by Tina Seelig
This is the type of energy that should be present during a great brainstorming session. Of course, at some point you have to decide what is feasible, but that shouldn’t happen during the idea-generation phase. Brainstorming is about breaking out of conventional approaches to solving a problem. You should feel free to flip ideas upside down, to turn them inside out, and to cut loose from the chains of normalcy. At the end of a brainstorming session you should be surprised by the range of ideas that were generated. In almost all cases at least a few will serve as the seeds for really great opportunities that are ripe for further exploration.
It is important to remember that idea generation involves “exploration” of the landscape of possibilities. It doesn’t cost any money to generate a wide variety of ideas, and there is no need to commit to any of them. The goal is to break the rules by imagining a world where the laws of nature are different and all constraints are removed. Once this phase is complete, it is appropriate to move on to the “exploitation” phase, in which you evaluate the ideas and select some to explore further. At that time you can view the ideas with a more critical eye.
Rule breaking can happen throughout every organization and in all processes. Consider companies such as Lyft, Airbnb, Netflix, and SpaceX, which all challenged long-held, traditional assumptions in their respective industries. Lyft challenged many assumptions about local transportation, such as people would not get into cars with strangers. Airbnb challenged the assumption that people would not want to rent out a bed or a room in their own house to a stranger. Netflix challenged the assumption that a movie distributor could not create its own content. And SpaceX challenged the assumption that space exploration should be run by governments as opposed to private companies. All of these ventures have shaken up their respective industries, opening the door to a wealth of opportunities.
Rules are often meant to be broken. This idea is captured in the oft-used phrase “Don’t ask for permission, but beg for forgiveness.” Most rules are in place as the lowest common denominator, making sure that those who don’t have a clue what to do stay within the boundaries. If you ask someone how to go about making a movie, starting a company, getting into graduate school, running for political office, or publishing a book, you will usually get a long recipe that involves getting incrementally more support from professionals who are already in these fields. It involves agents and seed funding and exams and approvals.
The majority of people choose to follow these rules . . . but a few others don’t. It’s important to keep in mind that there are often creative ways to work around the rules, to jump over the traditional hurdles, and to get to a goal by taking a side route. Just as most people wait in a never-ending line of traffic on the main route to the highway, others who are a bit more adventurous try to find side roads to get to their destinations more quickly. Of course, some rules are in place to protect our safety, to keep order, and to create a process that works for a large number of people. But it is worth questioning rules along the way. Sometimes side roads around the rules can get a person to their goal even when the traditional paths appear blocked.
Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor shared an instructive story that had been passed on to her by one of her advisors, about two student fighter pilots who got together to share what they had learned from their respective instructors. The first pilot said, “I was given a thousand rules for flying my plane.” The second pilot said, “I was given only three rules.” The first pilot gloated, thinking he had been given many more options, until his friend said, “My instructor told me the three things I should never do. All else is up to me.” This story captures the idea that it is better to know the few things that are really against the rules than to focus on the many things you think you should do. This is also a reminder of the big difference between rules and recommendations. Once you whittle away the recommendations, there are often many fewer rules than you imagined. This is how Linda leads Endeavor: each franchise is given three things they can’t do—the rest is completely up to them.
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Let’s step out of the high-technology business world and see how you can break rules in order to create something of great value in a completely different arena. For example, the past decade has seen growing interest in restaurants that look at food, cooking, and dining in a brand-new way. Instead of using traditional cooking techniques, a new generation of chefs has been experimenting with “molecular gastronomy,” which involves stretching the limits of cooking in all sorts of unusual directions. These restaurants use equipment and materials straight out of a laboratory and play with your senses in surprising ways. The kitchen might be stocked with balloons, syringes, and dry ice, and the goal is to create food that is shocking yet tasty. At Moto in Chicago, they had a “tasting menu,” and you actually ate the menu, which might, for example, have tasted like an Italian panini sandwich.
The chefs at Moto strived to break the rules with each dish they served, from “delivering” FedEx boxes to the table with food that looked like packing peanuts, to making a dessert that looked like nachos but was really made up of chocolate, frozen shredded mango, and cheesecake. Each dish was designed to push the boundary of how you imagined food should look and taste as they transmogrified your food into unusual shapes and forms. One of Moto’s chefs, Ben Roche, said their goal was to create a circus for your senses. They questioned every assumption about food preparation and presentation, developed brand-new cooking techniques, and even designed custom utensils used to consume the food. This is a great reminder that in any arena, from your kitchen to your career, you can remove the constraints that might be comfortable but are often limiting.
Another way to defy the rules is to break free of expectations you have for yourself and that others have for you. We each grow up with a story that others tell us and that we tell ourselves about what we can and can’t do, or should or shouldn’t do. I see this every day with my students. They are all in the same place, and yet they have very different aspirations based on the stories they tell themselves about how their lives will unfold. When they are encouraged to break free from self-imposed constraints, they find the range of options expands tremendously.
I met with a dozen current and former students and asked them to share their stories about breaking free from expectations. After listening to all their tales about getting around obstacles in school, in the workplace, and when traveling, one student, who graduated a few years ago, summarized all he heard by stating, “All the cool stuff happens when you do things that are not the automatic next step.” The well-worn path is there for everyone to trample. But the interesting things often occur when you are open to taking an unexpected turn, trying something different, and when you are willing to question the rules others have made for you. All the students agreed that it is easy to stay on the prescribed path, but it is often much more interesting to discover the world of surprises lurking just around the corner.
Knowing that you can question the rules is terrifically empowering and a reminder that the traditional path is just one option available to you. You can always follow a recipe, drive on the major thoroughfares, and walk in the footsteps of those who came before you. But there are boundless additional options to explore if you are willing to identify and challenge assumptions and break free of the expectations you and others project onto you. Don’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone, to have a healthy disregard for the impossible, and to turn well-worn ideas on their heads. As the students described earlier learned, it takes practice to do things that are not the automatic next step. The more you experiment, the more you see that the spectrum of options is much broader than imagined. You are limited only by your energy and imagination.
Chapter 4
Please Take Out Your Wallets
Before retiring, my father was a successful corporate executive. He rose up through the ranks, from young engineer to manager to executive, and had senior roles at several large multinational companies. Growing up, I got used to lea
rning that he had received promotions, from vice president to executive vice president to senior executive vice president, and so on. It happened like clockwork every two years or so. I was always impressed by my father’s accomplishments and viewed him as a wonderful role model.
That said, I couldn’t have been more startled when my father got annoyed with me after I showed him one of my new business cards. They read TINA L. SEELIG, PRESIDENT. I had started my own company and printed my own business cards. My father looked at the cards and then at me and said, “You can’t just call yourself president.” In his experience, you had to wait for someone else to promote you to a leadership role. You couldn’t appoint yourself. He was so steeped in a world where others promote you to positions of greater responsibility that the thought of my anointing myself perturbed him.
I have come across this mentality time and again. For example, thirty years ago when I told a friend I was going to write my first book, she asked, “What makes you think you can write a book?” She couldn’t imagine taking on such a project without the blessing of someone in a position of greater authority. I, on the other hand, felt confident I could do it. The task was certainly ambitious, but why not try? At the time, there weren’t any popular books on the chemistry of cooking. I wanted to read such a book, and since there wasn’t one available, I decided to write one myself. I wasn’t an expert on the topic, but as a scientist, I figured I could learn the material along the way. I put together a detailed proposal, wrote some sample chapters, shopped it around, and landed a contract with Scientific American.
After that book came out, I was disappointed by how little promotion my publisher did, and I decided to start a business to help authors get more exposure for their work and to help readers learn about books that might interest them. Again, many people asked me what made me think I could start a company. This was clearly a stretch for me, but I assumed I could figure it out. I started BookBrowser in 1991, several years before the web was born. The idea was to create a kiosk-based system for bookstore customers that would “match books with buyers.” I built the prototype on my Mac computer using HyperCard, a program that allowed users to create links between cards, just like links on the web today. Users could then follow links for a particular author, title, or genre. I also met with local bookstore managers, who agreed to put the kiosks in their stores, and I talked with dozens of publishers, who were enthusiastic about including their books in the system. Satisfied that the idea was sound, I hired a team of programmers to implement the product. Nobody told me I could or should do this. I just did it.
Over time, I’ve become increasingly aware that the world is divided into people who wait for others to give them permission to do the things they want to do and people who grant themselves permission. Some look inside themselves for motivation and others wait to be pushed forward by outside forces. From my experience, there’s a lot to be said for seizing opportunities instead of waiting for someone to hand them to you. There are always white spaces ready to be filled and golden nuggets of opportunity lying on the ground waiting for someone to pick them up. Sometimes it means looking beyond your own desk, outside your building, across the street, or around the corner. But the nuggets are there for the taking by anyone willing to gather them up.
This is exactly what Paul Yock discovered. Paul, as previously introduced, is the director of Stanford’s Biodesign program. His home base is the medical school, which is literally across the street from the engineering school. Paul realized that Stanford was missing a huge opportunity by not finding ways for the medical school community to work with the engineering community to invent new medical technologies. The medical folks, including doctors, students, and research scientists, needed engineers to design new products and processes to improve patient care, and the engineers across the street were looking for compelling problems to solve using their skills.
Over the course of many months, the various stakeholders met to discuss ways they could work together. It was a complicated process since the two groups worked so differently and used very different vocabularies. Eventually they hammered out a plan and the Biodesign program was born. During the same time period, other colleagues in different medical and technical disciplines developed similar partnerships, and the groups were gathered under one large umbrella, known as Bio-X. The idea was so big that it took several years to implement and resulted in productive cross-disciplinary collaboration and a stunning new building that now stands on campus. To date, this program has developed hundreds of valuable medical devices and helped launch forty-seven new companies, which are dramatically improving the quality of life for patients around the world. This story illustrates the fact that sometimes opportunities can be found right across the street—you just have to look up from your desk to see them. Nobody told Paul to do this. But he saw the need and filled it.
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One of the best ways to get off the prescribed path is to figure out how your skills can be translated into different settings. Others might not see the parallels on the surface, so it’s your job to expose them. Sometimes the vocabulary in two disparate fields is completely different, but the job functions are remarkably similar. Consider the similarities between being a scientist and a management consultant. Soon after earning my PhD in neuroscience, I set my sights on working in a startup biotechnology company. The only problem? I wanted a job in marketing and strategy, not in a lab. This seemed nearly impossible without any relevant experience. The startup companies with which I met were looking for individuals who could hit the ground running. I interviewed for months and months and often got close to job offers, but none came through.
Eventually I got an introduction to the managing director of the San Francisco branch of Booz Allen Hamilton (known also as Booz Allen), an international consulting company.1 My goal was to impress him enough that he would introduce me to some of the company’s life-science clients. I walked into the meeting and he asked me why someone with a PhD in neuroscience would be a good management consultant. I could have told him the truth—that I actually hadn’t considered that option. But on the spot, with nothing to lose, I outlined the similarities between brain research and management consulting. For example, in both cases you need to identify the burning questions, collect relevant data, analyze it, select the most interesting results, craft a compelling presentation, and determine the next set of burning questions. He was impressed enough to arrange for six more interviews that day, and I walked out that evening with a job offer!
Of course, I took it. In fact, it turned out to be an amazing way to learn about business strategy in a wide range of industries, and I certainly did leverage my prior training as a scientist. Out of necessity and curiosity, I’ve done this again and again, constantly reframing my skills to create new opportunities. When people ask me how a neuroscientist ended up teaching entrepreneurship to engineers, I have to say, “It’s a long story.”
Another way to anoint yourself is to look at things others have discarded and find ways to turn them into something useful. There is often tremendous value in the projects others have carelessly abandoned. As discussed previously, sometimes people jettison ideas because they don’t fully appreciate their value or because they don’t have time to fully explore them. Often these discarded ideas hold a lot of promise.
Michael Dearing started his career in strategy at Disney, went on to launch a retail venture that failed, and then landed at eBay, the leading online auction website. Michael was initially assigned to a job he wasn’t thrilled about and decided to use his free time to look at features that had been designed but then ignored or abandoned—ideas just waiting for someone to exploit them. It was the year 2000, and Michael saw that there was a new feature that let customers add a photo to their standard listing for an additional twenty-five cents. Only 10 percent of eBay customers were using this feature. Michael spent some time analyzing the benefits of this service and was able to demonstrate that products with accompanying photos sold fast
er and at a higher price than products without photos. Armed with this compelling data, he started marketing the photo service more heavily and ended up increasing the adoption rate of this feature by customers from 10 percent to 60 percent. This resulted in $300 million in additional annual revenue for eBay. Without any instructions from others, Michael found an untapped gold mine and exploited it with great results. The cost to the company was minimal and the profits were profound.
This wasn’t the first time Michael found a way to tap into resources around him. Even as a kid he wrote letters to famous people and was pleased to see that most of the time they wrote back. He still continues that habit, sending unsolicited emails to people he admires. In almost every instance they respond, and in many cases the correspondence results in long-term relationships and interesting opportunities. He never asks the folks he writes to for anything. His initial contact is all about thanking them for something they’ve done, acknowledging something they’ve accomplished, asking a simple question, or offering to help them in some way. He doesn’t wait for an invitation to contact these people but takes it upon himself to make the first move.
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Essentially, when you get a job—any job—you aren’t given just that job but rather the keys to the building. It’s up to you to decide where the keys will take you. If you just do the job assigned to you, you are telling your colleagues that you have reached the peak of your drive and abilities, and you will continue to do the same thing year after year. But if you make the effort to find ways for the organization to be more successful, you demonstrate that you are ready for bigger challenges.
So how do you find holes that need to be filled? It’s actually quite simple. The first step is learning how to pay attention. My colleagues at the d.school developed the following exercise, which gets to the heart of identifying opportunities. Participants are asked to take out their wallets. They then break up into pairs and interview one another about their wallets. They discuss what they love and hate about their wallets, paying particular attention to how they use them for purchasing and storage.