sense of enjoyment, fulfillment, or purpose. My consulting firm had sent me to business school. They had offered to come back. Even though I knew I didn’t like the job, I agreed to come back because it made a lot of sense.

I ended up not going back. The reason why is that I had a little bit of that safety net, so to speak. I was much more experimental with my summer internship. What I ended up doing for the summer is I went to work at a startup in Delhi, India. My wife and I moved to Delhi for four months. It was an interesting experience. Being in the developing world, I had thought long-term that I wanted to be in economic development. I had a clear selection of criteria.

I was able to be much more experimental than many of my classmates because so many of my classmates were putting all the burden of their career move on that summer. They wanted to get a foot in the door in order to create a case for a change post business school. Since I already knew what I was going to do afterward supposedly, I was able to be much more experimental.

Do you act or stall in the face of the unknown? That question has profound implications for the likelihood of success of your venture. Click To Tweet

I ended up in India. I was doing spreadsheets like I was in America, but in a room that sometimes didn’t have AC and that often had a chaiwala coming in and offering me chai, which was great. That startup employed a designer. The designer’s office was next to my office. I would hear him cutting away at stuff. He would be gone for a few days and I’d say, “Where’d you go?” He’d say, “I was in the slums. I was prototyping stuff with users.”

I was so curious about what he did. I was like, “How did he get to leave the spreadsheet?” It was clearly my world. He said, “When you go back to Stanford, you should check out the d.school.” I said, “What’s the d.school?” He told me about it and I thought, “That doesn’t sound like work.” I meant that as a criticism in my mind. If it’s not hard or unenjoyable, then what business do we have doing it under the pretext of work?

I went to the design school after I came back from that summer in India. It was a bizarre experience for me because I had always equated rigor with work. It was very rigorous, yet it was fun. I had equated fun with not being rigorous and not working. Over the course of 2022, I ended up taking a lot of electives at the d.school. I found I enjoyed the rigor of design work. It wasn’t necessarily that I was good at it. It certainly wasn’t that it was easy, but I found myself wondering about it and thinking about it even when I wasn’t supposed to be working. I found myself compelled to put in extra hours even though I didn’t have to. Those are some of the key hallmarks of work worth doing. I realized at that time, “There’s a different way to approach work. I don’t have to just do the job that I’ve been doing.”

It’s a great reminder for those that are reading who are active consultants and running their businesses with teams. It’s a good question for all of us to be considering and thinking about as well. One of the things that you do is run an accelerator at Stanford. You help ventures to launch. When you look at the businesses and the people that are most successful, are there any particular traits or characteristics that you see that successful ventures have?

Absolutely. It has nothing to do with the idea. It has a lot more to do with the founder’s behavior. It’s one of the key realizations that we made at Stanford. We were like, “Perhaps the most important thing we do is we’re selecting for the right people. How do we select?” You can’t throw a rock at Stanford without hitting a wannabe entrepreneur. I mean that in an affectionate way.

A lot of people want to start a company. How do you know which of those people you should admit to the accelerator? For us, one of the things that my co-author and partner in crime, Perry Klebahn, and I figured out early on is that we need to see how they behave. Specifically, we need to see what they do in the face of the unknown. Do they plan or do they act? That simple question has profound implications for the likelihood of success of their venture whatever the space may be.

 

The more likely an entrepreneur is to take some action in order to learn, the more likely they are to be successful long-term. Conversely, the more prone they are to planning or research, not in the academic sense but in the stalling sense, the less likely they are to ultimately be successful. What’s interesting is that I’ve seen better businesses fail because of a lack of an experimental mindset, which is crafting and executing scrappy experiments.

I’ve seen good businesses fail because it was a failure of experimentation on the part of the founders. I’ve seen objectively bad businesses end up doing spectacularly well because of the founder’s tendency to experiment. For us, what has become a key defining characteristic is that they have a tendency toward rapid, scrappy experimentation.

People in our communities hear me say the word imperfect action a lot. We are very big believers in the best way to get feedback is to take action. That’s how you’ll learn. I’m very interested in your perspective as you’ve worked with so many organizations and ventures through this process. You are helping them and supporting them to take action.

There are those that have that more perfectionist mindset or tend to be a little bit scared or afraid of venturing out into those unknown waters without a plan or without all the research in place. How do you counsel somebody in that position where they know they need to maybe pick up the phone and call more people, go to a trade show, send that email, follow up a bit more, ask for a sale, or make an offer but they’re not doing it because of something? What do you tell that person?

It is reframing the risk. The riskiest move is no move. The riskiest action is inaction. It’s about flipping the script. The reality is that whenever you’re an entrepreneur or you’re launching a new venture, you’ve got a new idea. There’s no way to prove whether it’s going to work. What managers and organizations love is the ability to deduce and have data from which they can draw empirical decisions and conclusions.

For an entrepreneur, experimentation is the means by which you create data. The beautiful thing is that you’ve got proprietary data. If you conduct a clever, simple, and tightly scoped experiment, you’ve got proprietary data. There’s a lot of talk in the world about big data. I’m a big believer in small data and creating not enormous data sets, but differentiated data sets that enable you to grow in conviction or lose conviction about a particular path to pursue.

The riskiest move is no move, and the riskiest action is inaction. Click To Tweet

On your website, it says, “It is often said that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Ironically, teams tasked with growing business ventures often neglect the 1% that fuels the 99%.” Can you talk a little more about that? When I saw that, it clicked with me. I’d love to hear you bring that to life.

If you think about creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation, they’re all on the same continuum. Most people think in terms of output. This gets to the heart of one of the key principles of Ideaflow. Most people associate creativity, entrepreneurship, or innovation with output. That’s a mistake. The important thing to consider is input. What are the inputs to your thinking? What are the ways of working, acting, and interacting that are likely to yield outputs over a period of time?

I agree that it is 99% perspiration. You don’t want to be perspiring without being inspired. Never perspire without inspiration. Take me as an example. I am a recovering MBA, so to speak, and recovering financial analyst. When I met my wife, she was studying Fashion Design. In part of her studies, they would have these assignments to get inspiration to make things called mood boards and stuff like that. As far as I was concerned, having had experience in a bunch of different corporations through management consulting, my definition of inspiration was a cheesy poster on the hallway that says teamwork, courage, or trust. That’s an inspiration.

For a fashion designer, inspiration is the pursuit of input. It’s this thoughtful and deliberate pursuit of input that fuels the practice. She would go on these inspirational trips, whether it was to New York, Paris, or the flea market in search of something. She didn’t know what, but she knew it wasn’t on her computer. It wasn’t on her desk. It was out there. That, for me, didn’t compute because I don’t know how to code that into the pivot table I’m building in my Excel model. Yet, over the course of thirteen years at the d.school, I’ve seen how valuable inputs are.

If you want to cultivate your imagination, you’ve got to be cultivating the input side of the equation. That’s what I mean by inspiration. That 1% is what you are doing to seek out new input and to stimulate your thinking and imagination. To bring the story full circle, for people like me who are highly analytical, linear, and regimented in their thinking, inspiration isn’t even on the radar of the toolset.

I taught a class with a hip-hop artist named Lecrae. Lecrae and I were giving this assignment to our students, which were a bunch of MBAs, engineers, lawyers, etc. We were giving this assignment to go get inspiration in the world about a problem they were trying to solve. It was like a mirror image through a time warp. I was seeing the expressions on our students’ faces that I made the first time my wife told me she had to go to New York for inspiration. It’s this very skeptical look.

 

Lecrae is way more obviously the creative in the room. I’m a closet creative. He’s out in public creating. I said, “Do you have any thoughts on inspiration for our students?” As a true hip-hop artist, he dropped a bar. He said, “Inspiration’s a discipline.” To me, it was a profound moment. The topic had been on my mind for a long time, but the summation of it was nice. I realized that for most of our students, this is not even on their radar, let alone a part of their routine.

That, to me, coming full circle when we talk about the 1% inspiration, it’s the easy part to neglect. I don’t code it into my schedule. I’m not thoughtful about it. I’m not deliberate about it. It’s way more ambiguous. There aren’t as many KPIs on the inspiration part, but I can prove my perspiration. We tend to manage what we measure. For me, having inspiration on the radar is a key discipline to cultivate. It made it easier to measure.

It’s so interesting. Often, people equate and connect creativity with going off in random acts or random insights. Often, from what I’ve heard and what I’ve studied, the most successful people who are known as creative people have clear routines and habits that they become creative around, whether they’re painters, writers, or whatever. They’re not waking up going, “Let’s be creative today there.” They have that regimen. That’s interesting.

I want to ask you. Before you get into talking about your book, you teach a course on lifestyle design. When you think about either the biggest mistake that you see in this area around lifestyle design or the big opportunity, where do people go wrong in this idea of lifestyle design? Is it that they’re not even thinking about how to design their lifestyles? It’s a whole course, but if there are 1 or 2 big things that stand out in your mind as opportunities for people to focus more on, explore, or think through, what would they be in connection to lifestyle design? Everybody wants to have a more enjoyable lifestyle or to live a life that connects to what they care about.

They want to put all the eggs in one basket. They want to make one bet that is the right answer. With the same attitude of experimentation that makes entrepreneurs successful and that same attitude around inspiration that makes creators successful, it is bringing those things into one’s life and saying, “I’m going to deploy or commission a portfolio of experiments. I’m going to try a few different things to get data. I’m going to do something on the side. I’m going to cultivate multiple interests. I’m going to have a portfolio of collaborators.”

You can only go to one college. It’s easy to think, “I can have one employer. I can have one boss.” Your exposure from a financial analysis perspective is enormous when you’ve made a 100% bet. More than ever before, people don’t have to make 100% bets, not even in school. That’s something we saw with the pandemic, like it or not, right or wrong. We saw students coming back frustrated that their teachers expected 100% engagement from them. As teachers, we are like, “What’s the deal? You’re in school.” They’re like, “I started a company during the pandemic.” It has been an interesting thing to see.

Never perspire without inspiration. Click To Tweet

Even at Stanford or among students that are in grad programs, they’re running businesses on the side whereas before, their studies are all they do. That’s a little dangerous. It’s a dangerous attitude. It is like, “I’m putting all my eggs in that basket.” Having a mechanism for experimentation, commercialization, and testing the market about a bunch of ideas is phenomenally useful.

I’m reminded of my friend, Minda Harts, who has written three bestselling books. All of them are, generally speaking, Black and Brown women’s or girls’ guides to having a seat at the table, finding their voice, and things like that. She wrote a book. It’s the Black and Brown girl’s guide to finding her voice. It’s called You Are More Than Magic.

She is a bestselling author. You go, “How’d that happen? For her, she’s working a job. She’s experiencing various forms of bias, prejudice, and things like that in her work. She started blogging on the side. She sent her family the stories of her experience. She then started hearing other stories. She’s still working her job, but she’s blogging. Things snowball.

The point is that if she hadn’t taken up that side project or blogging, her career wouldn’t have blossomed in front of her the way that it did. It is easy to think in terms of compartments. I get my work compartment and once that’s done, then I’m not working anymore. There’s some fluidity, especially around how you spend your “non-working hours.” Especially when you’re younger, maybe you don’t have as many constraints as far as family obligations, or responsibilities are concerned.

Thinking in terms of building a diverse portfolio of experiments of which your job is one, or maybe it is a non-trivial percentage of your employment portfolio, it’s something that I wasn’t thinking about. Even when I was in a highly demanding and lucrative consulting gig, I saw a clock-out mentality. When I was done, I was done. I wasn’t doing anything else. I wasn’t experimenting. I wasn’t exploring. I feel like that was a mistake.

That is so interesting and powerful. When I look at my own life, so many of the biggest opportunities, lessons, or experiences came from something. It probably seemed quite small at that time, like a little extra phone call or deciding to go someplace that maybe I was wondering, “Should I go or not go?” Probably all of us have these little experiences in our own lives. If we think about what led to or what came before that big result, big outcome, or great experience, it’s probably one of those things that are connected exactly to what you’re talking about.

 

One of the things that I do is try to practice what I preach. I’m a work in progress. All the stuff in the book and all the stuff we’re teaching students, I’m trying to apply myself. One of the things I mentioned is the power of appreciating small breakthroughs or even diagramming your last breakthrough. Think of the last time you had a breakthrough. What preceded it? What were the elements at play there?

My joke is that a breakthrough is more like a break-in. It catches them off guard. It’s a little like, “Where did that come from? How can we possibly conceive of perpetrating a breakthrough or committing a breakthrough if we don’t know what the environmental elements are?” For me, what I’ve observed is that as I’ve been a little bit more diligent to appreciate some of those breakthrough moments, I’m starting to rewire some of my circuitry. I’m starting to go, “This is like that. What if I did that?” I’m becoming more present and aware of opportunities that maybe I would’ve missed before.

Let’s talk about your new book, Ideaflow. Where did the idea for Ideaflow come from?

It’s a little bit of a response to a phenomenon that we’ve observed at Stanford for the last few years, which is the following. Most people, when they think of innovation, they think in terms of a sprint, a hackathon, or a workshop. It’s an event. It’s episodic. If it’s something that you click into, it’s also something you click out of. I feel like it does a grave disservice to the practice of creativity and the practice of innovation.

The truth is, like any other capacity, it’s got to be built. It’s got to be cultivated. Nobody would take in piano playing as another capacity. Nobody would take an hour-long or a weekend-long workshop in piano and go, “Book the Carnegie Hall for me. I’m ready,” or worse, which is something we see in the innovation space, put on their LinkedIn, “Certified piano player.” Nobody would take a swimming lesson and ask to get dropped off in the ocean or even the river, or certainly not put on their LinkedIn, “Certified swimmer.”

Whenever it comes to creativity, innovation, design, etc., we badgify it. That’s fine. People are badging everything. That’s okay. Worse, they’re not thinking about, “I got to play my scales. I got to do my laps.” For us, we’ve seen too many people come to workshops, and then at the end of it, go, “I’m done. I did it.” What I want is for people to say, “I’ve begun.” It is not, “I’m done,” but, “I’m getting started. I’ve jumpstarted this new practice.”

Having inspiration on your radar is a key discipline to cultivate. Click To Tweet

I’m no longer a hygienic person if I stop showering. It doesn’t matter how great of a shower I had. If you see me in three weeks, I’m like, “That shower I had when we talked was amazing.” You’re like, “You stink.” You’re not a painter if you stop painting. Similarly, if you want to wear the badge of honor of an innovator, tell me about your practice. Tell me what you are doing and how you are showing up. This idea of Ideaflow came in response to this workshop mentality or episodic mentality. It’s got to be a part of your life and your team’s culture if you want to routinely deliver breakthrough outcomes.

The subtitle of the book, The Only Business Metric that Matters, is bold. Tell us what you mean by that. How do you connect the idea or the concept of Ideaflow to business metrics or lifestyle metrics? How can people measure this area?

In simple terms, do you know what the single biggest determinant of how good your ideas are? If you want to know the biggest variable that has the most profound impact on the quality of your ideas? It’s the quantity of your ideas. If you want better ideas or good ideas, what you should be focused on is not improving. It’s more. It’s volume.

The reason that we say it is the only business metric that matters is that ideas are the wellspring of the future. The market is pricing a stock based on expected future earnings. Not to trigger PTSD, but to go back into some of my DCF calculations, everything about a stock value and a company’s value is based on its future earnings. Upon what are future earnings built? It is future ideas, future products, services, solutions, etc. If you want to know how successful you are going to be, look at the source. It’s that simple. For us, when we say it’s a business metric, I’ve never seen a balance sheet that tracked the number of ideas an organization generated.

Seth Godin wrote a blog post many years ago. Someone said to him, “How do you come up with so many good ideas?” Seth said to this person, “How many bad ideas do you come up with?” They said, “None.” He said, “That’s the problem. In order to have good ideas, you have to have bad ideas. If you’re not even trying to create or come up with ideas because you’re worried about having bad ideas, then you’re never going to get to a good idea.” That’s what I’m hearing you say as well.

That’s right. Ideas are all-natural phenomena, simply put. It’s a normal distribution. Things are normally distributed. Ideas are the same way. They’re normally distributed. That means what? There are a lot of average ones, a handful of genius ones, and a handful of goofy ones. You want to put as much volume under that curve as possible. The danger for a lot of people is that they go, “I love genius. Those are great. I want more genius. I don’t mind the average stuff, but I’m not interested in the goofy.” What they do is they try to chop off the left-hand side of the distribution, but they chop off the right-hand side as well.

Just like any other capacity, innovation has to be built and cultivated. Click To Tweet

The reality is that goofy is the price of genius. If you want to get to genius ideas, you’ve got to be willing not just to tolerate, but embrace goofy, too. We advocate practicing what we call a daily idea quota where every single day, you take any problem you’re facing. You can be like, “How do I title this email subject line? How do I open this presentation? How do I give this piece of feedback? How should we rejigger the factory floor?” It is not just new products and services, but any problem you’re facing. Instead of trying to find the answer, generate ten.

I met a technology executive in Singapore. She told me, “My best ideas usually come after I tell myself to think of something illegal.” To me, that speaks to the value of variation. It’s not that she’s implementing illegal ideas. There’s something about when you lower your guard, you say, “What can we do that’s illegal?” Maybe you think of something and go, “We can’t do that, but what if we did this other thing?” It is giving yourself permission to not just say, “What’s a permissible idea?” but, “What are all the ideas that are possible?” Ten is not all of them.

Getting in that habit of the daily discipline of shifting orientation from quality obsession to quantity-focused is what cognitive scientists call an interrupt. There’s a lot of research that suggests it is called the Einstellung effect. It was established by Abraham Luchins in 1942. What Luchin has found is that if folks started solving a problem in a certain way and they were presented with a problem of similar characteristics, they default to a particular solution. He would present them with a problem that could be solved much more simply, but they would still go through all the gyration and hoops of the complicated version because they had grown accustomed.

Certainly, since the ‘40s, researchers at Oxford have demonstrated with eye-tracking technology and all sorts of things that when we identify a solution, not only do we stop the search for more solutions even though we tell ourselves we’re still searching, but furthermore, we’re prevented from seeing better solutions. As long as you think the answer is the idea, then you’re stuck.

A few of the problems we’re facing are math problems. Math problems may have one right answer. I talked to a world-famous technology leader at a conference. He was saying he grew up dyslexic, and because he often transposed numbers, he learned he had to do every math problem twice. He said if he got the same answer, he was confident that he got it right. He did them in two different ways. If it’s true for math, which only has one right answer, how much more true is it for the problems we face where there are infinite numbers of answers? Why not try again? We’re like, “I got a solution. Let’s try another one. Let’s see.”

Let me ask. You opened the door here to take us a little bit more into the tactical realm of helping people to see how they could start to apply this. Let’s take the consultant or the consulting firm owner. Going back to your past in that world, what might be a step, framework, or some initial questions that the consultant or consulting firm owner could go through to be able to come up with better ideas? How could they apply what you’re talking about to that type of business?

If you want better ideas, you shouldn't be focusing on improving your ideas. You should be focusing on more ideas. Click To Tweet

There are a couple of different things that come immediately to mind. One is an AB test. We often get students to do an AB test. They’re used to that. It is a standard language. In the industry, when we tell people to do an AB test, the biggest surprise to the average professional is they’re like, “I’ve never had a B.”

Let’s say in professional services. When I think of the AB test, I think of people coming to a landing page and you splitting the traffic to the page. One person is seeing one thing or another group is seeing something else and you do it with subject lines.

You’re going to have an event. You’re inviting people. Why not split your distribution list in half? Better yet, split it in tenths and take a tenth of your list. Try one line at the tenth and try another line. Whichever the better performing line is, give it to the other 80%. That’s super simplistic. Think of the number of times you never even tried a second thing. It’s such a simple heuristic to say, “What’s our other idea?

I know Astro Teller, the Head of Google X. One of the things he says is, “Anytime a team comes to me with a solution, I ask them for four more.” Bob McKim is a legendary professor at Stanford. He has since passed. He is one of the founders of the design program at Stanford. Anytime a student asks him for feedback, he’d say, “Show me three.” We have such a default instinct toward quality. Why not have options? Is there any reason not to have options?

Is your recommendation to create options in pretty much everything that you do? You said to send people an invitation to come to a webinar. You’d have different subject lines or slightly different hooks for that. A good one would be a proposal. You’d have different options for the buyer to be able to choose from. Is there any place where people should not bring options in and not try to come up with multiple ideas? Is this across the board that in anything that you do, have more than 1 consideration or more than 1 potential path?

Anytime you don’t know what the right answer is, you should have options. Most of the time, you don’t know what the right answer is. I’ll give us a simple example. We live here in California. Our house faces West, which means the sun always sets at our front door. We’ve always got grocery delivery in the heat of the day. The ice cream’s melting on the front porch. There’s this fire alarm off, “Everybody stop. Grab the groceries.” For me, it’s a task. I’m contrasting tasks with problems.

Anytime you don't know what the right answer is, you should have options. Click To Tweet

With problems, we don’t know the answer. They yield a volume of potential solutions. With tasks, we know the answer is straightforward. It is just a matter of execution. Depending on how many bags Amazon uses, I can get a couple of bags in each hand. I’ve got the capacity for four bags. We order however many we order as a family. For me, it’s like, “When can I get this done?” That’s a task. It is annoying and irritating.

When I came in, I was a little late to the alarm. My ten-year-old daughter has laid a blanket on the floor. She’s loaded ten bags and her two-year-old sister. She’s pulling them like a magic carpet through the house. I go, “That was a problem for her. It was a task for me.” I had never even asked myself the question, “Could I do this better?” It’s such a silly and daily example, but it perfectly illustrates the point. There are so many things that we presume we know the answer to. If you question even that premise, you go, “It’s an interruption once a week every week of my life. Why wouldn’t I dedicate one daily idea quota? What are nine other ways to get the groceries inside?”

I love this concept. This is incredibly powerful and full of opportunities for everybody to explore. Before we wrap up, I have a couple of quick questions and then I want to make sure that people can learn more about your book and everything that you have going on. When you look at your daily habits or routines, what are 1 or 2 things that you do on a regular basis that you feel help you to be productive, focused, and perform at a high level?

Interestingly, productivity and performance at a high level are at odds. That’s part of the premise that I’m trying to question. I’ve been studying creative geniuses. What I’ve learned is that genius isn’t a little bit smarter than smart. Genius is altogether different from smart. Everyone wants to be productive. It’s an objective good. It’s efficiency, productivity, etc. Yet, what I’ve observed is that productivity comes with a cost. I can be productive at solving problems and yet not solve the right problem.

One of the things, practically speaking, that I try to bake in is I take, for example, one day a month. I call it a flight day. It’s blocked. I’m not allowed to use the computer. I’m not allowed to use my phone. I’ve got physical books. I have more physical books than anyone can read in a lifetime laying around that I still long to read. That’s one example. Another example is once a week, I carve out time to talk with a founder or a creator about their process. Instead of being the teacher, I become the student. You said there was a series there. I can’t remember the words that you used.

There is a focus as well.

Genius isn't a little bit smarter than smart. It's altogether different from smart. Click To Tweet

Doing your best work was something like that. I’ve got it posted on my standing desk. It says, “Never forget that your job is to 1) Learn and 2) Share.” I’m a teacher, and because I’ve been a teacher for so long, most people expect me to speak when I show up in a room. If I’m not careful, in every room that I show up in, I’m supposed to talk.

At some point, I start to dredge the bottom of the barrel and I cease to be inspired. I can’t convey that which I do not possess. I can’t inspire others if I’m not inspired myself. For me, carving out the time to be inspired and the time to take off the teacher hat and put on the student hat is critical. It’s unproductive in the sense that I don’t get as much email done in a week. I don’t get as many course outlines done. Yet, ultimately, it’s what enables my work to be long-term, sustainable, enjoyable, and vibrant.

What’s a better word? You hit the nail on the head. I agree 100%. When I use the word productive, the way I think through it is that it’s the application of productivity in an 80/20 sense. It’s not about the quantity of processing emails or getting a lot of “stuff” done. It’s getting the right stuff done. It is things that move whatever your goals are forward. It is doing real work that moves the needle. What’s a better word for that than productive?

Effective is the word that I’ve been thinking of. I would contrast that with being efficient. We’re all efficiency-oriented. We need to be more effectiveness-oriented. I put productivity in the efficiency camp, at least in my mind.

This is good. This is shifting or stretching my thinking. You’re putting on the teacher hat. Before we wrap up, you mentioned books. I love books. You love books. We’ll talk about your book in a moment where people can learn more about that. What is one book that maybe you’ve read or listened to in the last few months? It could be fiction or non-fiction. It is something that you enjoyed and would highly recommend that others explore.

One that I liked is Marc Randolph’s book, That Will Never Work: The Story of the Founding of Netflix. I love that. It is one of the best startup books I’ve read in a long time.

We’re all efficiency-oriented when we need to be more effectiveness-oriented. Click To Tweet

Finally, thank you so much for coming on. I want to make sure that people can learn more about Ideaflow and everything you have going on. What is the best website for them to head over to?

Check out Ideaflow.Design. As thanks to you, I made a free eBook available of How to Think Like Bezos & Jobs. It’s not a recast of any of the book material, but it’s related in the sense that those guys are breakthrough thinkers. The thing is it’s not about being brilliant. There are practices that any of us can adopt in order to increase the effectiveness and likelihood of a breakthrough in our work.

I’ve learned a ton from them and from observing innovators like them. I put that together there on the website. Ideaflow itself comes out on October 25th, 2022. It’s a great summation of a lot of the lessons that we’ve learned and observations we’ve made leading executive programs and the accelerator at the d.school for the last couple of years.

Thanks again so much for coming on.

It is my pleasure. It is great to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

Important Links

• Jeremy Utley
• Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
• Ideaflow
• How to Think Like Bezos & Jobs
• IdeaFlow.Design
• You Are More Than Magic
• That Will Never Work: The Story of the Founding of Netflix
• Jeremy Utley’s About page

 

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