English Script Request

?? I'm Dave Palter, I'm here with Bill Taylor, one of the co-founders of "fast company", he wrote a great book called "Mavericks at Work"...his most recent book is "Practically Radical", just out, go buy a thousand copies if you can...

Oh, music to my ears...

So I read this book, fabulous book, and my take-away from it, it's really intended to help business leaders.. fix what's wrong in their businesses today...uh.. to your mind, what are... what are some of the major problems you see out there that need fixing...

Uh, first of all, good analysis, you know, so much of what we did at "fast company", or even at "Mavericks at Work" was about "blank sheet of paper innovation", and people had the luxury of starting from scratch... just like you at Bzzagent did, and as hard as it is to do that, in many respects it's much less hard than taking an organization that's been around for...fifty, or sixty, or a hundred years, that was a great organization at some moment in its history, and then trying to make it relevant and fresh and exciting and important again for a new era of technology and markets and competition and so on, so that really is what this book is devoted to.

To me, the biggest challenge is really a mindset challenge... and it is that so many leaders and so many organizations have gotten comfortable being "pretty good" at everything..

Yeah..

And the problem today is that with so much change, so much opportunity, so many new ways to do just about everytthing, being pretty good at a lot of stuff really isn't gonna get you very far. The key is to become the most of something in your field. That may mean the most exclusive, it may mean the most simple, it may mean the most expensive, the most affordable, whatever it is, you can't get stuck in the middle of it... I'll read you a friend... Seth Godneh (??) had a funny line in one of his books, he said "tastes like chicken is not a compliment." And I think most big organizations today kinda taste like chicken... they're sort of indistinguishable from one another...and so that's, I think, where all innovation has to start...

Throughout the book, you profile all these great leaders who are helping transform their businesses for this... Are you seeing this issue as "you need the right leaders in the right businesses who can sorta change the culture to be about the most, or are seeing sort of, you know, the every middle manager, you know, up and comer has the ability to do this for the organization.

I'd say it's a "both and" rather than "either or" and.. to be honest...as I think about the organization ... we profiled 25 organizations in really all walks of life...in each of these organizations there really is, "at the top", an individual leader with a set of ideas, a set of values, a real commitment at playing the game differently, that said, they understand that over the long term, this stuff only works if deep in the ranks of every level, but you kinda can't have one without the other, and so, it is a "both and" proposition, but, you know, to me, the key, again, the key mindset for these individual leaders is to say: just because I'm the change agent in chief, and the person in charge, that doesn't mean I'm capable of solving every problem we have, identifying every opportunity we need to, identify... it's no longer on the smartest person in the room, it's how do I lead in a world where nobody alone is as smart as everybody together... so even though they're very charismatic and decisive as leaders, they understand the real game is.. building an everyday commitment to innovation deep in the ranks.

So you speak of, you know, culture and cultures your brand etc. One culture that sort of stands out to me is 37signals and, I know you talked to Jason in this book, uh, you talk a little bit about the type of culture they built etc. Now they've got a very specific way of looking at the world, do you... maybe describe a little bit of what they see, but do you believe that every company can embody the 37signals way?

This goes back to the age old dictum, 'Hire for attitude, train for skill,' you gotta find the kinds of people who thrive in your environment and find more people like them, and unfortunately so many organisations still treat the 'people' side of business as a kind of administrative challenge, as a something, ' well we have to do this but the real business is marketing, finance, R&D.' No, no, no, this is about as real as it gets, but if you believe that a company's products and strategies have to be distinctive, then each company's culture has to be distinctive, and so you can't just, 'Oh, I wish we could do it like those guys!' Well that doesn't make and sense. To me the big question for every leader... you know most of us spend a lot of time.. (***) 'What keeps you up at night, what are the problems and worries that nag at you,' the question every leader has to ask himself or herself is, 'What gets your people up in the morning?', 'what makes them more determined than ever, more committed than ever, more energetic than ever?' in a world which, on most days, seems more uncertain and treacherous than ever. And that means having a set of behaviours, practices, principles, in the workplace, that connect with what you're trying to achieve in the marketplace. And every company, kind of necessity, needs to be different.

Yeah. Well I like to say I sleep like a baby, which means I wake up every 3 hours and cry.

Don't we all.

OK, so a different question. There's a spot in the book where you talk about Orpheus, so can you explain a little bit about Orpheus and why you brought them into the equation?

What's amazing is they're tight, they're exquisite, but the play without a conductor, which is... I mean if you think about Classical music the ultimate symbol of authority and power is the conductor, and the conductor gets all the applause and takes the deep bows, then we give a smattering of applause to the oboe player, or whatever, and what Orpheus has demonstrated now, going on 30+ years is that, you can have an organisation take collective responsibility for a really intricate piece of music.

Um, you have a thing there about group genius versus lone genius and, sort of, how that works and so I think this is a good idea about how leader's can run their organisation, so a little bit about that.

I meet so many leaders who are hungry for new ideas, and, 'I need some genius in my organisation,' and what I try to persuade them of is that, in this day in age, the most powerful ideas tend to come from the most unexpected places. Maybe it's the hidden genius of the people you work with, the collective genius of the customers and suppliers who surround you, and there's no longer a linear relationship between, 'I need a specific idea and I know exactly where to get it.' As a leader, kinda, the mindset flip is, 'You're no longer a problem solver, you're a solution finder,' and you should assume that the solution to whatever is out there somewhere, and you just got to be the, sort of, kind of person who knows how to orchestrate a conversation. So it's, 'How do you innovate?' where you you'll get the answer, you just don't know where it's going to come from.

Alright, well Bill, thanks.

Thanks, it was a lot of fun.

Nice, yeah. We'll see you soon.

Very good, thank you.