Transcription
Translator: gaith Takrity
Reviewer: Mohamed Salem
In 1995, a graphic design teacher named Lynda Weinman, who was also an ambitious entrepreneur, decided to get a website, Lynda.com. She did this because she needed a sandbox to play in, with the new graphic design tools, and the digital tools that were being developed at that time: Photoshop and Illustrator and many others. And she needed a place to put her students' work so that everyone could see it. Well, she put together this website, and the business started to grow. And in 2002, she discovered that it could be much more, so she moved all her teaching online. Later, the company was sold to LinkedIn, which renamed it LinkedIn Learning, and it was sold for 1.5 billion US dollars. Lynda is the poster child for what I call the unconventional entrepreneurial mindsets. So I want to tell you about these mindsets today, and here we go. So, first, why do I call them unconventional? First, these six mindsets go against best practices, as we call them, that are done in large corporations today. They go against a lot of what we teach at London Business School and other business schools about strategy, marketing, risk, and much more. Now, you might say, "John, what do you mean by 'mindset'?" Mindset, of course, is here, isn't it? It's those things and attitudes and habits and ideas and mental inclination that, when something comes our way, predetermines the response that we have to that thing that comes our way, and these things, as we entrepreneurs call them, are opportunities. So I want to tell you about these six mindsets, the first one, I call "Yes, we can." Now, B-school strategy 101 says the following: What we're supposed to do, in a corporation, is stick to our knitting. We need to know what we're really good at – we call them core competencies – and we need to build on them and invest in them and nurture them and make them stronger. And if somebody comes along and says, "Can you do something different, that's outside of that?" What are we supposed to say? "No, I'm sorry, we don't do that here." Well... A Brazilian entrepreneur by the name of Arnold Correia built a fantastic business that today is called Atmo Digital, by ignoring those rules. He actually reinvented his company twice, to become a leading provider of event management and production services, when one of his clients said to him, "You know, I have 260 stores spread throughout Brazil," and Brazil is a big country, "and I'd like to be able to broadcast training and motivational events to the stores in real time. So, Arnold, can we put televisions in the training room in all my stores, and can we build a satellite link so that we can send all this great stuff to the stores?" So what did he say? He said, "Yes, we can do that," even though he knew nothing about satellite technology, and he had never worked outside of São Paulo, but he got it done. Then, a few years later, some other clients, one in particular, Walmart, said, "You know, it's great that we have all these televisions in the back room of the store, but wouldn't it be great if we put them out on the sales floor? Because then, we can run advertisements, so as a customer walks down the aisle looking for detergent, maybe there's an advertisement for Procter & Gamble detergent in that aisle?" And what did Arnold say to that request? "Yes, we can do that." Over the years, Arnold reinvented his business, essentially, four different times, by saying, when a client wants something new that falls outside of his core competencies, "Yes, we can." The second point that I want to tell you about, I call "Problem-first logic, not product-first logic." So in large corporations today, it's all about products. So when I was in the United States, my family and I used Tide, for many years, to wash our clothes. And we laugh from time to time, because we can tell that the new brand manager has come along, because what happens, they change the product, don't they? They take the blue specks out of it and turn them green. And they call it "new and improved." Is that innovation, folks? I'm not sure. Coca-Cola, what's there? There was Classic Coke, and then, there was New Coke. That didn't do very well. Then, there was Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Vanilla Coke and Cherry Coke, and lots of Cokes. I don't think that's all that innovation is about. But for entrepreneurs, we don't focus on products, we focus on problems. A guy by the name of Jonathan Thorne developed a technology that did something very useful. This instrument that you see in front of you is called surgical forceps. It's the instrument that virtually every surgeon, of every medical specialty, uses to do their work. But there's a problem with these surgical forceps – they stick to human tissue. So imagine you're having cosmetic surgery, and the cosmetic surgeon is doing the final touches, but the tissue sticks to the forceps. Maybe it's not going to look quite as good as it was supposed to look. And maybe the cosmetic surgeon is going to get a little frustrated, and it's going to take longer to do this work. And John said, "You know, this is a problem I think I can solve," with a new silver-nickel alloy that he developed. It turns out the business didn't grow very quickly, by focusing on cosmetic surgeons. So he said, "I wonder if there's another surgical specialty that has a bigger problem that I can solve," and he discovered one, and that is neurosurgeons. And neurosurgeons operate in two places on our bodies, in the spine and in the brain. So I hope you never have brain surgery, and I hope I never have it, but if they have to remove a small tumor, I hope the forceps don't stick to some other tissue, because I want to keep all my brain cells, don't I? John Thorne built a fantastic business, and he sold it a few years later to Stryker. Stryker is very happy, and John and his investors are very happy too. Why? Because John focused on solving problems and not on thinking about products. The next point, I call "Think narrowly, not broadly." Like John Thorne, an entrepreneur I'll tell you about focused on a problem but thought very narrowly about the target market. But corporate wisdom doesn't want narrow target markets, it wants big target markets, doesn't it? Because you have to move the needle. Why would a big company bother with something small? Like John Thorne and Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, when they founded Nike, a company we all know very well today, they identified a problem, but it was a problem that a very narrow target market faced. Phil Knight was a runner, a distance runner, and he could run for almost four minutes, and Bill Bowerman was his track coach. And there was a problem with their shoes, because running shoes, back in those days, were really made for runners. And when runners train, they run around the track. It's a nice, smooth track. But distance runners don't run around tracks. Where do they run? On cross-country trails and dirt roads, and they're always stepping on sticks and rocks, and they get shin splints. And they run mile after mile after mile, and they get shin splints. Well, Knight and Bowerman said, "We need better shoes, shoes made specifically for distance runners, and especially elite distance runners, who train really hard. So we're going to build a better shoe that has better lateral stability and a wider footbed. And it'll have more cushioning, to protect from these shin splints – and by the way, if it's a little bit lighter, a few ounces lighter, multiplied by all the steps in running a mile, or two miles, or a marathon, it's going to make race times faster too." So we know what happened with Nike, don't we? Once they developed the skills to design shoes specifically for a target market, a narrow market, and once they learned to import those shoes from Asia, and once they learned to convince athletes to adopt those shoes, what did they do? Well, John McEnroe in tennis and Michael Jordan in basketball came along next, and we know what the story is with Nike today. It's the global leader in athletic footwear and much more. Well, the next question – "Beg, borrow, but please, please don't steal." In B-school finance, we teach our students how to analyze whether a venture is worthwhile or not. So you figure out how much investment you have to make, and then you figure out what the cash flow is going to be, going forward, year after year, for five years, or 10 years or whatever. Then you ask yourself, "Well, is the return on this investment sufficient?" And if the ROI is good, you do the venture. That's the idea. But for Tristram Mayhew, and Rebecca Mayhew, his wife, who built a fantastic business in the UK, called Go Ape, a treetop adventure company, they didn't think that way at all. They said, "We want to build a treetop adventure company, here in the UK." They saw one in France, they liked it, on vacation. "So where can we get some trees?" Well... Who has trees in the UK? It turns out the UK Forestry Commission has trees in the UK, lots of them, in all these Forestry Commission sites, and the Forestry Commission was very interested in increasing its visitor numbers. Well, what's a better way to increase their visitor numbers than to have a Go Ape treetop adventure course on their land? So what Tris and Bec basically did was go to the Forestry Commission and say, "Look, if you give us the opportunity to build five of them and show you that it works, then we'd like to have an exclusive for the rest, for 25 years." The deal was done. There are now over 30 Go Ape adventure sites throughout the UK, and there's a whole bunch of them in the United States, and how did that happen? Because they borrowed most of the assets that they needed. They borrowed the trees, they borrowed the loos, they borrowed the parking lots, all those things. All they had to do was put their equipment on the trees. Pretty cool. Now, entrepreneurs and permission are sort of like oil and water. If you're an entrepreneur, you kind of know that, don't you? But in a large corporation today, if you want to get something new done, something entrepreneurial, something maybe a little bit different than usual, you have to run it by the lawyers first. Because there are so many regulations everywhere, and you don't want to do something that might get a senior executive thrown in jail. So it's really hard to get a "yes" answer to do something new and innovative, and it takes a long time. But it's really easy to get a "no." But for entrepreneurs, like Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, who founded Uber, do you think it was wise for them to ask permission from the regulators in San Francisco? "Can we start a taxi company without any taxis?" No, probably not, right? Because, if they had asked, what do you think the regulators would have said? "No way to do that. That's going to threaten the existing taxi industry." So entrepreneurs don't ask permission, they just go ahead and do it. Now, I'm not condoning many of the things that Uber did, throughout its journey, many of which are unethical, and some of which, arguably, illegal. But the entrepreneurial principle is just to go ahead and do it, when the regulations are perhaps vague or they haven't thought about what can be done today, digitally, then you go ahead and do it. Well, I want to conclude with four questions for you. Question number one: Which of these mindsets are embodied in you today – maybe one or two of them already? Question number two: Which of the others can you learn? Are these learnable? I think they are. Question number three: Can you teach them to someone you work with, who has some challenges that these mindsets might help them with? And most importantly today: Is there a challenge that you are facing today that one of these mindsets, or two of them, might help you break through the barriers that you're facing with that challenge? Well, here we go. Six unconventional rule-breaking mindsets that can help anyone, maybe you, change the world.