Podcasts Archives - Sterling Marketing Group: Recent Episodes

View Details

Shayne Hughes, President of Learning as Leadership discusses the connection between personal mastery and leadership presence. What happens when leaders learn to step away from their aggressive egos, and eliminate workplace politics? We will explore how CEOs and C-suite executives contribute to office turf wars and how they can move from reactive feelings in times of crisis and stress to being their authentic selves.

Listen to the podcast on iTunesThe following is an edited transcript of this podcast. Since how we talk and how write is often very different, this transcript may contain uses of the English language (including grammar) that are not 100% correct. We are counting on your understanding in advance.

Personal Mastery and Leadership with Shayne HughesKaren Leland Branding Expert: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me today. My guest is Shayne Hughes. He is the president of Learning as Leadership. We are going to talk today about personal mastery and leadership. Shayne, thank you so much for joining me today.
It is my pleasure.
I am really happy that you could be here. I just wanted to start by asking you straightforwardly how you define personal mastery.
Personal mastery is our ability in any given moment, particularly in moments of stress, conflict, or challenge, to show up and respond with our best selves, with our most creative and flexible capacity and strengths. What tends to happen in moments of crisis or challenge is that we often feel our success threatened in some way, or we feel threatened by the conflict with the other person. These situations tend to bring out our coping strategies, our reactive behaviors. In fact, in the moment when we most need our strengths and intuitions, we tend to show up with fight and flight behaviors or more inflexible responses. We tend to be suboptimal the moment we need to be optimal. Personal mastery is learning to break out of that paradigm.
It is interesting because a lot of work I do is about branding and personal branding. I work with a lot of CEOs and executives. It’s interesting because I find that people often go away from their authentic brand in those moments of stress. Their true, authentic brands tend to flip into the background when they get into that reactive space, and they don’t have personal mastery skills yet.
Yes, I connect with that. What I see for myself, and also for a lot of clients, is that our authentic brand is about bringing in our true selves, our thoughts, perspectives, and our feelings, to bear in a situation, to show up in an open-hearted and straightforward way, which is the key to personal mastery. Moments of conflict and threat often trigger it. From our perspective, we often talk about how it triggers our ego and our preoccupation of our self-worth, and one of the ways in which we most often get it triggered is around what other people are thinking. Are they being critical of me? They are judging me. They are better than me. They are trying to hurt me. They have an agenda. We have all sorts of thoughts in our minds that make other people feel like a threat to us.
In that moment we are more liable to want to try to protect our image in their eyes and our eyes. So we will do or not do certain things in order to manage the relationship and the other person’s view of us. Those behaviors tend not to be our most authentic selves because when we don’t feel safe, one thing that does not feel okay to do is be authentic. Yet when we don’t feel safe, often, we most need our most authentic selves. Generally speaking if I am not feeling safe with you in an interaction, it’s probably because you are not also feeling safe with me. The question is: Who is going to step forward first?

Staying true to our authentic selves when triggered by thoughts of, “Are they judging me? Am I good enough?” etc is part of personal mastery.That’s interesting, because I think about some of the people that I deal with like executives, and when they feel threatened, it is like they disappear. Something else shows up. It’s like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Someone else shows up in their place. If they do that often enough, what happens is that people start to view them in an untrustworthy way because they are inconsistent. They do not know who’s going to show up. They are often seen as having an inconsistent brand or inauthentic brand because they don’t show up in a consistent way that shows they have great personal mastery of their reactive emotions. You never know how they are going to react. I do not know if you see that a lot in the work that you do because you deal mostly with senior executives and leaders of corporations, yes?
Yes. Broadly speaking, in those moments of conflict, people tend to either withdraw and shut down or to get aggressive and attack. Some people do a little bit of both. Most usually have a dominant response. One of the things that tend to happen that I see is that over time, other people tend to summarize us in their mind as to whatever that behavior is. If I come across as abrasive and aggressive, personally I have an anger problem that I worked on a lot in the past, so if I get angry once or twice, that’s enough. The next time I raise my voice, the other person thinks, “Here he comes again.” People tend to be on the lookout for that. Or if I withdraw but I am still judging you in my mind, I think people sense that. That tends to trigger their own feelings of being judged or not feeling safe, so they get guarded with us. That’s when communication breaks down, and we tend to begin seeing each other in one-dimensional ways. Shayne is this way. Karen is that way.
That’s really well said. In that whole issue of personal mastery, what I hear you saying is that personal mastery is learning to catch that reactiveness before it happens. So that you can make a choice about the way you want to be rather than that default way of being. Would that been an accurate way to say it?
Yes, absolutely. In other words, each of us has our own coping strategies that have developed throughout the course of our lives. When we get down to the root of them, because we are emotionally charged, it feels so personal. To be able to notice that in a moment and realize, “Oh, it’s like my rejection hot button coming up or my feeling-criticized hot button coming up.” We then see that we’re going in our automatic behavior; to catch it in a moment and to re-center is a crucial skill.
Personal mastery also is interwoven in leadership at a broad level, because when you are a senior executive, for example, how you behave has a huge impact on culture and the context around you, the atmosphere that you’re creating. These reactive behaviors tend to ricochet off each other like a pinball machine. If I, as a leader, am able to notice that in a moment, come back, and show up differently, I’ll be able to set a tone for a more functional interaction. If I let myself get hijacked, especially if I’m in a position of authority where I have consequential influence over someone on my team in terms of their performance review or their feeling of safety with their job, there can belong a shadow to those reactions. We tend to underestimate the negative ripple effects when we’re not attuned to those moments.
I really love the way you’ve said it. I’ve never heard it said that way. You said there is a context around you? That’s a great way of saying it. What’s fascinating about that in a lot of ways, what people’s personal brands really are, especially when you’re a leader at work, even if people don’t say this, is the way people experience the context they are in when they’re around you. I’ve never quite heard it put like that; that’s a really brilliant way to say it.
We tend to see context, because our culture is somewhat external, like a static thing. “My organizational culture is like this,” and it’s much more malleable. It’s constantly being created and re-created. In fact, how I show up really has an enormous impact on the atmosphere and on the context. Either I’m leading it to the direction of more transparency and openness, or often in my reactive behaviors, I’m creating an atmosphere of tension, threat, or feeling judged. We started at the outset by saying that personal mastery is learning to notice what happens when I feel threatened, and this pinball machine that I was talking about is this: When I act in a way that’s defensive and you feel threatened, you respond, and over time you can create an organizational culture that is fairly dysfunctional, and people feel they’re under siege.
It becomes the pattern of you and the person as well.
Absolutely.
A lot of your work focuses on dealing with the ego and its impact. What can you say when talking about the ego and your company? What specifically are you referring to? What do you think that impact is on the executives and leaders? On how they’re seen and what they see in other people?
We define the ego, because it’s a commonly used word, in a very specific way, which is the constant preoccupation with our self-worth.
No one listening has that problem, including you and I!
The way to recognize the experience that I’m talking about is to recognize the voice that’s in the back of your mind. It’s constantly chattering about, “Was that smart? Was that intelligent or insightful? Are they criticizing me?” or “That was stupid.” The conversation goes on; it’s a constant chatter. We judge a lot, or say, “I’m my own worst critic.” This is the constant voice of our ego evaluating: I am good or bad, I have succeeded or failed, I am better or inferior to. That preoccupation can become background static, and many people can be overwhelmed by the dominant noise in their brains. That really takes up lot of their creative space and a lot of their emotional energy. So this ego and the noise in our head, they influence our perception and generate emotions, stress feelings, and all of those drive behaviors.
The problem is our ego directs all our behavior, a lot more than what we realize, and it directs our behavior a lot more than our actual most cherished goals. Personal mastery is quieting this ego. One example that I can give is a CEO that I knew. First thing he realized was that one of his very precious goals as a CEO was to unleash the potential of his team. He really wanted to mentor and grow people and help people be their fullest selves. He identified, though, that one of the ways which he evaluated his worth, which was around his intelligence. . That looks something like managing how smart he was in his mind and evaluating, “Am I smarter? Was that a better idea?”

Personal mastery is quieting the ego and the voice in the back of the mind that second guesses all actions and statements.You mean like having to be the smartest person in the room? That sort of a pattern?
Exactly. One of the things he realized was that, in a very unconscious way, he always had to have the very best ideas and ended up not welcoming the input of his team. Not really being able to question in the moment whether his idea or someone else’s idea was the best idea was highlighted as a blind spot for him.
The challenge of this, Karen, was that we all know the correct behavior: to be open, to be curious and not hung up on our idea, and to welcome others’ input. So it’s not a question of do we know what it means to show up in our best way. It’s that if it happens, at some point, that my feelings of worth around my intelligence get triggered, and all of a sudden my goal in that moment becomes to prove my intelligence and not to help my team formulate the best idea even if I look inferior, getting in the survival state in that.
Personal mastery can be, on the one hand, very overwhelming. Why I really love this work and believe in it so much is because we all have a much deeper part of ourselves. We all have this desire to contribute to something larger, to feel connected to other people; to feel like we belong to an effort that really matters to us. This is connected to our sense of purpose. In our modern world, where we are evaluated around our strengths, our performance, and our progression in our career, how are we compared to our MBA cohort back at school? We have this obsession with our self-worth that disconnects us from the “why” and our desire to create things with others. So when we can extract the ego in that way, it’s like creating a sense of inspiration and collaboration for teams and organizations.
It somehow links to the part that I was going to ask you; so, being driven by ego has sort of a negative impact. What’s the alternative?
Sometimes it’s interesting that people say, “Oh, I want people with strong egos. They get things done and drive things forward.” While people with strong egos, in the short term, can sometimes look like they’re successful, in the long term and in a context of team and organization, what happens is that we have a lot of internal jostling, competition, and perceived agendas, because there is always a background tension of “Is this person trying to one-up me?” And so, in organization, what happens is they try to defend their worth and success first, they do their job second, and they worry about the organization’s mission third. And that can actually be reversed.
That’s a great way to say it. I run across people, not frequently, but I do run across people who say, “Look, my brand is that I am just tough.” I actually had a CEO of a fairly large company say to me the other day, “I will settle for nothing less than totally annihilating the competition through complete humiliation.” I sort of didn’t know what to say to that guy, because that’s the opposite of how I think about things in general. I was trying to talk to him about it, and he was so proud that that was his brand and that’s how people knew him. It was his whole orientation around himself.
I don’t see it very often, but I do see it, and I’m sure you must see it in what you do. I guess if someone has spent their whole life doing that and it’s “worked for them,” they are successful, they have money, what’s the motivation for them not to be that way?
This is what we usually hear from people: “This has been my success formula. I drive hard and tend to leave dead bodies in my wake, but I get it done. And if you want me to change that, you’re asking me to give up my success formula and I will lose my edge.” If I can say something blasphemous, I think that’s a fallacy, that we’re actually less successful than we could otherwise be, but we don’t realize that because we are not very connected to the consequences of these behaviors. So people who operate with that mindset; they never feel satisfied on the inside. It doesn’t matter how much success they get, there will always be something missing in them, like there’s always one more thing that they have to do. Maybe it has caused them to show up in their personal life in ways that are dissatisfying.
If you scratch beneath the surface in their organizations, people may be really working very hard, feeling driven and maybe getting a lot of things done, but there’s no inspiration there. Ultimately, in organizations that are really inspired by what they’re doing, I’ll take over the organization that is working very hard every time because the discretionary effort really comes from caring, from really feeling in the core that something really matters. I often hear leaders in organizations who come to our program at the onset, “I want to be the best leader that I could be,” or, “I want to be the best in class in our industry,” or, “I want to be the organization that people envy or people want to be a part of.” That’s a manifestation of a collective obsession that we all have — being the best. But in fact, the best is something that’s all about trying to measure myself over other people.
So it’s a constant competition paradigm. There’s something more than that; personal mastery actually creates even greater performance — and that’s when we don’t worry about whether or not we’re the best. What we’re really connected to is to what we’re doing. Why does it matter? What are we trying to create? We’re creating a culture where people aren’t worried about where they are in the pecking order or who is better than whom. We are creating a context in a culture where we are constantly talking about what we’re doing, why we care about what we’re doing — that’s when you get the whole person. When you get the whole person across an organization, you create something completely different in terms of performance.
What I get from the perspective of the brand of an organization, or of an individual, the brand isn’t just one thing. It’s not some sort of one-dimensional thing. It’s a very rich, complex, multi-faceted dimension. When somebody is really in that place, there’re all those dimensions to it. People are saying that Steve Jobs had a very strong brand. Well, he really did have a strong brand; he had a strong public brand. But it’s very one-dimensional. He was seen, not to take anything away from him, because he was a genius, but a lot of his workers describe him the same way: that’s very one-dimensional. There’re not a lot of complexities about how they talked about him. They talked about him with respect and admiration, but very one-note. There are no people who talked about him with a much richer, deeper, almost in an affectionate way because they brought their whole person to it.

There’s nothing wrong with a strong ego, so long as the person has personal mastery over it and knows how to quiet it when needed.We have a mutual friend, Joel Kimmel, who was also interviewed in this podcast. He said that he woke up from a dream and he was thinking, “What would my life be like if I stopped blaming myself or anyone else for anything?” And then he said that this became his practice. He was going to stop blaming himself or anyone else for anything. Not that he was going to stop taking responsibility or holding people accountable, but actually stop “blaming people” and himself for anything. Which, as he has said to me, it’s a practice—he’s not always successful at it.
His wife, Judy, and I were actually having lunch a year after this and Judy said, “I think I’m going to try that,” and I said, “Me too.” That has actually proven to be so unbelievably rewarding and unbelievably hard. There’s a part of us where there is that survival instinct. It’s something that kicks in and it’s something to fight against, to do with what you’re talking about. Is this what you call personal mastery? Personal mastery is like a muscle that you exercise. It takes an enormous amount of rigor to be able to catch yourself just before you go into whatever your response is and stop, go for some of the bigger and higher things that we’re talking about. So what’s your take on that?
A couple of thoughts. One, I find it helpful to remember that blame is really a reaction of our ego, and sometimes we’re blaming other people and sometimes we’re blaming ourselves. Typically in the situation where there’s a lot of blame and frustration going on, you’ll notice that we go back and forth, almost from one second to the next, where we ask, whose fault is this? We get caught up in each thought of blame as if it were true and valid, when in fact, it’s just a reaction. The whole cycle is just a reaction, and we get caught up in the moment. It’s like I’m in the wrong paradigm in the moment. It’s completely irrelevant, most of what I’m thinking. For those who have had the situation where they were really worked up, or where they often fall to a blame cycle, you see it’s really hard to get out of it. It’s kind of what Joel was pointing to: “If I didn’t spend my time blaming myself or others, what would my life be like?”
I think that part of this is, you’d probably gain back 75 percent of your mental energy. I’m not exaggerating. There can be almost nothing else going on for us — that’s the one thing. I really feel that’s big, and I think about being right in the same way. I’m just not interested in trying to be right about things because in those moments, I’m the one who’s agitated, the one poisoning myself, the one who’s not thinking about what I want to create in my life right now. Because that’s my present moment, and that’s precious. I don’t want to give that away. Being right in blame is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies; it doesn’t work.
The second thing I want to mention, though, you mention that it’s something that we need to fight against, and I think I would come back to that work and challenge how we think about it because I also relate to what you’re saying, when I’m blaming, or judging, and I try to stop myself from doing it. It’s like trying to stop a wave from the ocean and standing in front of a train and slowing it down. It’s very hard to do, and so you feel like it’s a big fight. I think that’s because that’s not where our leverage is.
Just before this phone call, I also had a phone conversation with someone. I hung up, and there’s this spin going in the back of my mind: self-blame and resentment toward the person. I had stuff going on about other people. So I tell myself, “Oh, I’m in this spin, so what am I going to do about it?” The first thing to do is I shut it down, go to my device, and ignore it. I said to myself, “Wait, what I am feeling here?” When I followed the thread back, that blame cycle always starts in a very specific moment; there’s always a before and an after.
We call that moment a pinch, an emotional pinch, like someone has pinched your arm. Something happens and I have that first burst of hormonal response. The blame then is what follows. That moment was the key to recognize, as it occurs in particular, when something about my self-worth has being triggered. If I can go back and learn to recognize what in my ego has gotten set off there, and extract that out of the situation, it deflates 85 percent of the tension. So in the example I have given you this morning, I realized that something happened, that that person had said something. I didn’t notice it until I went back. These things are like mosquitoes that zoom by your ear.
But they take a micro-second.
They do, and they’re gone. I realized in tracing back to the moment where my discomfort first happened, this person said something, and I had a sense of, “Oh, I’m not making progress here, and I’m failing.” It was my ego threat. “I’m failing right now, and there are other people outside that are going to judge me.” All of a sudden, it was there and gone in an instant, when I began behaving differently during the call and trying to be more convincing as opposed to me drawing the other person out.
You mean more convincing as the reaction to that feeling you had?
I was trying to convince the person to go to my direction as opposed to drawing out some questions like, “What are you trying to say? What do you mean? What’s going on?” The right decision is to ask a question in that moment and not try to convince, but I lost that because I had a pinch where my sense of competence, success, and fear of being judged and failing came out. I was able to go back and recognize, “Ah, right. I got it.” After that, I was off track. So, what’s my goal? Because my goal here is not around my self-worth. My goal goes around what I want to be creating in the world and what I want to be creating with this person. Coming back to that, all the blame evaporates like a San Francisco mist on a hot sunny day. All is just gone and you can see clearly again.
So what you’re saying is that’s where the leverage is, not in the fighting against it but in identifying where that ego pinch happens and going to what the bigger goal is.
Exactly, because when we identify the ego threat, with practice, we can learn to have distance from it. Instead of it being a runaway freight train, it’s gone. What remains is, “What do I want?” and so there’s no fight. Because our natural state, Karen, is to be connected with what we want to create, our sense of purpose, our desire to connect with other people. It’s just that when we’re triggered, we lose all of that…but it comes back right away.
I have done your personal mastery programs for years, and I wouldn’t give myself a gold star for this; however, I would say that certainly I notice there’s a great percentage of time that something will happen and I’ll tell myself, “Karen, that is just your ego in the way you’re talking. It’s just your image. You’re just trying to manage your image; stop it.” So I notice that the ability to see it is far greater than it was before I started the work with you. Personal mastery makes the difference, in a way that you don’t take yourself so seriously. Do you know what I mean?
Absolutely. I think part of what you’re saying is that personal mastery is so subtle. Really, it’s a challenge to recognize it. What’s kind of counterintuitive about it is often, there’s a real feeling of threat that goes on. It’s not like, “Oh yeah, you’re in your ego and you should get over it.” Right now, if this person thinks, “I’m incompetent; they’re not going to respect me anymore,” It results in thinking, “I’m not going to be needed or wanted or be part of the team.” It’s almost like it’s a question of life and death.
It does. It feels like survival.
It really does. That’s why it can be very important. At the same time, if affects when we realize that the tempest that we’ve made of it is not really at stake. So when you say, “Oh, that’s just my ego, and I’m not going to take myself so seriously,” part of that is learning to recognize that there’s not much at stake.
No, not at all. The change is really fast once the swirl stops. The swirl makes it seem a lot more important than it actually really is in 99 percent of the cases.
Absolutely.
Can you talk about Learning as Leadership, your role there and what the company does to foster personal mastery?
So Learning as Leadership, we are really focused on helping leaders and organizations become more aware of how this ego dynamic we’ve been discussing plays out in our leadership and our organizational culture. One of the tragedies of workplace politics and turf wars is that nobody wants them, but we are all caught up in them and powerless about it. What we think is it’s somebody else; it feels like it’s the organization or it is the other person. Our goal is to help executives learn to recognize ways they’re inadvertently and involuntarily reacting and perpetuating this and become much more comfortable in self-diagnosing and talking about it transparently, creating a culture in their team where it becomes commonplace. After that, we dig deeper into an organization with some on-site programs to really help them bring transparency and this self-awareness to their entire culture. My role in Learning as Leadership is as the president, and my focus is on the development and the delivery of our executive programs and of direct client work that we do with large and small organizations.
So can you give your website where people can go and check your work out at?
It’s www.learnaslead.com. You can also put www.learningasleadsership.com. They all go to the same place.
You have a new book coming out on personal mastery and ego. Can you just talk a little bit about that?
Absolutely. We worked with a company called Encore Capital, which was in the financial services sector for about eight years, and the CEO came with his management team. Over the course of this time, we worked with the direct executive team and then with the top 150 leaders in the organization to really bring this level of awareness and more functional behavior to the company. They went through this incredible journey in terms of reinventing what their mission was, how they interact with their clients. During the recession of 2008 and 2009, about 90 percent of their industry went bankrupt. During that same time frame, their growth was 300 percent. They were able to stand up to a subsidiary in India that became number fourteen on the great places to work in all of India. When most of their industry was trying to do the same strategy and nobody was making any money, they were able to extract the dysfunction so the people’s focus was on the work at hand. When he left we decided to work on a book together describing this journey.
We wanted to write a book that was a page-turner, that was engaging to read. I did not want to bore people with all of our concepts and case studies. What we have is our two voices interwoven. He tells the story as a first-time CEO, stepping into this world in a time of intense challenge and all of the ups and downs that he went through in guiding the company. Each chapter has three sections from him and three sections from me where he tells part of his story and I comment on it and relate it to other aspects of our methodology or, more often, tendencies and broader issues that we tend to see in either individual development or in organizations. There is a back-and-forth to give an engaging story that is not a fable. It is a real-life story with real people, and all the results are actually what happened.
That’s an interesting way to do it. What’s the title?
I wish I knew.
Does it not have a title yet?
We have different working titles. The publishers have a whole titling process right now. Our working title is The Ego-Free Organization.
I like that title.
I like it too, but it has ups and downs. What I like about it is that we are trying to say, in everything that we have been talking about now, I can imagine someone going, “I have an organization where we can really eliminate the ego, and what we have instead is people’s creativity, collaboration, and sense of purpose. Sky’s the limit.” I want that, right? But I think, as I mentioned earlier, there are people who like the ego. Ego’s good, and that’s the people that get things done. Our concern is that it could be an initial turn-off because there are people who think that the ego is helpful. They don’t yet realize that the negative ripple effects are dramatic.

An uncontrolled ego can have dramatic negative ripple effects.Interesting. I have two more quick questions for you. I ask everyone these questions. So the first one is this: Who is someone in your life who had a negative impact on you, and what did you learn? Don’t say the person’s name!
There is someone who had an influence on me that was very negative, and a lot of it came through how they communicated their expectations and their perceptions. It came across as judgmental and dismissive. There was often anger mixed in with it. I internalized that in a toxic way. When I think about how I mentor other people, how I say the difficult message, whether it is to someone in one of our programs, a client, someone in my team, and I practice it every day with my children, honestly, it is searching and learning to say the message in a direct and blunt way with love.
That’s great.
It’s a challenge because I have a tendency, like many of us do, that I hold back and not say it because I don’t want to hurt their feelings or I don’t want them to not like me. At some point it builds up and comes out with an abrasive edge, and the person will mostly hear that I am judging them, and they are not really hearing the message. It’s really a challenge for us because if we are delivering a difficult message, someone right away will bring their own self-judgment, right? And their own ego triggers. I have to find a way to be clear and yet emotionally present in connecting with my intention for them, so that I can help them hear the message not only behind my dysfunctions but behind their effectiveness. There are two barriers for us to go through.
Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about personal mastery.
My guest has been Shayne Hughes, the president of Learning as Leadership.

Important Links* Learning as Leadership

About Shayne Hughes – President of Learning as LeadershipShayne is President and Culture Change Partner at LaL. Shayne’s expertise in creating cultures of open communication and collaboration has lead to substantial improvements in organizational and personal performance for such clients as Fairchild Semiconductor, NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, Shell Oil, and Encore Capital. He has also taught leadership at the University of California Haas School of Business, the University of Michigan’s Executive MBA Program and the Darden School of Business. He was recognized in 2009 as one of the Forty Under 40 most remarkable up-and-coming leaders in Northern California. Shayne co-authored an article on “Ecosystem Leadership” in Harvard’s Du Bois Review, was profiled in Psychology Today, and has been published in Diversity Executive Magazine, Forbes.com and the Huffington Post. When the Running Began: A Young Man’s Journey to Show Up in Life is his 2015 memoir exploring how the pains of his past became infused with the coping strategies of his ego, and what it took to grow beyond it.

Listen | Download | ViewHear the episode of the Branding Blowout Podcast by using the player above OR Click to Download any Episode
This article is copyrighted by Karen Leland and cannot be reprinted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of Karen Leland.
Karen Leland is President of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding and marketing strategy and implementation firm. She works with individuals, businesses and teams to enhance their business and personal brands. Her clients include LinkedIn, American Express, Apple, Marriott Hotels and others. Her ninth book, The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand, is due out from Entrepreneur Press in May of 2016.

The post Personal Mastery and Leadership with Shayne Hughes appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

If you look at the greatest innovations of this world, it may surprise you to find deviant personalities and quirky innovators behind them. Melissa Schilling, Professor of Innovation and Strategy at New York University’s Stern School of Business, was inspired to do a multiple case study on serial breakthrough innovators. She didn’t actually try to set out and find unusual or quirky people to study, but ended up being pretty surprised that almost uniformly, they all had this strange social awkwardness or social detachment, a sense of separateness like they didn’t belong or they didn’t feel connected to the social world. One interesting truth is that none of the innovators she studied placed a high priority on money. The more she studied them and the more she connected what she knew about them up to what we knew about innovation and creativity, it all started coming together that this separation is actually a big part of what enabled them to break norms, to challenge conventional wisdom, and to pursue projects even in the face of criticism.Listen to the podcast on iTunesWhy Quirky Wins the DayMy guest is Melissa A. Schilling. She is a professor of management at New York University Stern School of Business. She has a new book called Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World. Melissa, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.

Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the WorldI’m excited because your new book, Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World has come out. That’s a heck of a title.
It’s a mouthful. I have to think about it every time I say it.
You’re also a professor of innovation and strategy at New York University Stern School of Business. Is being at the school and teaching what inspired you to write the book?
Yeah. It was about 2010 when this all started. With the deteriorating health of Steve Jobs, I had a lot of students coming up to me and saying, “What’s going to happen? How much of the innovation is due to Steve Jobs himself? How much of it’s in the organization? Can it be handed down to a successor? How can I be like Steve Jobs?” Initially, I started studying just Steve Jobs. I made it a full-time preoccupation to read absolutely everything that had been written about him, to watch all the videos, read all the interview scripts, until I felt like I knew him. That’s when I realized he looked an awful lot like another innovator that I had already written a case about, which is Dean Kamen. That’s what inspired me to do a multiple case study on serial breakthrough innovators.
The title of the podcast is The Power of Quirky. It’s so interesting that you chose to talk about these people as quirky because when we see these innovators, they’re not usually these straight-laced guys. There seems to be something a little bit off-path about them. Has that been your experience?
Absolutely. I wasn’t looking for that. When I started this project, I didn’t set out trying to find unusual or weird people to study, so I ended up being pretty surprised that almost uniformly. Benjamin Franklin is an exception, but of the people that I studied, they all had this strange social awkwardness or social detachment, a sense of separateness like they didn’t belong, or they didn’t feel connected to the social world. At first I couldn’t figure out why they would all have this trait and it seems like a very peculiar coincidence for them to all have it. The more I studied them and the more I connected what I knew about them up to what we knew about innovation and creativity, it all started coming together. I realized that the separateness is a big part of what enabled them to break with norms and to challenge conventional wisdom and to pursue projects even when other people said it was impossible or in the face of criticism.
When you say separateness, a lot of them are people that are married and have families and obviously have run businesses. Define separateness for us.
Separateness is this sense that maybe you feel detached from the social fabric around you or you feel like the rules don’t apply to you, that you’re somehow different or disconnected. Even the innovators that we’re married, if you take Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, their separateness came through very, very clearly. I have a quote from Thomas Edison’s wife where she says that Thomas Edison doesn’t have very many friends and he shuts himself off from the rest of the world, but that’s how it is for a man like him who has to do his inventions. She makes sure to bring his meals to him on time.
Chrisann Brennan, who was the mother of Steve Jobs’ child, commented that he was brilliant, and he could be charismatic, but he also had this incredible emotional woodenness and this apartness. Most people who knew Steve Jobs felt that detachment that he had. People look at Elon Musk, and if you don’t know him well, you might associate them with the Tony Stark character in the Iron Man movies and assume that he’s like a playboy, egomaniac, traditional millionaire from a movie, but that is not who he is at all. When he was growing up, he was smaller than the other boys in his class. He was incredibly nerdy and he used to be really heavily bullied. He changed schools seven times during his childhood. He remarked that he never had a chance to make friends, so he would hide out at home and read books. His former employees have commented that he has this incredible ability to be very socially detached and that he basically loves humanity but interacting with human beings individually is harder for him.
Are these characteristics innate? For example, can someone learn to think like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk even if they don’t feel that sense of separateness or some of those other characteristics you were talking about?
I want to clarify that there’s seven major commonality categories that I deal within the book and separateness is only one of them.
Could you tell us some of the other six?
Separateness is one of the first ones I dealt with because it was the one that was so surprising and so poignant in their stories, but another thing, which is probably less surprising is that they all have this incredible self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is when you have faith in your ability to overcome obstacles to achieve your objectives. It’s a very particular type of confidence. A person could seem not confident in other ways. They might not feel comfortable dealing with others or they might not feel confident about their personal appearance or something like that, and yet have a very high self-efficacy. All of these innovators had intense self-efficacy where they had utter faith that they would do what they set out to do even if other people said it was impossible, so self-efficacy is an important one.
They were all extremely intelligent, although intelligence doesn’t have a uniform correlation with creativity. I have a big discussion of when and why intelligence matters, but all the innovators I studied were quite intelligent and also had exceptional memories, which was interesting. I could explain why that matters. All but one of them. This time, the exception is Thomas Edison. They were also keenly idealistic, which means they were pursuing some higher level goal that they saw as intrinsically noble, important, and honorable. That turns out to be important because it not only organize their life with an incredible focus, but it meant that they were willing to sacrifice comfort, leisure, personal relationships, and sometimes even their family or their health because the goal was so important.
Many of them wanted to make money, but making money was not the highest purpose that they had.
None of the innovators I studied placed a high priority on money, and sometimes to their detriment. Nikola Tesla was this brilliant inventor, but he was so unconcerned with money that he was unable to achieve some of his goals because he basically never had any money. I wrote something about Elon Musk. You might have heard Tesla announced that they’re not going to pay Elon Musk for the next ten years and then they’re only going to pay him if he hits the rather remarkable goal of Tesla hitting $650 billion in market valuation.
That number, to put it into perspective, is ten times the market valuation of General Motors. It’s up there with Google. It’s an astounding goal, and until then he gets nothing. If he doesn’t hit that goal in ten years, he’ll still get a nothing. He’ll get no compensation. People were surprised by this and I said, “You shouldn’t be surprised by this at all because it’s never been about money for Elon Musk.” If you study his history, it’s never been about money. He’s taking his whole personal wealth and plowed it into ventures that he knew had a low probability of success because he thought they were important, and he hasn’t been paid in the last five years. His official salary from Tesla is the California minimum wage, so right now it’s at about $44,000 a year. He doesn’t cash the checks. It shouldn’t be surprising that he’s willing to gamble it all on the next ten years on hitting these goals because his goal is to help us move to an electric automobile future and to basically get us off fossil fuels. His goal is not to become wealthier.
[Tweet “Separateness is this sense that maybe you feel detached from the social fabric around you or you feel like the rules don’t apply to you.”]
What are the rest of the seven characteristics?
Another one is a broad category that includes a need for achievement or what Csíkszentmihályi would call flow. This means that all of the innovators found joy in the process of work itself. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten to know a Border Collie dog. Do you know dogs at all?
I do and I know Border Collie dogs.
For those of you who don’t, a Border Collie is only happy when it’s working. You don’t have to train it to work or persuade it to work or reward it. It wants to work. Work is the reward, and if you don’t give it a job, it’ll find one of its own and you probably won’t like it, but this is how the innovators were. They were happiest when working. Thomas Edison lost a huge part of his fortune because the people who formed General Electric basically carved him out of the business. When someone pointed out to him that he had lost all of his returns from his original lighting business, he thought about it for a moment and then he commented, “We had a lot of fun doing it though.” He said work made him so happy. Work made the Earth a paradise for him and he never intended to retire. He was happiest when working, and all the innovators I studied had this trait.
They also all benefited to some degree from situational advantage. The first category of situational advantage I identified had to do with temporal opportunity or timing, being at the right place at the right time. For instance, you could identify a lot of serial breakthrough innovators that emerged with the information technology revolution. The time was right for lots of innovations to be put forward. If you were an innovative person and you were there at that time, that made a big difference. Steve Jobs identified this very clearly. He said he was very lucky to have grown up in Silicon Valley, right when these things were happening. If he hadn’t grown up in Silicon Valley, when these things were happening, we might not even know who he was.
The last one had to do with access to resources. This was an interesting one, because as a researcher in a business school, we focus a lot on money and you probably don’t find that very surprising. We’re doing research on things like venture capital and Angel investors and how can the government create financial resources for people who want to innovate or be entrepreneurs. It turns out every single innovator I studied started out with no money and never identified the availability of money as a key resource or an obstacle for them, except you could say that the lack of money became somewhat of an obstacle for Nikola Tesla later in his life.
The key resource for them was access to technological and intellectual resources. It was often people. For instance, Marie Curie benefited enormously by being married to Pierre Curie. He had created a piece of equipment that she could’ve never obtained or used that enabled her to identify radium, so that was hugely important. Steve Jobs became friends with Steve Wozniak, who is a brilliant engineer. Without Steve Wozniak, he couldn’t have realized his early goals with computers, and then later on there were lots of other people who helped Jobs execute his ideas. Finding ways to put people in connection with technological resources or intellectual resources is a whole lot more important than financial resources, and that has interesting implications for policy and business.
I have a friend who always says, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” It’s a little bit along the lines of what you’re saying. It’s like those networks and who they know is part of what made those innovations possible.
I want to be clear. These were not people who had strong social networks. That’s another interesting contrast with a lot of the research we’re doing in business. Ever since Duncan Watt’s work on six degrees of separation that comes from Milgram’s work, people have been focused on social networks, how they’re structured, how dense they are, how short your path links are to other people. There’s a lot of awareness now that being in a good network or having a good position in your network is important, yet these people were not in good networks on the whole. They did not maintain networks well because they were not very socially motivated, and yet they were able to be successful. That’s an interesting thing that we need to study more to understand.
Are those characteristics that you mentioned innate or can people learn to think like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk?
Some of the characteristics are innate. Having an exceptional memory is probably innate. Some aspects of separateness are sometimes innate, although sometimes separateness comes from your external environment, so a lot of things can cause separateness. You could’ve been isolated as a child, you could have a physical disability. Edison’s separateness probably came from the fact that he was mostly deaf. You could have had different economic and social barriers that kept you separate. Separateness can come from a lot of things, but sometimes it comes from personality and that may be innate.
Even when the traits are innate, the mechanism that connects the trait up to innovation is often something we can tap. For instance, one of the things we learned about how separateness works for the innovators is that solitude is incredibly important. Spending some time thinking and reading and deciding what you believe about the world and coming up with your ideas unfettered from the ideas of others or the constraints of others is incredibly important for creativity, and that we can tap irrespective of our personalities.
Another thing that you find with the innovators, they naturally tended to pursue what are called long paths of reasoning, meaning that they would follow an idea very far forward in time to see its repercussions. They might follow a concept very far backward in terms of abstract reasoning to see what the fundamental principles were that drove an outcome. This came naturally to them because of their intelligence and their memory. It’s very easy to follow a path out further if you have a long memory because a lot of things stay active in your mind naturally, but we can all learn to do that. We can all learn to ask why. When we identify some cause and effect relationship, you should say, “What caused that causal factor? What caused that?” Go backward in the chain of reasoning and go forward several steps in the reasoning. “What will happen after this happens, and what happens next? What happens next?” People who actively mine these long paths of reasoning, and you can do it on paper, you don’t have to have an exceptional memory, are going to see larger scale dynamics. They’re going to become bigger thinkers. You’re going to tap that part of you that was similar to Einstein. Einstein did this naturally. He wanted to understand at a very elemental level what cause things.

Quirky Innovators: People who actively mine these long paths of reasoning are going to see larger scale dynamics.What do you think managers need to take away from what you’ve learned from innovators? People that are not necessarily entrepreneurs or innovating on their own, but they’re managers within more of a corporate structure, yet they still want to be innovative in the way they approach their jobs.
There are two things that are probably the most near-term implications that I would tell them about. The first one is that if you want people to come up with creative ideas, brace yourself because this is a little bit counter intuitive for people. You don’t want them in teams, not for the early work. You want them to work alone. We have been conditioned to think that teams are more creative than individuals, but there’s a lot of psychology research demonstrating that it’s not true because teams have a tendency to create apprehension about evaluation for people. It tends to cause production blocking, which means that while I’m talking, you suspend your thinking and you may never get back around to your own ideas.
You want people to work alone first. You want people to write down their ideas and elaborate them and follow them through to a pretty far extent before you bring them together in a group, because a group will tend to extinguish a lot of the wildest ideas that people have. A lot of managers don’t realize this. They think that the first thing we ought to do if we want a creative idea is have a brainstorming meeting as a group. That’s the last thing you want to do. You want to separate people and give them time to think and to work and to encourage them to put their wildest ideas down and to not fear being unorthodox and to not fear being judged by others. That’s an incredibly important one.
Another interesting implication, it’s best to explain by telling a little story about Steve Jobs when he first applied at Atari. When Steve Jobs saw an ad in the paper that said, “Make money, have fun,” he went to apply to Atari and he showed up in the lobby of Atari in sandals with dirty feet and unwashed hair and pretty strong body odor. He said, “I’m not leaving until you give me a job.” The receptionist called security and called Al Acorn and said, “What do we do about this hippy guy in the lobby? He says he’s not leaving until you give him a job.” If this had been IBM or Hewlett Packard or any of the other technology firms that were more buttoned up at the time, they would have sent them away, but Al Acorn said, “Send him in,” and he interviewed him. Steve Jobs even had the impudence to put his feet up on the desk. He was an unusual guy, but Al Acorn could spot that this was a creative and insightful person. He ended up giving him a job.
Steve Jobs turned out to be one of the more creative and insightful people we know about in our time. The lesson there is that we have to learn to embrace a little more weirdness or quirkiness. We have to realize that people who might seem unusual to us and might even make us a little uncomfortable at first, are exactly the kinds of people who are going to challenge some assumptions and come up with ideas that other people don’t come up with, which is incredibly important if you want breakthrough innovation.
That’s an important point because people tend to look for people who present their ideas and their contributions in the same way that they do, particularly managers. Part of what you’re saying is that someone may present completely differently and in a completely different way. That can be incredibly valuable and lead to huge innovation within the workplace.
A lot of people will emphasize how important it is to have social skills and be charismatic. Those things are incredibly valuable for getting around in the world and can make your life more pleasant but somebody with strong social skills is good at adhering to norms. They know what the norms are, and they know how to match them. That’s not the trait we’re looking for in breakthrough innovation because the person who comes up with breakthrough innovations is not adhering to norms.
Why don’t we see more women on the most famous innovators list?
This costs me a lot of angst early on in my study. I had set out criteria for my study that was meant to make sure that I could write rigorous case analyses. Everybody had to be at the top of several most famous innovator lists. Everybody had to have several biographies written about them. I only wanted people from science and technology because it’s much easier to measure utilitarian innovations and achieve consensus that they were important, which is why I didn’t put Picasso on my list or John Lennon on my list. Although initially, I’d considered looking at those kinds of innovations.
At the end of the day, when I applied these criteria to the lists that are out there, the only one that came up was Marie Curie. I got very anxious about that and I knew there was going to be push back on this and that people would want to see more women, they’d want to see people of color of all genders. I started looking for more women like this, but I knew in my scientist heart that I was biasing the selection process. I couldn’t put anyone in my study that didn’t meet the criteria. I studied Marie Curie, but once you’ve studied Marie Curie or Grace Hopper or some of these other women that had been innovative, you understand exactly why there aren’t more women on these lists. There are two main reasons. The first one is an obvious one, and that is that for a very long part of our history, women didn’t have access to education and they weren’t welcome in science and business.
When Marie Curie was growing up in Poland, she was brilliant. She was the top of her class at every school she went to. She won all the metals of award from her schools, but Poland didn’t allow women into university. In fact, most European universities didn’t admit women. She had to achieve a remarkable feat to get university training. She had to scrape up money she made as a governess to pay her way to go to Paris and apply to the Sorbonne and ended up being one of the first women to obtain higher education at the Sorbonne. She was one of maybe three women that got a PhD in her field from the Sorbonne the year that she graduated out of hundreds and hundreds of students. Even after she started achieving remarkable things in science, she wasn’t admitted to the Academy of Science and she was almost denied a Nobel prize, all because she was a woman. She faced these enormous obstacles.
Grace Hopper, who’s a little bit later in time, she’s the woman who invented computer programming language. She loved math, she had a doctorate in math, but she notes in her biography that women were not welcome in engineering and science and business. The only reason she was able to penetrate science and business is because she became an Admiral in the Navy and that rank essentially neutered her gender. It made it so that men would talk to her because she was an Admiral. The first reason is that there’s been a tremendous lack of access for women for a long period of time, which means you’ve had a much shorter period of recent history when it was feasible for women to have access to get on to these lists. These lists are looking at people for all history. They’re taking a large sample that goes very far back in time and most of that sampled women don’t have access to doing that work. That’s the first reason. Access, it’s basically discrimination. The second reason is going to make you a little bit more uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable and I had to think long and hard about whether I wanted to tell this part of the story, but it’s an important part of the story. It’s kids.
[Tweet “We have to learn to embrace a little more weirdness or quirkiness.”]
Because they are care-giving. They’re being parents, mothers.
Every breakthrough innovator I looked at had this maniacal, single-minded focus on their science and on their innovation. It’s very difficult to have that maniacal, single-minded focus on innovation and have an intense focus on your children. For example, Marie Curie relinquished most of the care-giving of her children to her father-in-law. When you read the biography her daughter, Eve Curie, wrote about her, what you see is this adoration and respect. Her daughters loved her, but there’s also longing and sadness. Her daughters pined for her attention and her affection, and that is something that is very difficult for a lot of mothers to do, and probably would be for fathers to do also. Parents have this intense focus on their children. It’s biological, nature made that a design choice that was incredibly important to make sure that children survive, but historically, more women have been in the role of primary caregiver than men.
From the conversations I have with women entrepreneurs today, both people that are entrepreneurial and doing startups and people that work within corporations, that’s still to a large degree an issue.
It’s not easy to overcome. The politically correct thing to say is, “We can solve this by providing childcare. First of all, men and women should have equal responsibilities. Secondly, businesses and governments should provide more access to affordable quality childcare.” They’re wrong about that because the truth is I look at someone like myself, I’m not Marie Curie, but I have obsessive tendencies to be sure. I can afford more childcare, but I don’t want to give up more childcare duties to someone else. I want that connection with my children, that’s inside of me. I have willingly and happily embraced being the primary caregiver for my children. What that means is that I cannot be obsessive the way I used to be about my work. I can’t stay on the computer until 4:00 AM and hunt down a solution to a problem I find fascinating because at 5:00 PM, I got to dial it back and start thinking about dinner and homework. I don’t think this means that women can’t be breakthrough innovators, but it means we have to think a little bit differently about career paths. We need to find ways to make it so that women or men, both of us can, can take a pause in our career paths and then more easily re-enter later.
For instance, if you want to be a scientist, you apply to grad school early within a few years of your undergrad. When we see applications for people for the PhD program where someone has been out a long time and had a diverse career history, we tend not to take them that seriously. That’s a mistake. That means that you have to have this linear career path where you’ve had this focus since before childbearing years that is not very consistent with primary child care giving. I want to be clear. You can be absolutely successful and be a great mom or a great dad. I’m not saying that at all. Lots of people have these very close relationships with their children and are extremely successful at their work, but the breakthrough innovator is something else. If you want to see women on the top of most famous innovator list, they need to be able to have this incredible, intense, idealistic focus, and they’re going to have to do that either before they have kids or after they have kids because it’s pretty hard to do it while you’re taking care of kids.
It’s also interesting because you were talking about how the whole science and engineering was unfriendly to women. All you have to do is pick up any paper today and you see that there’s still a huge controversy, particularly in the Silicon Valley, about how friendly STEM is to women. It has changed since Marie Curie’s days. It’s gotten better no doubt, but what’s your perspective on where we are today with how much technology and science and computer is embracing women?
It’s gotten a whole lot better and right now there are women who are creating the stories that we’re going to be telling in the future about most famous women innovators. It’s already changing. We’re already knocking out this access to education and business and science that we lacked in the past. We’re also talking from an economy where most women have, if not equal access, pretty close to equal access. That’s not true in every economy around the world, so there are large chunks of the globe where women are still incredibly disadvantaged at getting access to business in science, so we still have ways to go.
Our audience are entrepreneurs, executives within Fortune 500 companies, CEOs in mid-cap companies. It’s all over the map in terms of business people who listens to this podcast. What are one or two simple things that you think everyone can start from the moment they hear this podcast to tap into their innovative potential?
The first thing I would say is sit down and think about what your big long-term, idealistic goal is. If you have some big grand ambition, you should write that down. Don’t think to yourself, “I’m only going to write things that are possible.” If you have a goal lurking in your heart or a thing you wish was changed about the world that you think is impossible, I want you to suspend that idea that it’s impossible. Assume for a moment that nothing is impossible. If nothing is impossible, what would you do in the world? Write that goal down. Think about what are the steps that it would take to get to that goal. That has to do with forming a long-term grand objective. If you have a long-term grand objective, right away, you’re more likely to be a breakthrough innovator.
The second thing you should do is start challenging assumptions. Challenge every assumption. When you walk through your day, get in the habit of challenging the fact that things need to be the way they are. This is something that Steve Jobs was brilliant at. He would say, “You look around at the world, don’t assume that it has to be that way. The people who created that world were no smarter than you and you can change it.” Say you’re walking down the street and you assume that cars have to drive on roads. They don’t have to drive on roads. What if they were hanging from rails? What if we didn’t have cars at all? What if we had conveyor belts that moved to people or Elon Musk’s pneumatic tubes that are going to blow people around the world? Challenge every assumption and get in the habit of realizing that a lot of the assumptions you take for granted are wrong. They’re just ideas that were created by other people and you might be able to change them.

Quirky Innovators: Challenge every assumption and get in the habit of realizing that a lot of the assumptions you take for granted are wrong.There are a couple of themes to this podcast and I always ask every guest. I like to end by asking every guest these three questions because to me, these are three themes that are important that I have found in the work that I’ve done with thought leaders and people that are thinkers from all fields. These are three things that they always have in common. The first is what I call the joy of missing out. People tend to have a fear of missing out on things. People do have a fear of missing out on things in regard to innovation. What do you think that people have a fear of missing out on in regard to innovation that in your opinion they shouldn’t? What should we have a joy of missing out on in regard to the larger innovation conversation?
The first one I have to say that studying innovators, I’ve found it to be very freeing. Sometimes I’m not particularly social and I have a kid who’s not particularly social and I felt a bit anxious about that. I felt like it was a weakness I had to overcome and that I was missing out on my full capacity by not being more social. After studying these innovators, I realized “No, the main thing you need to do is love who you are, whether or not your social.” To realize that being more separate or preferring solitude some of the time is a huge advantage for particular types of tasks and activities. It’s a wonderful quality and it’s not a quality that you’re trying to extinguish in your life. That idea that you’re missing out on something if you’re not a great social networker, you’re not missing out. You’re reaping an advantage that maybe people who need to socialize more might be missing out on.
More directly to innovation, I would say this missing out idea relates to this compulsion we have to benchmark our innovation against others. If you’re paying a lot of attention to your competitors and the types of innovations they’re doing, you’re letting your competitors hijack your innovation process and your direction for your company. You are far better off coming up with your own direction. One thing we know is that if you’re racing against a competitor who’s already started doing something that you want to emulate, you’re starting that race at a disadvantage and you’re very unlikely to come up with something unusual. What Mauborgne and Kim would call a blue ocean move that has high profit potential. You’re much better off developing your own thing that your company does that’s different from anyone else. You want to stop trying to benchmark so closely against others and don’t worry about missing out on their innovations. You want to focus on the innovations that your company can focus on.
That’s an important point because a lot of companies in my experience go, “The bar is here, and it’s set by our competitors, so we have to get to that same place,” rather than going their own path and defining it themselves. The second thing I like to talk to people about a theme is what I call living beyond the script. There are these personal scripts, professional scripts. What’s the prevailing script of innovation? How do we think about innovation? Like, “This is the script about how you innovate,” and how do we go beyond that?
If you study Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, you see good role models for people who are living beyond the script. This is going to go back to idealism. If you look at Musk and the choices he’s made, they are very different from what a standard entrepreneur would do or what a business school recommendation would be. For example, he didn’t take SpaceX public. Taking SpaceX public would have restored a massive amount of wealth to him and it would have made all the other employees at SpaceX very wealthy. People were confused by that. They’re like, “Why don’t you want to take SpaceX public?” He said, “Because my objective with SpaceX isn’t just to be a profitable space company. My objective is to get to Mars.” He knew that having a board of directors was going to make it a lot less likely for him to make the choices that would optimize getting to Mars.
That’s placing his idea of making humans an interplanetary species more important than shareholder returns. That’s definitely living beyond the script that we would follow in a typical business school course, for example. Steve Jobs too. He made a lot of decisions that people disagreed with, like not putting any ports on the early Macintosh. Steve Wozniak thought there needed to be more ports because he knew engineers like to customize their computers. Steve Jobs said no because the computer needs to be for everybody. It needs to be a tool that extends the mind of humanity and ports get in the way of that. We need something clean and simple and beautiful, so that idealistic goal that he had completely changed the script of what his company would do. It wasn’t going to produce a utilitarian product that was maximally optimized for either engineers or businesses. It was producing a product that was designed to be an extension of people.
[Tweet “If nothing is impossible, what would you do in the world?”]
The last thing I always talk about is the everyday artist. I’ve been a painter, an actor, an entrepreneur, and a branding and marketing strategist. I’ve been a writer, and I interview people that are artists and CEOs. I’ve always found that there’s a part of what everyone does that is art and a part of what everyone does that is science. I’d love to know, in what way do you consider yourself an artist in the work that you do?
This is an important and interesting question because you’ll find that a lot of people who are talented in science are also talented in some form of art or fascinated by art. Einstein played the violin, for instance. Will Bommel was a talented artist. I don’t think we understand completely the connections there, but in some ways, art is about understanding patterns and finding joy and beauty in them. For example, if I’m trying to understand an idea, I try to draw it. It’s important to me that the drawing or the pattern I identify has an aesthetic quality to it. I’m looking for the symmetry or the asymmetry that makes that drawing move and resonate with me. That’s an important part of understanding the universe. Somehow this idea of space and spatial qualities and beauty, Einstein would say musical harmony, helps us to understand fundamental principles better. I don’t think we have a good science of it yet but we will someday. We’re going to understand how art and science are intrinsically connected.
Thank you. Melissa, where can people find the book?
You can order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or any independent bookseller.
Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
My guest has been Melissa A. Schilling. She is the John Herzog Family professor of management at New York University Stern School of Business. She’s also one of the world’s leading experts on innovation. She has a new book out called Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World. The book combines rich stories with deep science to show what breakthrough innovators have in common and how we can tap into our own innovation potential.

Important Links

• Melissa A. Schilling
• Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World
• Melissa Schilling’s article about Elon Musk
• Quirky on Amazon
• Quirky on Barnes & Noble About Melissa SchillingMelissa A. Schilling is the John Herzog Family professor of management at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and one of the world’s leading experts on innovation. Her research focuses on innovators and innovation strategy, and her textbook, Strategic Management of Technological Innovation (now in its fifth edition), is the number one innovation text in the world. Her new book, Quirky: The remarkable story of the traits, foibles, and genius of breakthrough innovators who changed the world combines rich stories with deep science to show what breakthrough innovators have in common, and how we can tap our own innovation potential.

Listen | Download | ViewHear the episode of the Competitive Advantage Podcast by using the player above OR Click to Download any Episode
This article is copyrighted by Karen Leland and cannot be reprinted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of Karen Leland.
Karen Leland is President of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding and marketing strategy and implementation firm. She works with individuals, businesses and teams to enhance their business and personal brands. Her clients include LinkedIn, American Express, Apple, Marriott Hotels and others. Her ninth book, The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand, (Entrepreneur Press, 2016) is available online at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and in bookstores now.Save

The post Why Quirky Wins the Day appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

The move away from full time work in offices will create a domino effect in the supply chains surrounding office life, from cleaning to food services.
Click To Tweet

Listen to the podcast on iTunesJeff Wald is the Co-Founder and President of Work Market and the author of the new book The End of Jobs: The Rise of on Demand Workers and Agile Corporations.
On today’s show he discusses the way COVID-19 speeds up some of the changes already forecast for the future of work. In addition, we touch on subjects ranging from the absence of retraining and its link to populism and nationalism, the advent of robots and AI, and also to democracy and technology being the way forward in shaping the future of the American workforce.

Tips and Thoughts for Making the Best of the 4th Industrial Revolution* Jobs that have more than 50% repetitive high-volume-component tasks are historically automated. These types of jobs will account for 10% to 15% of jobs in the U.S. over the next 10 years. * Have a retraining plan—as we are at the onset of 4th industrial revolution the biggest challenge remains to retrain the workforce. * Prepare for an agile workforce—on-demand is not the future of work. The data points to fluid, team-based “work from anywhere” jobs being the future. This comes with its own set of remote working challenges.

About Our GuestJeff Wald is a successful entrepreneur across the technology and services landscape. He has successfully built and sold multiple tech companies, including SpinBack to Buddy Media, which was subsequently purchased by Salesforce.com for $800 million. Jeff has a deep background and passion for talent management and is widely recognized as a thought leader on labor force evolution. He speaks regularly on the subject of modernizing workforces and the role of contingent labor and has been a contributing writer to Forbes on the topic.

Listen to the podcast on iTunesThe post Robots are Not Coming to Take Your Jobs—The Future of Work With Jeff Wald appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

The Internet has created a new way for businesses to brand and market themselves, and Ken Courtright, founder of IncomeStore.com knows just how to help companies do business in the Internet age. Based on his popular system on how to “Grow any business in any industry at any time,” Ken shares his insights on how to build company webpages that avoid coming off “salesy” but build social proof and establish trust.

Listen to the podcast on iTunesGrowing Your Business and Brand in an Internet AgeThe following is an edited transcript of this podcast. Since how we talk and how write is often very different, this transcript may contain uses of the English language (including grammar) that are not 100% correct. We are counting on your understanding in advance.
Karen Leland Branding Expert: Thank you so much for joining me on our podcast today. My guest is Ken Courtright. He is the founder and CEO of incomestore.com. He is an expert on doing business in the Internet age.
Ken, I’m so happy we could finally get this scheduled to be together on this call.
Thanks for having me.
It is my pleasure. You travel a lot, and one of the things you do is travel all over the world talking about, among other things, how people can make money on the Internet. But it’s really way more than that. It’s really about doing business in the Internet age and this whole way people now brand and market themselves. Can you talk a little bit about your company, on what you do and what your mission is?
Well sure. We’re about 24 years old. I’d like to start off quickly correcting people; they think we’re a web-based company, an Internet marketing firm, or an SEO shop when they find out about what we do. The reality is we have 87 employees, and over half of them have nothing to do with Internet marketing and things like that. But what we specifically do is we live by our 24-year-old roots as a growth-consulting firm. We like to think that we can meet a business owner, ask a few questions, look them in the eye, and comfortably tell them that we can grow their business.
Usually their first questions will be, “How exactly can you grow this? It has been a family business for 20 years,” or, “We just started and are hitting a brick wall. You don’t even know us. How can you say you can grow us?” We have a tagline that we can grow any business in any industry at any time. The reason is, we don’t think traditionally. We had the ability and the serendipity in 2009 to step outside the box, if you will, to look at our own growth-consulting firm and say, “What is something that could be done in any business, in any industry, at any time that could add a second, third, or maybe fourth and fifth revenue stream to a business?” We can quickly surmise that if you add a website that is industry specific, that is built for no other reason than pure monetization, you can add that type of website to any business, in any industry, at any time. We have spent the last six years building a team of 80 incredibly sharp people who strategize certain industries one at a time.
We meet people at their needs. If they need leads for their business, we’ll build a website for that. They just need cash flow to stabilize the company, or a household, or maybe keep their wife from going to work, or maybe keep the husband from the second or third job; we’ll build a website or buy a website just to add extra income to the household. If we were to summarize it in one sentence, we help people, businesses, or private equity firms add additional revenue streams to their main source of income. We do it through monetized web properties.

The team at Income Store know how to grow a brand in an internet age through monetized web properties.Wonderful! By the way, I want to say it for the listeners, I don’t think you meant keep your wife from going to work if she wants to work. I think you meant if she wants to stay home and raise children or do something else, so that she doesn’t have to work.
Yeah; unequivocally yes. My wife works 80 hours a week.
She does. Your wife is your partner in your business there—a fabulous businesswoman and wife.
Yes. She loves what we are doing. She would have just corrected me, just like you.
That’s why she and I are friends. I’ve heard you say a lot in the conferences I’ve been to where you have spoken that trust trumps everything, especially today. I want to know what you mean by that. Also, how do you think that this idea of trust trumps everything impacts the business and the brand in today’s world?
That’s excellent. For a year and a half, that was my main talk. I have a book coming out that you’re aware of. That is the centerpiece, and it goes like this: For a couple hundred years, the business and marketing books would teach the concept that if you’re selling something, for people to truly buy something, they have to know you. Then they have to like you. Then they have to trust you.
I’ll give you an example: You could take an insurance salesperson, a marketing expert, even a school teacher who wants to do part-time work on the side or over the summer, when these people go into the marketplace to position themselves so people would want to buy from them, anything today in 2016, that is let’s say more than a hundred dollars, the odds are well past 50 percent, that somebody is going to Google that person’s name, and then they’re going to Google the company name. They are looking for certain trust factors. Does this person have a social media presence? Are they on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook? Do they have a website? The single most important aspect of trust trumps everything was the 6- to 10-year run that companies were doing at what is now known as social proof. Social proof proves that if we, as business owners, say that our product is the best, we as business owners are looked at as salespeople.
If our website said that we have the number-one product in this space, and people look at websites like salespeople, they’re simply not trusted. However, if the world says it’s so, it must be so. The definition of social proof is, if the world says it’s so, it must be so. If, for instance, the website of TOMS Shoes, the fastest-growing shoe company in history, has nothing but shoes all over the homepage claiming they are the best, it’s just a website selling shoes. The fastest-growing shoe company in history, TOMS Shoes, has no shoes on its homepage. It’s a picture of a gentleman named Blake—the founder—sitting next to a mountain, and right under the picture of Blake, it’s explaining that, “If you buy a pair of shoes here, we’re going to put a brand new pair of shoes on a kid who has never worn shoes before.” He does not sell shoes. He sells a message. The message is well received, and he’s not pumping shoes down people’s throats. The world tells the world how great TOMS Shoes is. Right underneath that picture where Blake is right next to a mountain, he has literally hundreds of testimonials of his customers telling the rest of the world how great TOMS Shoes is so he doesn’t have to do the work.
Right now, today, in 2016, the websites that can deliver the most upfront trust and comfort are the ones that are excelling and growing the fastest.

Your website is your brand in an Internet age, it needs to establish the know-like-trust factor.It’s amazing to me how many people in businesses—both individual entrepreneurs or small businesses and even larger companies, middle-sized companies—really don’t get that. They don’t understand the importance of establishing that trust in the website. I’ve talked to so many people where they know they need a website. They will say, “Well, I hired my aunt, or my uncle, or my cousin, my friends’ son, who isn’t really a web designer, a writer, or a brander,” and they have those people do that work and put up a website that’s really mediocre. They will often say to me, “Does it really matter that much?” I’m very shocked that people don’t know that. Do you find that? That a lot of people still aren’t aware of what you just said?
Definitely. As much as there was a lot of homework done on social proof, none of the foundations or the industries or the institutions that did the homework have anything to gain by following up on the publishing of their findings. It’s up to the marketers to see what’s really working in the marketplace. I’ve never seen that being brought into business—social proof. My podcast and a few other books I’ve read touch on this subject. I don’t think it’s a commonly understood formula of success.
The scary thing is, I’m seeing just as much of the 4 P’s today as I did a few years ago. The 4 P’s are: product, pricing, positioning, and promotion. That was taught for 100+ years. You get the right product to the right niche market. You do the right pricing, make sure the positioning against competitions is on point and the pricing matches, and then, you promote it. The old adage is, “Tell more; sell more.” If the other 3 P’s are in place when you do your promotion, that product is going to make it.
The reality is, that’s not true today. The fact of the matter is, and I’m going to say it as simply as I can, that nobody wants to go first. If somebody starts a business today, they launch a website. They hire a web designer. They get all excited. They will have a 10- to 20-minute interview of, “What would you like for the homepage, frequently asked questions, about us, products and services, and tools and resources sections?” They set up what was a great website in 2000. That doesn’t work today. The reality is, when you live by the 4 P’s, you’re actually making these millennials gag. The last thing they want to see when they open your homepage is a product with a dollar sign with it. They buy stories. Quite frankly, the reality is that people today, especially the millennials, they buy cool people in cool companies. They don’t necessarily buy cool products. They want to do business with the people who are very cool, very cutting edge, even comedic and funny. They want to buy companies with big hearts with deep, worthy causes that matter.
Quite frankly, even the millennials who don’t necessarily have the big bank rolls, they will find the money to buy the right products from the right companies. I agree with you; I don’t see a lot of people who are paying attention to social proof and trust trumps everything. They’re still focused on the 4 P’s. Honestly, it’s just a matter of time. They will go by the wayside like the taxi cab is going by the wayside with Uber.
It’s interesting about the 4 P’s, because in branding work that I do so often, that’s how people are able to find their brand. It takes me an entire day to sit down with people and help them look at their brand in another way, and I think you’re absolutely right; today you have to define a brand in a much deeper and broader way that includes your story and contribution. It’s essentially what you said: You have to have a narrative about your brand. You can’t just have, “The facts, ma’am, just the facts.”
In his incredible book No BS Marketing to the Affluent, Dan Kennedy wrote something that, when I was riding in an airplane as I read it, I physically felt my heart stop. He said, “Over six years, we studied the top 10 reasons that the affluent make a buying decision.” I want to say that he said there were 280 to 300 interviews. The number one reason that the wealthiest people buy anything, believe it or not, it’s the story behind the brand. The story goes, when someone is making a decision between three $30,000 watches, what he envisions is himself playing poker with his buddies. They will say, “Oh, nice watch!” Then he goes, “Let me tell you about that watch.”
The wealthy want to make a buying decision about the company or the brand behind the product because they really want to buy a story. It is exactly why the 2007 book Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk went absolutely ballistic as one of the best-selling marketing books of all time, because he told the story of how he turned his father’s liquor store from a $1-million-a-year liquor store into a $20-million-a-year liquor store in under a year. He did this by simply taking a bottle of wine every single night, going to the basement, Googling that wine brand, and telling the brand story to a flip phone for 5 to 7 minutes. He proved to the world that the story sells wine, that the brand sells wine. The wine sitting on the shelf at the right price point doesn’t sell wine.
There is a counter-side to this, which is—just to be devil’s advocate for a moment—that you can be telling a great story and have a lot of social proof, but if you’re not delivering a product of quality, eventually, you’re not going to be making it.
No question. The reality is that the tipping point to a potentially explosive business is the brand story, but then it just tips it over what I call the flat table. The flat table is supported by the legs. You better have an incredible product. You better have a great customer service division, because we’re in the world of customer service. You better have still-legitimate pricing. If you’re pricing yourself out of the market, you’re going to be looked at sideways. If you’re underpricing, pricing is branding; you are also going to look like something’s wrong. You’re going to need a great product. You need a great customer service support team. You need a great price point. The bottom line is you need a serious business. You need real employees doing great work.
If you want to be explosive, it can’t be just about the product or the pricing. You said it; the perfect word is your narrative. You’ve got to have a narrative story that resonates. A lot of people today are still living in the 4 P’s. They’re not positioning their product in their customer’s language. Here’s an example from about 2 to 3 months ago, right before our last event: I’m sitting at the kitchen table, and we only have one phone in our home, it’s a very old phone from a very old fax line. Nobody has the number, not even my dad. All of a sudden, I’m sitting 20 feet away from the home phone, which is the 911-emergency phone, and the only other person home at this time is my 14-year-old daughter. I know she is about six feet away from the phone, because she’s in the garage outside the door putting on her roller skates. She’s going roller skating.
All of a sudden, the phone rings. I know that the only people that have this number are my wife and my three daughters. I know where my wife and my two other daughters are. They’re unreachable. The only other person that has this number is my 14-year-old, who’s six feet away from the phone. I realized very quickly this son-of-a-gun pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket; she is closer to the phone than I am, but she’s still dialing that number. So I got up from the kitchen table, walked up to the phone, answered, and said, “Can I help you?” I know it’s her.
Cameron says, “Yeah, dad. Can you do me a favor? I left something on the counter. Can you bring it to me?” Here’s what’s crazy. I think most people would get angry and upset at their 14-year-old who is closer to the phone than the adult was. I remember being spell-bound, holding the phone thinking, “Oh my goodness! This is how my 14-year-old’s brain works. Her cell phone is in her hip pocket. It’s faster and more convenient to her to reach her father by calling the phone, than it is for her to very quickly pull out of her skates, walk up six steps, open the door, and yell at me.”
In reality, it’s an incredible business lesson. How many business owners today are still branding their product, marketing their product, and building their websites the same way they did five years ago? Every year on the Internet is like dog years. Five years ago on the Internet is 35 years ago in business. Does that make sense?
It makes total sense.
We have to remember that these millennials, they are the future of this country. They’re the influencers. They influence the seniors on how to use the Internet. They influence their parents on how to communicate online.

Millennials are the future, does your brand in an internet age match with an online and mobile presence?I’m seeing some very grave mistakes out there. We have 700 revenue-generating websites to do this split testing on. It’s not fair for me; I have a little bit of an edge on the game; I can see it coming before it’s coming. It is painful for me to sit back and see people sleeping and not understanding. They don’t know how to reach out to us.
That’s something that I’ve always talked about is doing business with your customers the way they do business with you, not the way you want to do business with them.
You better believe it. You nailed it.
Then, that’s how you do it. It’s interesting. You have all these websites. You are managing over 700+ websites for people. Is that correct? How many are there?
There are 716.
The 716 websites, can you give 2, 3, or 4 of the best practices today in terms of a website that is well-branded, well-marketed. They reach the audience, the millennial audience, that’s out there?
First and foremost, as a business owner, you have to understand the difference between mobile, mobile-ready, and mobile-responsive. In the last two and a half to three years alone, there has been a huge shift in getting websites mobile, and then there is mobile-ready, which ESPN just pulled off about 13 months ago. ESPN shut the site down for two hours and flipped it to mobile ready. This way, everything they have shows up both on a desktop and on a phone at the same time. The difference is, not every advertisement shows up and not every app or every distributor shows up. The next wave is mobile-responsive. That’s where any tablet, smartphone, any desktop, every ad, everything, shows up 100 percent; nothing is cut off, nothing is left off.
Google is so passionate about making sure the world understands this, they decided to penalize, without telling you they penalized you, those that are not mobile-responsive. They’re not saying it’s a penalty, so you technically can’t quote me, because you’re not going to find any of the guys at Google saying the word “penalty.” Just take my word for it. If your site is fully mobile-responsive, and all things are considered equal—social signals match, linkbacks match—if everything matches up to your competitor, and you are mobile responsive and they’re not, I assure you that you are going to rank higher than them.
Number one, you’ve got to make sure that you understand that 65 percent of every page view online today on a mobile device—this is all pushed and led by the millennials—is on a mobile of some kind. So that’s the first thing.
Number two is, we can’t forget yesterday. I had a podcast on this, it’s podcast number 2, called “How to Read Your Client’s Mind.” We can’t forget the fundamentals of using the Internet. This is the first time that business owners have been able to communicate directly with the client without talking to them.
In the old days, the times of Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, his mantra was white shirt. You get in front of your customers. You ask them a million questions until you know exactly what they want. Then, we’ll build them what they want. You have to physically talk with the client. Today, there are so many tools, like Google’s Adwords keyword planner, SEMrush, Quantcast, that can physically show the world what your client is typing into a search bar. We can see what they want unequivocally with the data of how many times they search that every month.
We know, if we know what tools to use, exactly what content to write on a Monday, once a week, or once a month. People are forgetting the old-fashioned getting to your client, getting what they want. Build what they want, and don’t build what you think will sell. That’s the key.
That is an excellent point. I know from working with you that one of the strategies that is working effectively is finding out those key words and key words phrases and just continually writing about those. I have never paid a dime for Google Adwords. I’ve gotten very high ranked in some my areas, and I’ve had clients ranked high just by using that strategy.
It’s just a simple strategy. It’s almost too simple that people don’t believe that it’s possible. It is what you said. It’s founded in that old-fashioned idea of giving your customer what they want. What they want is what they searched for. It’s giving them what they searched for, not what you think they will search for.

Google Adwords is a key tool to use in building your brand in an internet age.We have a website called theplumbinginfo.com. As of December 7, 2015, it became the number-1 plumbing website in the world. It ranks on 162,000 plumbing terms. What’s scary is that we’ve only written a piece of content every Saturday for three and a half years, which is not a tremendous amount of content, and we’ve done really little traditional marketing. They key is we asked Google ahead of time—we stay six weeks ahead of the website—we asked Google via this Google Adwords keyword planner tool: What is the world searching for right now that we have yet to write on? It physically talked back to us. As long as we’re writing on what Google has proven the world’s looking for, Google has an internal algorithm that balances the amount of pages written that are titled a certain way. Let’s call that title an answer to a key phrase.
Google was saying: We’ve got this key phrase, “How to fix a leaky toilet,” that only 10 people in history have written on. If you’re going to write a piece of content on how to fix a leaky toilet, Google is already craving that because they’ve only got 10 pieces worldwide. If we make it 11, we’re pretty much assured to get 9 to 10 percent of that traffic. It’s just pure math. For whatever reason, we’d like to do the hard work and the labor of finding that stuff out. If you write on that, it works for everybody.
That’s a great strategy. So many people say, “I can’t rank if my key word is ‘money’ or ‘Internet.’” You can’t rank for that pure key word, but you can rank for those longer tails and phrases using key words and questions, which you were just talking about.
Yes, completely. You nailed it. You start with a long-tail and find a five- to seven-word phrase. You can almost assure yourself that not very many people have written on that five- to seven-word phrase. Then you can get to the top one, two, or three positions on that phrase just by continually writing on that phrase differently. Those are called the authoritative pointers.
If Google sees that you are toward the top of page one on seven to 1ten long-tails all of a sudden in that industry—and Google doesn’t know any better; it’s a computer program—they think you’re an authority. So when you write on a three- to four-word phrase, you’re going to become an authority quicker. Then you write one- to two-word phrases, and that’s exactly the strategy we used for theplumbinginfo.com.
That’s funny because in a way, what you’re doing is showing Google your social proof by doing it that way. That’s interesting. You talk about the success wheel. Can you say a little about what that is and why it’s important for building a brand today?
After a presentation, we found out our flight was delayed. We have to stay an extra night in that town. The convention organizer ran up to me, “Ken, I heard your flight was delayed. Could you do one more talk? Just 25 minutes?” I said that I hadn’t prepared anything. He said, “We’re just going to ask you some questions. We’re just going to mic you up. You sit on stage. It’ll be centered on a talk you previously gave.” I figured it’d be fine, so I got up on stage.
What this gentleman asked me is one simple question that they wanted that 25-minute answer for, which was this: “In 24 years, you’ve had three huge growth spikes in your company’s career. One growth spike, then you went not just flat, but you almost lost everything. Then, you grew back and went flat for four years in a row. Now, you’re growing again faster than you’ve ever grown before. Can you map out for us over 24 years, what are some of the critical decisions you made to grow, to get out of almost losing your company, to grow again, to get out of going flat, and then to grow again?”
I said, “That’s probably going to take longer than 25 minutes, but I can at least take a rough stab at it.” I walked up to a flip chart and big markers out there. The first thing I figured out when I was 22 years old is I was very ignorant on business. I knew I had to get my brain around business owners, so anybody that came through Chicago—like Brian Tracy, Zig Zigler, Tom Hopkins, and Tony Robbins—anybody that remotely sounded business savvy to me when I was 22, I attended their event. I became what I called a conference junkie. I noticed there is something very interesting when you go to these conferences: You can definitely tell the people from stage that are pure-hearted and the people who are just going to sell you some cassette tape, which was the thing to do at that time.
I can’t tell you how many of these huge clam-shelled cases of cassette tapes I came home with. The cool thing was, as much as I wanted to buy their cassettes to further get to know these people, what I found way more intriguing was that the pure-hearted people would often, on purpose or accidentally, drop hints of what they’re currently reading or what they just read. I would literally sit there waiting, sometimes through a two-and-a-half-day session for them to mention a couple of books they’ve read. I would go home to the local book store, and whatever book these “superior” businesspeople mentioned they were currently or just finished reading, I would read them like crazy.
Usually when I draw this in front of a group, I’ll put “conferences” at the bottom left as a word with a little circle around it. Then from conferences, I draw an arrow up and to the left, indicating that they drew me to certain books. Then I draw a circle around the word “books.” At the very top of the piece of paper, I write “IP,” which stands for intellectual property.
What I found so intriguing after a year and a half on this, what I call the success wheel, is the books more than anything because I can read them and I can reread them. I can consume myself in these books. They gave me so much IP, intellectual property, that in a very short period of time, before I was even 24, I could walk into a chamber of commerce event or some kind of a networking event, I would only be halfway into an event, and I’d have a crowd of people around me wanting to know what I knew.
I, at the time, had a low self-image. I didn’t date anybody in high school and very few in college. I never drank a beer or anything like that. I was a complete introvert, yet, you put me in a room of businesspeople, I felt completely in control because I felt that I read more than these people, I studied more than these people. Sometimes they were 40-, 50-, or 60-year-old businesspeople with 40 years of business experience on me.
Something dramatic had happened in year three of this success wheel. Conferences led me to the books. The books led me to intellectual property. The intellectual property would allow me to go to these events and these meetings and bump into businesspeople who would want to either buy products from me through marketing services or just partner with me and do a joint venture. I made some great friends in my first few years in business, many of whom would do actual business deals with our growth consultant company, so at the bottom right of this wheel I would write “deals” or “business flow” and circle that.
The success wheel is this: After a few years of growing, we doubled five out of seven years, and then we went flat for two years and almost lost everything. In the three-year period of time, I asked myself, how in the world could we go from doubling every year, almost tripling sometimes, to flat and then backwards? Then I realized, I actually said to myself when I was 28 years old, “I probably should stop going to these conferences, because I think I know more than these people. If I keep going, I might dumb myself down.” I didn’t realize it for 10 years. That was the dumbest thing I ever could have said to myself.
There’s a phrase in business, “When the students are ready, the teacher appears.” I found out the second time around the wheel, when I was about 28 or 29; I jumped back to the exact same conferences, exact same ones with the same speakers. All of a sudden, even though it was almost an identical presentation as when I was 24 years old, everything was speaking to me at a whole new level. I realized it wasn’t the speaker; it wasn’t even the information. It was that my business and my person were at a different level. I needed different material. I needed different input.
All of a sudden, the same people, the same Tony Robbins, the same Brian Tracy, these people are still out there talking on stages with the same and new information. It was speaking to me so differently. The most critical aspect is hearing them recommending different books. I jammed on the books from 1998 to 2003. I read one, at least, if not two business books a week for five years. My intellectual property of how to grow or market a business exploded.
Just one quick question about that: When you say “intellectual property,” I know you don’t mean it this way, so this is just to clarify for the people listening; I know you don’t mean that you took ideas from those books and used them, because that’s their intellectual property. You mean that those intellectual properties helped you grow your business.
Correct. When I say IP, it’s just a very general sense that my business smarts, my business knowledge, my knowledge base in business overall, my personal intellectual property grew unbelievably. I wasn’t really quoting Brian Tracy. I wasn’t quoting anybody else out there. I wasn’t using any of their techniques. It’s just my overall, general understanding of the book. I always think of the book The E Myth; Michael Gerber has done an incredible job of describing why solopreneurs get stuck, why they can’t grow past themselves.
Yes, that’s a great book.
My intellectual property, the second time around the wheel, exploded our company. The real magic came when I went four years in a row. I was very satisfied. I had a great life 10 years ago. I started having a bunch of kids. We moved three times in I don’t remember how many years.
Things got very comfortable. I got very scared because I know in life, you’re either in a storm (things are very difficult), or you’re coming out of the storm, or you’re about to go inland. I felt so comfortable, I said, “I must be so comfortable that I’m about to go into a storm.” I remembered looking back and thinking, “I haven’t gone to a conference again in four years.”
Here’s what’s amazing; one thing I didn’t stop was reading. This time when I went back into the conferences, the conference coordinators of almost every event I was going to got to know me. They remembered me since I had been going to a conference now for 15 to 20 years.
They would start to ask me, “Ken, how come you’re in the audience? How come you’re not on stage?” Then I’m like, “What are you talking about? I’m not a speaker.” They told me that I might want to consider it. I started getting on the stages of the events I used to attend. What I learned in business through books and conferences was enough meat to propel my business forward.

I realized that one of the greatest ways to learn is to teach. I realized I really need to know what I’m talking about if I’m going to teach people. It’s not just helping them grow their businesses. There’s another level of accountability when you’re a teacher. This third time around the wheel, which I’ll be on the rest of my life when I die with my boots on, I found one item of the success wheel that brings more people more success than anything else in business; I have yet to find anything that can beat this. It goes like this: If you’re on a success wheel—and everybody’s on their own success wheel—it could be books. It could be watching TV. Who knows? Everybody has their own success wheel whether they admit it or not. What I found is that if you attack your own personal success wheel to build your own personal intellectual property bucket, something dramatic happens.
The bigger players, when they want to get around you, they bring their success wheel with them. They bring their whole black book of contacts with them. They bring their whole book of clients with them. The deals we started doing on our third time around the success wheel, the size of these deals was staggering, to the point where our average deal size just six years ago was about a $14,000 contract. Our average deal size today is a $172,000 contract. It’s because we got around people who played a bigger game. Does that make sense?
It totally makes sense. I went to a financial class once about 30 years ago that totally changed my life. They said, “There’re only two ways to make more money: Either you increase the amount you’re charging to a very narrow stream, or you get next to a much larger stream. There are only two ways to do it.”
What I love about what you’re saying about the success wheel, and it’s something people miss so often, is you have to keep learning. Whether they’re personal or business brands, the strongest brands are brands that continue to evolve, grow, and learn rather than stay stagnant.
The most underused and dustiest room in everybody’s home is the room for improvement.
We met at a conference. You’re obviously very successful with what you do. I just have to honestly say, Ken, that the humility that you have in terms of listening to the speakers in what you are willing to gain from them, you probably knew 99 percent of what those speakers were saying, but you never had that attitude. That is something that is a source of your success.
Yes, I appreciate that. The reality is we can always learn something from everybody. I don’t go there with the understanding that I’m going to gain two golden nuggets today or I’m going to get three great contacts from this conference. I’m there because I actually feel I’m supposed to be there. There is something that’s going to come off from that stage that if it isn’t for me today, it’s supposed to teach me something that I’m going to need in six months.
It’s more of an attitude of just going there to receive, and even today, I’m a faculty, as you are, of CEO Space, I’m a regular at Secret Knocks, I’m a regular at New Peaks, I’m probably a regular at seven major events. But when there’s somebody there speaking, I would still be part of the audience, not backstage farting around with the other speakers. I think that’s where I’m supposed to be is in the audience.
I know you’re the CEO and founder of incomestore.com, and you’ve won the Inc. 5000 two years in a row, is that right?
Two out of three years, and then apparently, from what it looks like right now, we’ve grown more in this past year than the other two that we won. It looks like we’re going to do it three out of four years, which is fairly unprecedented.
Can you say a sentence or two about the conferences that you do so that the people can know about that and take a look at them?
We have Digital Footprint, which you’re a regular speaker at: digitalfootprint.net. Forbes says it is ranked one of the top-5 must-see, can’t miss business conferences of 2016. They’re held twice a year, and we do those east coast, west coast. The next one is late October in the L.A. area.
The concept is simple: The greatest business model ever created is to follow a working model. If you look at Burger King, all they do is move in next to Mc Donald’s. That’s not me saying it; it’s their physical demographic model. The greatest, quickest path to success is to model someone else’s success, because it takes away a lot of thinking.
Digital Footprint was created to show businesspeople how business was done for the last hundred years by using working models. We flipped the working model into just digital pieces. If you just want to model someone’s website, what would you look for? If you want to model somebody’s e-mail campaign, how would you look for that? How would you model it?
By the time people leave the conference in three days, they’re walking out of there with five to twenty-five models they can follow. We give away an iPad to somebody who can find the most things that could be created or duplicated for free or nearly free. One girl who won the iPad heard 202 different things in three days from our stage that she could model for free or nearly free. We have four people who found 150 things they could model freely.
People can find out or register at www.incomestore.com, correct?
You either go to incomestore.com, under “events,” or to the actual event page at digitalfootprint.net.

Digital Footprint Conference is the can’t miss business conference of 2016.I’ve started asking everybody who appears on this podcast three questions at the end. They’re not specific to what you do in general, but I think there are things that are important. The first one is, who’s that one person in your life who had a really deep positive impact on you? What did you learn from them?
No question. It is Brian Tracy. When I was 24, I picked up the book The Psychology of Selling. It transformed our business. It definitely changed my life. There is one specific part of the book where he talks about an income barometer, that every person will earn exactly what they think they’re worth. He proved it. It wasn’t just Brian proving it; I think it was Yale that did a study, another group did a study in the 1930s, and then another study went back across different countries for a couple hundred years. The reality is that one chapter of that one book showed and proved that I’m going to create a company the size of what my worth is: my personal worth. That told me I don’t need to work on my company size. I need to work on my personal worth size, my income barometer. Because of that book, I went so deep into self-improvement books like Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins and See You at the Top by Zig Zigler. It was part of my mission of absorbing anything that got in front of me. I think The Psychology of Selling is maybe one of the top five business books ever written. That is what definitely hit me the most.
The second question is, who is the person who had a negative impact on your life? What did you learn from that? Don’t tell us the name of the person!
I won’t name the person, but it was partly because of something I read in a Brian Tracy book. He mentions that if you want to grow ten-fold in your company in two years, you’ve got to go headhunt someone who’s at that level of a manager at a company that size and bring them in to work for you. In the mid ’90s, I did exactly that. We were what’s called a Microsoft-type of company. Just to tell people how it was back then in the late ’90s, we got things done very quickly, made snap decisions. We were growing so quickly.
This person had what’s called a Procter & Gamble mentality; it would take this person four months just to order a stapler. I mean that. He would want paperwork done. It was oil and water or jumbo shrimp, whatever oxymoron you can come up with. We did not mesh. Because of how we didn’t get along with that, I let it go on for six months. It literally took our chain of video stores down. It cost us a million dollars.
He was great as a person, but it was a terrible business decision for me to bring him on. I did not vet the person at all, and he definitely had a negative impact on me.
It’s a good lesson there! If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, from the age you’re at right now, what would it be?
It sounds almost impossible to believe. I would tell my younger self, as much as I’ve read, READ MORE. I’m doing it now, reading two books a week. The growth came because I read and studied what I knew I should, where everybody else was watching TV and going out with their buddies, doing what average people do. I didn’t. Now, we look like overnight wonders. It took us 24 years to get here. I could have cut the time in half had I been more specific in my studies.
Ken, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast to talk about building your brand in an internet age.
My pleasure; it’s been great.

Important Links* The Income Store * Today’s Growth Podcast * Digital Footprint Conference

About Ken Courtright – Founder and CEO of The Income StoreKen Courtright is the founder and CEO of the Inc.5000 company Income Store. Income Store helps people and businesses grow their income through Building or Buying “Revenue Generating Websites.” “Income Store” now manages close to 700 Money Making Websites for their website partners. Every website they build or buy comes with a lifetime performance guarantee of 11% – 22%. Because of the performance guarantee, Ken’s model has attracted hundreds of partnerships with individuals, business owners and private equity firms.
A Best Selling Author in 5 Categories, Ken has recently been featured on WLS, FOX, CBS, A&E, Forbes and most recently on the Biography Channel. Their portfolio of 700 revenue generating websites are viewed almost 200 Million times each year. After doubling revenues 6 years in a row, in 2013, 2015, and now again in 2016, Ken’s 23-year old company was ranked in Inc. Magazine as one of the 1,000 Fastest Growing U.S. Companies.Listen | Download | ViewHear the episode of the Branding Blowout Podcast by using the player above OR Click to Download any Episode
This article is copyrighted by Karen Leland and cannot be reprinted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of Karen Leland.
Karen Leland is President of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding and marketing strategy and implementation firm. She works with individuals, businesses and teams to enhance their business and personal brands. Her clients include LinkedIn, American Express, Apple, Marriott Hotels and others. Her ninth book, The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand, (Entrepreneur Press, 2016) is available online at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and in bookstores now.

The post Growing Your Business and Brand in an Internet Age appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Listen to the podcast on iTunes Thought leadership is a hot topic right now, but it can get a little cloudy on what it really is. Peter shares examples of what thought leadership is, what it is not, and how […]

The post How to Become a Thought Leader in Your Field appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Mushrooms, alternative alcohol, digital health and merch are four of the fastest-growing sectors for startups in 2021. Learn more.

The post Upcoming Design Trends and The Future of Design appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

In this episode of The CEO Brand Video Series, you will learn how to create and embrace a parallel CEO brand. Watch the video to learn more.

The post 3 Reasons These CEO Brand Mistakes Should Be Banned appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

In this episode, I show you how the way you manage your A, B and C to items impacts your branding and marketing success.

The post What Is The Interesting Truth About Emptying Your Email Inbox? appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

In this episode of The CEO Brand Video Series, you will learn how to create and embrace a parallel CEO brand. Watch the video to learn more.

The post How to Create a Winning CEO Brand and Avoid Wasted Energy on Social Media appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Video marketing has the capacity to create a connection and tell a multifaceted story that just words or audio can’t always accomplish. 

I’m joined today by Nina Froriep from Clock Wise Productions to discuss what it takes to drive a successful video marketing campaign for a small business, why you need to be creating video, and the biggest mistakes to avoid. 

The post Why Your Social Media Strategy Must Include Consistent Video Content appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

In this episode, I show you how the way you manage your A, B and C to items impacts your branding and marketing success.

The post Why B Items Are The Bomb When It Comes To Branding and Marketing appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Today Karen Tiber Leland discusses why and how Zoom Fatigue happens (during and after COVID) as well as five easy ways to nip it in the bud.

The post PR Expert Advice On Preventing Zoom Fatigue appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Learn the three biggest mistakes Karen sees when it comes to CEO Branding and how executives can best develop their personal brands.

The post Why CEO Branding is a Necessity appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

In this episode, you will learn about the trend of giving customers the opportunity to opt out of receiving emails. Watch the video to learn more.

The post No More Valentine’s Day Emails appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

When something isn’t working, don’t try to fix everything at once, try changing just one element at a time. PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2NlK51q
Click To Tweet

Listen to the podcast on iTunes On my most recent Peloton bike ride, the gentleman leading the session said something that I found applies to so many aspects of our professional lives: “Less excuses, more adjustments.” In today’s short episode, I will share five ways for you to fine-tune your business goals by doing just that.

Oftentimes when we work on our time management, personal brands, marketing plan, or business development we throw up our hands and give up when things don’t go as planned.

Today’s podcast is all about making small adjustments in your business goals as you go along so that you don’t feel the need to tackle everything all at once or get it perfect the first time out.

Fine-tuning tips toward achieving your business goals * One small thing at a time — when something isn’t working, don’t try to fix everything at once: try changing just one element as a starting point in achieving your business goal. * Brick by brick — you’re not building the whole wall at once, you’re making a brick: every small action you take towards your business goal helps get you there. * Be less critical — don’t judge things you did wrong in the past: focus on the small changes that can take you forward in your chosen business goal. * Find the holes — find the little things that may be missing in your overall business goal plan and fix those. * What can you do that will bring the most value for the least amount of effort? (check my 80/20 rule podcast for tips on identifying those areas of improvement: Bit.ly/3q8k2c4)

About Karen Tiber Leland Karen Tiber Leland is the founder of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding, marketing, and color strategy and implementation firm helping CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs develop stronger personal, business, and team brands. Her clients include Cisco, American Express, Marriott Hotels, Apple Computer, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

She is also the best-selling author of nine traditionally-published business books that have sold over 400,000 copies and been translated into 10 languages. Her most recent book is The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand. She regularly writes for Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com and has had articles published in Self, The Los Angeles Times, American Way, The Boston Globe, and many others.

Karen has spoken for Harvard, The AMA, Direct Marketing Association, and Stanford, among others. She has been interviewed on The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, and Oprah.

Get in touch with Karen on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

Resources If you’re looking to optimize your time, be more productive, and fine-tune your routine, I invite you to pre-order my latest book No Nonsense Time Management: 50 Smart Solutions, Powerful Habits & Proven Time Hacks To Make The Most of Your Day.

Tweetables and Quotes to Share It’s really all about seeing what’s working, what’s not, and making fine-tuned adjustments as we go. PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2NlK51q @KarenFLeland

When something isn’t working, don’t try to fix everything at once, try changing just one element at a time. PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2NlK51q @KarenFLeland

You’re not building the whole wall at once, you’re making a brick. PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2NlK51q @KarenFLeland

If we move away from the dialogue of “It’s bad,” “it’s wrong,” “We should have done it a different way,” we actually move much faster. PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2NlK51q @KarenFLeland

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post Fine Tune Your Business Goals With Less Excuses & More Adjustments appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Is It Time For You To Embrace Mental Toughness?
Click To Tweet

Listen to the podcast on iTunes Dr. Ellen Reed is the co-author of Relentless Solution Focus, She has 15 years of extensive experience in cultivating mental toughness for consistency, accountability, and execution in business, athletics, academics, and the performing arts.

She joins the Thought Talk show today for an in-depth discussion on the impact mental focus has on achievement and performance. We will touch on the topic of how our brains are wired for seeing problems (problem-centric thought) and share tips on how to cultivate mental toughness.

Tips to Build Mental Toughness * Interrupt problem-centric thought patterns with the Relentless Solution Focus (RSF) tool — a ‘living’ question to ask yourself in the face of any problem: what is one thing I can do that could help make this better? * To build mental toughness — follow these three-steps

1. Recognize when your mind is focused on a problem — anytime you experience a negative emotion it is a clue that you are focusing on a problem.
2. Replace — use the RSF tool to find one thing you can do to make it better.

3. Retrain — use the two following tools every day:

   1. The centering breath: breathe in for six seconds, hold for two and out for seven.
   2. Daily success log, write down:
4. • • Three things you did well in the last 24 hours - One thing you want to improve in the next 24 hours - One thing you can do to make that improvement

About Karen Tiber Leland Karen Tiber Leland is the founder of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding, marketing, and color strategy and implementation firm helping CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs develop stronger personal, business, and team brands. Her clients include Cisco, American Express, Marriott Hotels, Apple Computer, LinkedIn, and Twitter

She is also the best-selling author of nine traditionally-published business books that have sold over 400,000 copies and been translated into 10 languages. Her most recent book is The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand. She regularly writes for Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com and has had articles published in Self, The Los Angeles Times, American Way, The Boston Globe, and many others.

Karen has spoken for Harvard, The AMA, Direct Marketing Association, and Stanford, among others. She has been interviewed on The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, and Oprah.

Get in touch with Karen on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

About Our Guest Dr. Ellen Reed has worked side by side with Dr. Jason Selk for over 10 years, and she has extensive experience in mental training for consistency, accountability, and execution in business, athletics, academics, and the performing arts. Dr. Reed helps numerous athletes, students, and business leaders reach their peak performance through developing the mental toughness necessary for success.

Dr. Reed utilizes her in-depth knowledge and experience in athletics and the performing arts to help athletes and teams from the student to the professional level overcome obstacles and outperform the competition. Dr. Reed also has substantial teaching experience in the University setting, and her background in both academia and the performing arts allows her to apply mental training techniques to success in business and academics.

You can learn more about Dr. Ellen Reed on her Website|LinkedIn|Facebook

Mentioned Relentless Solution Focus

Resources Do you think you might benefit from one-on-one branding and marketing consulting? If so, you might want to consider booking a Rent My Brain session.

During this one-hour, no-holds-barred consulting call you can bring up any marketing, social media, PR branding, business development, or content marketing issue you have that you might want some insight on.

You will walk away with actionable items and very specific information about your branding or marketing issue.

For more information or to book a session, contact me directly at karen@karenleland.com or visit Sterling Marketing Group.

Tweetables and Quotes to Share “Relentless Solution Focus is about the mind’s ability to stay focused, especially in the face of adversity. — Dr. Ellen Reed” PODCAST: https://bit.ly/3n0K9QP @KarenFLeland

“Optimism isn’t about turning a blind eye to your problem, it’s about getting to a solution faster. — Dr. Ellen Reed” PODCAST: https://bit.ly/3n0K9QP @KarenFLeland

“Problem-centric thought is normal, mental toughness is abnormal. — Dr. Ellen Reed” PODCAST: https://bit.ly/3n0K9QP @KarenFLeland

“If you allow problems and self-doubt to consume your thoughts, you’re not broken, you’re normal. — Dr. Ellen Reed” PODCAST: https://bit.ly/3n0K9QP @KarenFLeland

“60 seconds is long enough to recognize that your mind is focused on a problem. — Dr. Ellen Reed” PODCAST: https://bit.ly/3n0K9QP @KarenFLeland

“People get so consumed trying to take in the entirety of the problem that learned helplessness sets in and people don’t even get to the first step. — Dr. Ellen Reed” PODCAST: https://bit.ly/3n0K9QP @KarenFLeland

“Cortisol at moderate levels does some beneficial things for our performance, but at higher doses, it has a negative effect on our health and on our happiness. — Dr. Ellen Reed” PODCAST: https://bit.ly/3n0K9QP @KarenFLeland

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post Is It Time For You To Embrace Mental Toughness? appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Your personal brand isn’t just about you, it’s about raising the level of your business and it’s about giving your investors and your employees something to rally around.
Click To Tweet

[

Listen to the podcast on iTunes With COVID-19, more and more eyeballs are on us online, and our business and personal branding need to be sharp and effective. In today’s solo episode I bust the seven most common myths surrounding personal branding.

About Karen Tiber Leland Karen Tiber Leland is the founder of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding, marketing, and color strategy and implementation firm helping CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs develop stronger personal, business, and team brands. Her clients include Cisco, American Express, Marriott Hotels, Apple Computer, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

She is also the best-selling author of nine traditionally-published business books that have sold over 400,000 copies and been translated into 10 languages. Her most recent book is The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build, and Accelerate Your Brand. She regularly writes for Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com and has had articles published in Self, The Los Angeles Times, American Way, The Boston Globe, and many others.

Karen has spoken for Harvard, The AMA, Direct Marketing Association, and Stanford, among others. She has been interviewed on The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, and Oprah.

Get in touch with Karen on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

Mentioned “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters — Fast Company Magazine

Resources Do you think you might benefit from one-on-one branding and marketing consulting? If so, you might want to consider booking a Rent My Brain session.

During this one-hour, no-holds-barred consulting call, I promise to get to the heart of your marketing, social media, PR branding, business development, or content marketing question.

The feedback I give is to the point and precise: you will walk away with actions and solutions.

For more information or to book a session, contact me directly at karen@karenleland.com or visit Sterling Marketing Group.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post The Seven Myths of Personal Branding With Karen Tiber Leland appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

If it’s not super crisp and super perfect, that’s OK: it’s your consistency that matters.
Click To Tweet

[

Listen to the podcast on iTunes Video marketing has the capacity to create a connection and tell a multifaceted story that just words or audio can’t always accomplish.

I’m joined today by Nina Froriep from Clock Wise Productions to discuss what it takes to drive a successful video marketing campaign for a small business, why you need to be creating video, and the biggest mistakes to avoid.

Tips For Successful Video Marketing Online * Shorter is better — 90 seconds is ideal for a marketing video. * Choosing a platform — First, find out where your potential audience goes for their information, then show up there. * Biggest video marketing mistakes — Inconsistency, investing in too much equipment, and being too high-concept. * People like real people — be authentic, talk about what you know, be consistent, and give potential customers a feel for what it might be like to work with you.

About Karen Tiber Leland Karen Tiber Leland is the founder of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding, marketing, and color strategy and implementation firm helping CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs develop stronger personal, business, and team brands. Her clients include Cisco, American Express, Marriott Hotels, Apple Computer, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

She is also the best-selling author of nine traditionally-published business books that have sold over 400,000 copies and been translated into 10 languages. Her most recent book is The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build, and Accelerate Your Brand. She regularly writes for Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com and has had articles published in Self, The Los Angeles Times, American Way, The Boston Globe, and many others.

Karen has spoken for Harvard, The AMA, Direct Marketing Association, and Stanford, among others. She has been interviewed on The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, and Oprah.

Get in touch with Karen on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

About Our Guest Nina has seen it all from the early days on independent features, to big national TV commercials, corporate mega-shows, and many documentary films, including one she wrote, directed, and produced about Muslim kids in New York, called Abraham’s Children. In short, there’s no film or video production scenario she hasn’t taken care of.

Along the journey, she’s met many, many awesomely wonderful people and a few bad-asses. She’s worked with stars like Sophia Loren, John Malkovich, and Wynton Marsalis, she’s interviewed Fortune 500 CEOs, she’s worked on Emmy award-winning and Emmy-nominated documentaries, and produced hundreds of videos for uber-corporate shows.

She’s negotiated with teamsters, clients (big and small), actors, crew, children, police officers, a few dogs, and one snake.

You can learn more about Nina on her website.

Mentioned Clock Wise Productions

Adobe Premiere

iMovie

InShot

Resources Do you think you might benefit from one-on-one branding and marketing consulting? If so, you might want to consider booking a Rent My Brain session.

During this one-hour, no-holds-barred consulting call, I promise to get to the heart of your marketing, social media, PR branding, business development, or content marketing question.

The feedback I give is to the point and precise: you will walk away with actions and solutions.

For more information or to book a session, contact me directly at karen@karenleland.com or visit Sterling Marketing Group.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post Consistent Video Content Can Grow Your Business With Nina Froriep appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

The independent worker is a growing demographic but there aren’t many people well suited to look out for their best interests.
Click To Tweet

[

Listen to the podcast on iTunes Most people who choose independent work in the gig economy do so because they are pursuing career fulfillment, independence, and flexibility. But the trade-off is that you need to fend for yourself: withholding and remitting taxes, putting money aside for health insurance, retirement or paid sick leave, etc.

This can be overwhelming, but today I welcome Matthew Spoke, CEO of Moves Financial, to the show. Moves is a startup dedicated to helping independent workers achieve their financial goals.

We discuss what the gig economy is exactly, how it was expected to grow, and how COVID-19 impacted the timeline. We also touch on the increased demand for interim C-level executives and what the biggest pitfalls are for gig workers and the people who hire them.

Get to know the gig economy * Growing labor force trends: + Economic and industry instability — More people will choose independent work as a primary choice or to diversify income in the coming decades. + Increasing selection — More skills are being brought into the online marketplace every day.

• Tips for Gig workers:

  • Diversify — Make sure you have profiles on every platform to avoid your reputation being held hostage.
  • Financial hygiene — Understand your income and live below your means so you can put money aside.

• Tips for hiring gig workers:

  • Do your due diligence — Investigate reviews to avoid the most common pain points.

About Our Guest Matthew Spoke is the Founder and CEO of Moves, a fintech company for the gig economy, and the Open Foundation, a not-for-profit designed to steward the Open Application Network (The OAN). For many years, Matthew has been a leading advocate for the potential social benefits of decentralized technologies in the world. Matthew has been an entrepreneur for five years, through which he’s had the opportunity to serve as a founding board member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and a founding director of the Blockchain Technology Coalition of Canada. He’s also served as an advisor to governments on the regulatory implications of new technologies like blockchain on the future world of finance.

You can learn more about Matthew Spoke on Twitter and LinkedIn

Mentioned Moves Financial

TaskRabbit

Thumbtack

Resources Do you think you might benefit from one-on-one branding and marketing consulting? If so, you might want to consider booking a Rent My Brain session with Karen.

During this one-hour, no-holds-barred consulting call, I promise to get to the heart of your marketing, social media, PR branding, business development, or content marketing question.

The feedback I give is to the point and precise: you will walk away with actions and solutions.

For more information or to book a session, contact me directly at karen@karenleland.com or visit Sterling Marketing Group.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post Navigating the Gig Economy with Moves' Matthew Spoke appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

“If you think of Twitter as just this 280-character kind of chit-chat where the majority of people post about a tuna fish sandwich they had for lunch, then you really need to think about it again.”
Click To Tweet

Listen to the podcast on iTunes Today Karen talks about tweeting your way to the top — how you can use Twitter to build your business, your book, or your brand online.

When you consider that 44% of Twitter users are between 18 and 34, that 69% are moms, and that 72% who follow a brand are likely to buy, it’s an opportunity you might not want to pass over. But like all social media, effectiveness boils down to a few factors that Karen breaks down in a comprehensive way in this short, informative episode.

Tips for Tweets * Relationships — Connect, expand, and maintain. * Generate leads and get attention — Twitter can give you access to people in your field, otherwise impossible to reach. * Branding and image building — Use Twitter to gain perspective on your own image. * Buzz and promo — It’s a great place to build some excitement over a new product. * Consistency is key — Posting should be done 2 to 4 times a day, 5 days a week.

Using Twitter strategically can be a real boon for marketing a book, business, product, or brand. If you find that it’s a good fit for you but you’d like more information after listening in to this podcast, feel free to reach out to karen@karenleland.com for a great little 30-minute audio workbook called Tweet Your Way to the Top.

About Karen Tiber Leland Karen Tiber Leland is the founder of Sterling Marketing Group, a branding, marketing, and color strategy and implementation firm helping CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs develop stronger personal, business, and team brands. Her clients include Cisco, American Express, Marriott Hotels, Apple Computer, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

She is also the best-selling author of nine traditionally-published business books that have sold over 400,000 copies and been translated into 10 languages. Her most recent book is The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build, and Accelerate Your Brand. She regularly writes for Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com and has had articles published in Self, The Los Angeles Times, American Way, The Boston Globe, and many others.

Karen has spoken for Harvard, The AMA, Direct Marketing Association, and Stanford, among others. She has been interviewed on The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, and Oprah.

Get in touch with Karen on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

Resources Karen’s new book No Nonsense Time Management: 50 Tips to Hack Your Time and Get Everything Done will be coming out in paperback and Kindle on December 1st, 2020, but it is available for preorder right now.

This book will help you fight distraction and find your focus, go for your goals, and master online life.

Take a moment to check it out here.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post Tweeting Your Way To The Top with Karen Tiber Leland appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Nonprofits need people to sit on their boards, they need board members that are savvy about sitting on their boards. They don’t just need someone to give them advice.
Click To Tweet

[

Listen to the podcast on iTunes Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Caroline Boudreaux, a social entrepreneur and the Founder of the Miracle Foundation. The Foundation is committed to a family for every child in our lifetime.

Caroline and I take some time to talk about philanthropy and charity in trying times, the three “Ts” of philanthropy, as well as the challenges nonprofits face compared to for profit businesses.

Tips * In 1989, the U.N. ratified the Rights of the Child — 12 measurable things kids need to reach their full potential and the life skills training the Miracle Foundation provides for children to activate their rights. * The three “Ts” of philanthropy — Caroline details the ways you can help even in times of financial instability. * The little girl on the wooden bed — Sheebani is the child that began it all 20 years ago, she is now in nursing school. * The double standards faced by nonprofits — paying for marketing and talent is called overhead.

About Our Guest Caroline Boudreaux is a social entrepreneur and Founder of the Miracle Foundation.

In May 2000, on Mother’s Day, Caroline’s life changed forever as she visited India for the first time and met a group of more than 100 orphaned children. The children were bald and filthy with empty-looking eyes — yet she saw their incredible potential. Since that day, she has committed her life to help orphaned children realize that potential.

Caroline is a firecracker Cajun who was born and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana and attended Louisiana State University where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Prior to her nonprofit work, she had a successful career in media advertising.

For her achievements with Miracle Foundation, Caroline was presented with the Hope Award in 2005, the Impact Award in 2008, and the United Nations Humanitarian Award in 2017. Caroline is a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum and has completed executive programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Yale’s Jackson Institute for Diplomacy, and the India School of Business.

Caroline often speaks to heads of states, the press, and companies around the world.

Find out more and get in touch with Caroline on her Website|Twitter|LinkedIn|Instagram|Facebook|Youtube

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post The Importance of Philanthropy During COVID-19 With Miracle Foundation’s Caroline Boudreaux appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.

View Details

Now more than ever we need to take a deep breath, step back, and take a sober look at our future financial plans.
Click To Tweet

[

Listen to the podcast on iTunes Joanna Burish joins the show today to share her expertise as a licensed holistic financial planner with Northwestern Mutual. Her family office focuses on three ways her clients can have more power and control over their finances.

In today’s Thought Talk podcast we discuss the importance of partnering with your financial planning advisor, the difference between good and bad debt, the three financial items you must handle as a result of the COVID pandemic, and how to work with a “financial quarterback” to keep you on track.

Tips for Financial Planning * Holistic VS Siloed planning. * Finding the right holistic financial planner. Striking a balance between comfortable and challenging. * Short- and long-term plans — in times of COVID, make sure your fight-or-flight response is mitigated and you keep making decisions that align with your long term plan. * The three things you need to have a handle on right now — 1. Keyman insurance, 2. tax-free, tax-deferred, and whole life insurance and 3. portfolio allocation and diversification.

About Our Guest Joanna earned her B.A. in Accounting with a focus on Finance and Real Estate, and her MBA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She has combined her extraordinary business and artistic sensibilities into a rich and diverse career over the last 25 years including as the CEO to Real Estate portfolios ranging from $130MM- $450MM, the CEO of her film and music company working with top film and music labels and artists, and today she manages her own holistic family financial planning office at Northwestern Mutual.

This full service endeavor offers top leaders, business owners, and family businesses a holistic approach for wealth growth and preservation, lifestyle protection, and making sure clients don’t run out of money, today or in retirement.

Joanna is passionate about giving back to her community serving multiple Boards. She founded The Brauds Network in 2011: a non-profit organization of female leaders empowering each other to optimize growth opportunities.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes The post Holistic Financial Planning — Finding Your Financial Quarterback With Joanna Burish appeared first on Sterling Marketing Group.