Innovation and business success almost always involve taking risk. But risk is, quite frankly, risky, and everyone handles it so differently. How do we know when to act on our new idea or to procrastinate and wait it out? On top of that, how do we create new ideas or new ventures and how do we unlock our creativity and sustain our originality? Tyler Meuwissen, of Xenium HR, returns to join Brandon Laws in a discussion of the book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant and what it means to be an Original.

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MP3 File | Run Time: 21:29
 

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Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business Podcast, this is your host, Brandon Laws. Today I’m with Tyler Meuwissen, he is back with me for another book club discussion.
Tyler: Yes!
Brandon: Good to have you back Tyler.
Tyler: Good to be back!
Brandon: So every time we read a book at the Xenium Book Club—if you haven’t been a loyal listener like a lot of you have—go back and listen to some of those podcasts and read our reviews on the books. We basically get together and there’s anywhere between 10 and 20 of us that have a discussion on these books that we read and this time we read a book called Originals and it’s by an author named Adam Grant. It’s about – what do you say? About 250 pages or so?
Meuwissen, Tyler - circleTyler: Yeah, it’s about 250.
Brandon: But it’s a dense book.
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: It has a lot of data, a lot of stories.
Tyler: Yeah, a lot of stories, which is nice.
Brandon: This is the kind of book where there’s not a lot of subheadings and things like that where you have some breaks in between. It’s a deep read.
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: If you’re going to sum it up in kind of a quick little synopsis for somebody who doesn’t know what this book is all about, I mean, the title is pretty intuitive, but what is this book about?
Tyler: I kind of mentioned this earlier, but I always think back to the Apple motto, “Think differently.” It summed it up pretty much perfect for me—thinking outside the box, thinking differently from others and not being privy to that group think. Those are the innovators. Those are the ones that have these creative ideas that can change the world, so to speak. So I think being creative and thinking outside the norm and the status quo.
Brandon: In the book, Adam Grant talked a lot about taking risks and how we a lot of times associate innovative, creative thinkers like the Steve Jobs’ in the world or Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Gates, Gandhi, people who take radical risks in their lives. And he kind of makes the case that some people like that do and they’re very well-known for it. But then on the other side of it some people are original thinkers but they take minimal risks. He gave the example of Warby Parker, the glasses company, online shopping basically. He talked about how he had a chance to invest in this company. Talk a little bit about that because – didn’t you find it interesting?
Tyler: Yeah. So I mean obviously there’s one glasses giant. I can’t remember – like Luxottica or whatever. It was a glasses company that cornered the market on glasses and they were so expensive to buy and these students were like – you know, we have these glasses that are so old and being held together by paper clips and they’re like there has got to be a better way, you can’t pay this exorbitant amount of money for glasses. They should be cheaper.
So they came up with this idea to sell them online for a lower cost and see if it would gain some traction, which it did. People wanted that convenience and wanted to be able to purchase a low cost option for glasses and not worry about paying 500 bucks for the glasses repair.
Brandon-iconBrandon: Yeah, but the interesting thing is that Adam Grant had a chance to invest in this company. But he was concerned that the founders of the company weren’t fully – I mean they’re fully committed in the sense that they love their idea. They wanted to see it through. But they were all still either in school or had other jobs and this is sort of a side project. So they weren’t like fully committed. So as an investor, it scared him a little bit.
Tyler: Yeah. And rightly so. I mean if you see something and you feel like oh, maybe they’re not as mature in this process as we would like, taking that risk and seeing if their idea is original, if their idea is a way to break into a market that you wouldn’t normally think to associate with that.
Brandon: So that’s a miss on the author’s part. But he gives tons of examples of other misses as well. Both on the side where they thought it was such an original idea and then it failed and one where it’s like you just passed up. I have two examples for you. So Steve Jobs wanted to invest $63 million in Segway which is the – I don’t know how to describe exactly.
Tyler: Motorized scooter?
Brandon: Motorized scooter. Yeah, like it balances perfectly on two wheels but as we know is a big flop and I think it was more of like a transportation issue. The sidewalks aren’t conducive to those devices. But Steve Jobs, one of the best thinkers of our time, wanted to invest a lot of money and he was almost all in on it and I can’t remember what ended up happening with that or if he backed out or if other people didn’t want to invest in it.
Tyler: I think the investors were kind of all over the place.
Brandon: Yeah. So that was the example where Steve Jobs had a gut instinct that this was going to be the next big thing, and he was wrong. The other story that resonated with me was on the other side of the spectrum. NBC executives at the time Seinfeld was being developed into a pilot and had like an order of four episodes, it tested so poorly with focus groups. I think they were ready to pull the plug. It sounded like it was so different. That it was boring. It was a show about nothing. But it’s so different and it’s punchy and it’s funny the entire time. But focus groups didn’t see it that way. So it’s funny how you can go through so much analysis and focus and still get these wrong.
Tyler: Yeah. It’s interesting too because I think it goes to the whole question of do you bet on that idea or do you bet on the people that have the idea? It’s kind of like with Adam Grant not taking his chance to invest in Warby Parker. Maybe he thought that This idea is good, but I’m just not willing to bet on you guys yet or invest on you guys yet. And same thing with the NBC executives on Seinfeld. This relatively unknown comedian had this idea for a show about nothing. Do we bet on this no-name comedian starting like a revolutionary cultural phenomenon? To take those calculated risks you weigh the pros and cons and see which one would be best. But it also kind of goes back to Do I bet on this person?
Tyler & Brandon-5Brandon: I think you’re so right about that. There was another story that was very much like that where this CIA analyst – I don’t remember how long ago this was, it sounds like it was pre-computer or when computers started coming out. But the information exchange between agents and analysts was so fragmented and she saw an opportunity to streamline it either through like a company intranet or something like that. Like a social network to share information because they would have these cases that would drag out forever whereas if somebody always had access to the right information, then it would probably be streamlined and the cases would be solved faster.
So what ended up happening in the story was that she was at such a low level that she was so harsh about bringing her fresh, original ideas to the table that people thought she was crazy. People didn’t take her seriously because your point about investing in the person, well, she had no credibility at this point. She was so new in her career, an unknown. But she decided after her ideas weren’t taking hold to sort of stay silent on it until she worked up through the ranks and she might have become like a director at some point. Then she brought the idea up subtly and it caught hold.
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: So your point, I think, is right especially in this story. If you don’t have credibility your original ideas may seem out of control or far-reaching or off the wall. If you’re new in your career or you just don’t have credibility, they will seem crazy.
Tyler: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s true. It’s very true. I think that you have to build that up. You have to have that kind of – not necessarily respect, but yeah, the credibility aspect. People will trust in you and believe in what you’re doing because you’re in a position of power, essentially.
Brandon: So how do you as a creative individual with unique ideas, how do you put forth ideas that don’t seem so crazy at first?
Tyler: I think it comes back to the culture of whatever organization you’re in, whatever company you’re in. If the culture is open and challenges people to put forth new ideas and creative ideas and think outside the box, then I think it becomes a little bit easier. Other than that, if you have a more restrictive culture, you might have to work your way up through the ranks and that can be a slow process. You’re not going to be making a lot of changes right away. But it’s the procrastination and the waiting for your time to come.
Brandon: Yeah, and that’s funny that you say that procrastination part. There was something in the book that I just – I saw it and I’m like, wow, I never thought about it that way. So I guess in ancient Egypt, procrastination had two meanings. One was laziness, which I think most of us probably associate with it. The other meant waiting for the right time.
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: I like that one better.
Tyler: I like that one.
Brandon: Because it doesn’t have a negative connotation to it. It means you’re just patiently waiting for the right time because if you think about – I always go back to college with this. Like, OK, you’ve got to write an essay or a paper. I waited until the last minute. I procrastinated but maybe I was waiting for the right inspiration. Maybe I was waiting for the fire to be lit underneath me and that sparked new ideas. I think that form of procrastination actually makes sense.
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: So you talk about the environment, that makes a lot of sense too.
Tyler: Yeah. I think when you have something that is going to be able to drive you – you know yourself better than anybody else and you know what you need to do if there’s a project that needs to be done or whatnot, if there’s a paper you need to write, when the timing is right for you personally to get that creative inspiration, that muse so to speak to do whatever you need to do on that project. So I think as long as you have that idea or that topic in mind throughout the process, I think waiting for the right time for that catalyst to start, I think that is fine. I like that better than the laziness aspect of it.
Brandon: The chapter about first movers was also interesting. It ties in nicely with the procrastination point and it was saying that being a first mover in business isn’t always the best or coming up with that first idea isn’t always the best because you’re going to probably hit some bumps in the road quite a bit. But if you’re second or third, you may have come in at a time where – the right time where you saw the issues and then you were able to iterate based on all those failures and make it even better.
how-to-say-anything-11Tyler: It was the Magnavox Odyssey in the book versus the Nintendo systems. So Magnavox came out, they were the first to market the video game console and then Nintendo came out. They refined what the negatives were and the positive as well of the console and then they made that system, that gaming system and it turned out to be a huge success. It’s still around today.
Brandon: Going back to just some of the more brilliant original minds, I thought that story about Martin Luther King Jr. was pretty interesting, the one about the I Have A Dream speech. Talk a little bit about that because we talked about that as a group and it’s fascinating how it actually came to fruition.
Tyler: Yeah. So Martin Luther King Jr. was going to be speaking in Washington, he was up all night, the night before, just dreading, trying to find the right words of the speech and at the time he was trying to think of what he needed to say and how he needed to say it. But he really wasn’t utilizing that time to be like, “Oh well, what am I going to be saying in the moment?” It comes more fluid. Then sure enough when he had given the speech, he had to be kind of reminded by – you know, now it’s the I Have A Dream part and it’s kind of more fluid. It’s kind of an off the cuff type of speech he gave. So it wasn’t really structured the way he wanted it to be, because I think it flowed a little bit better in the moment.
Brandon: Well, I think he probably was feeding off the energy of the crowd too so you could just see people getting pumped up about what he’s saying and he probably just wanted to keep building on that. So the speech he wrote and stayed up all night for wasn’t the same and I think when you’re talking about being creative and original, I think you sort of have to take it in the moment, don’t you?
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: I don’t think you can script your life and still be creative at the same time. It doesn’t seem that that’s how it works.
Tyler: I think creativity kind of blossoms from a lot of the things that are spontaneous and spur of the moment that you don’t really realize you can capture. I mean especially if you look at famous photographers. They can’t just say I’m going to go take a picture of something and have that be inspirational. It usually comes across to them the moment it happens and they’re able to capture that moment. So I think those are the creative photographers or artistic people as well. You know, they can’t just like, I’m going to go paint this perfect picture of this one day because I know what it’s going to be like. You have no idea what it’s going to be like, what it’s going to look like.
Brandon: We were actually talking about on the heels of the Martin Luther King I Have A Dream speech. You were talking about speech class and your experience with that. It’s like gosh, if you over-script, sometimes it just handicaps you a little bit because you have this plan in your mind and if you know it so well, you’re not going to veer off script whereas if in the moment, you were able to change course, you wouldn’t have the ability to do that.
Tyler: Yeah. I think the candid nature comes across a lot better to audiences too especially if you’re doing speeches. You want to be a little bit more interactive, a little bit friendlier and not that monotone, robotic, following the script and reading off of a paper. So with the speech class for instance, I would kind of go into a speech class knowing what I wanted to talk about but having some pieces of it that I can just kind of go off in the moment.
Kasey TED Talk-3Brandon: I posed the question about TED Talks, I’ve been so curious about if those are completely scripted by most of the people or if it’s just sort of like they know what they’re going to talk about. They have a timeframe and they’re just going to look at the clock as it’s ticking down and then they just kind of shoot from that.
I’m very curious because some of those are very good. Do they just know the subject matter so much to where they just wing it or do they literally know every word of the speech?
Tyler: Yeah, I think it might be a combination of both. But the way a lot of those TED Talk speakers are, they are very fluid in their approach and it almost seems like they just kind of go off in the moment and they can talk about the subject and they kind of utilize the audience more.
Brandon: Being in HR and supporting employers, we talk about company culture quite a bit. I think in this book, he framed up cultures of commitment in a way that I hadn’t really thought of before, but I could see some issues coming from it. So here’s what I got from it. You define your culture so much to where people probably think similarly. They like the same things. They like each other. You have values and belief systems that are very much aligned. And that’s a great thing.
But the big but is do you end up having any diverse ideas and experiences? Do you bring in people that are a little different than you and have contradicting ideas? Even if they’re wrong and totally off the cuff compared to what you’re normally used to thinking about. Are cultures of commitment and hiring people that are exactly like each other, is that a good thing or not?
Tyler: In my opinion, I don’t think it is. I think there are certain principles that your company and your company’s culture can be founded on and utilize, which are good. But I think you need that diversity. You need that difference of opinion to spark new ideas and creative ways to go about your business. I think you need to include that and not just kind of structure everybody to be the same way.
Brandon: I want to go further on this because I think as you have people that like each other and have deep relationships, if you don’t have a regular conflict in the organization and encourage conflict to happen, then you can have confirmation bias. You can have conformity. You can have group think, all those buzzwords. There’s one example in here that I thought was interesting. There’s an experiment where there was one line off to the side on a page, just a straight vertical line and that was like the test line. Then the other – I think there are three lines, level A, B and C. One of the lines matched up the test model line. So there were seven people in the experiment. The first four automatically chose the wrong one on purpose. That was by design, and then they wanted to see what the fifth, sixth and seventh person would do. They said 33 percent of the time, even though they knew the line was wrong, they conformed to what the first four people did out of fear that they would be called out or that they’re just not going to follow what everybody else already believes even though it was wrong.
They said they did the same experiment with these people solo and they virtually never got it wrong. So if that in itself does not tell you how dangerous the group think or social pressures can be, I don’t know what else can.
Tyler: I agree.
Brandon: We all feel it every once in a while.
November 2016 All Team-4Tyler: I completely agree. As a company, you got to have that value of openness and sincerity and speak honestly about certain things. I think that has kind of helped deter that group think. That can be detrimental to a company if everybody starts going one way and starts thinking the same way, no one is voicing a dissenting opinion.
Brandon: There was a section that he talked about dissenting opinions and how they can be good, meaning basically having somebody on the other side playing devil’s advocate or just having a different opinion and regardless if that person is right or wrong, it doesn’t really matter. The point is, it slows the process down. Where everybody might have said yes and moved along and went to the next thing, somebody with a different opinion might cause everybody to pause and say, Is this right? Is there a different way to do this? What’s the strategy? And even if it’s wrong, it opens up people’s minds because it gets you to think about the other side of what the possibilities are.
Tyler: I was reading something that – I can’t remember the company but in every meeting they have, they would have at least one person come into it being the dissenting opinion, being the opposite.
Brandon: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Tyler: So it allows you to kind of view the other side and how we can work with that opinion. Everybody is not going to be viewing the same thing all the time. So there’s always going to be difference of opinion. So I think having that dissenting opinion, even if it was just by design, it allows you to think more on what that side has going for it and what’s negative and positive to that side. So what values do you pull from that, the dissenting opinion?
Brandon: When I think about this book as a whole, what did I get from it? Like what is the message really? I mean to me it’s not about like, oh, we all need to be original thinkers and non-conformists and all that. I mean that’s – maybe that’s one sort of underlying theme.
Tyler: Sure.
Brandon: I think the bigger thing is how do you tease out the originality and how do we question our line of thinking.
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: I think there are things that we just kind of get through the motions or whether we’re influenced by certain people. We just don’t put ourselves around or in the frame of mind to just come up with original ideas or to act on them. So I think this book beautifully described the way in which you can become an original thinker, how others around you can become original thinkers and what that would look like. What did you kind of get from it?
The Originals-3Tyler: Kind of along similar lines to that. I think it’s developing yourself and working with your company as well to develop your employees in a way that they can be more open and more eager to share new ideas. I think a lot of people don’t like speaking up and voicing an opinion knowing that it may go against the grain of what everybody else might be thinking.
So I think if you culture that and nurture that, I think that’s more what I got out of the book. It’s cultivating yourself to be a little bit more open, a little bit more outgoing in the ideas or views you have regardless of if they’re dissenting or disagreeing opinions. But just be more open in general.
Brandon: So if you give this a star rating out of five, what do you give this?
Tyler: I thought about this a lot and I’m going to give it a four. I’m going to give it four stars. I think there are a lot of good things you can take from this book and a lot of things you can realize about yourself and about being original. I mean that’s the title of the book. So I liked it. I liked it.
Brandon: I also give it a four. I actually would have probably rated it higher if it’s a tad bit shorter.
Tyler: Yeah, I think it could be a little bit more concise.
Brandon: Well, good stuff Tyler. Thanks for joining the podcast today.
Tyler: Yeah.
Brandon: I appreciate.
Tyler: I had a great time.