In this final installment of the podcast series with my good mate and bestselling author Tim Sanders, we talk about how to deal with receiving difficult feedback. This is obviously an concept important for all entrepreneurs but especially those in the early stages, and Tim has some great insights to share (hint: Tim’s grandmother = one brilliant lady). Later on we delve into one of my favorite concepts from Making It Happen: Moving the Market.

You have a great idea. You know it’s the next big thing. So big, in fact, that no one else is doing it, which also means that there is next to no market data to prove that there will be any demand. What do you do? You move the market.

I never knew I needed a flatscreen television… until I saw one. And suddenly I knew that my life would never be complete until I had one for myself. I needed a flat screen. Now, I wasn’t prepared to pay the $10,000 price tag for a 40 inch model that was about as graceful as a ’63 Zeta and weighed just as much, but I did know I would certainly buy one when they became competitive. This really was a case of build it and they will come. And now thanks to Avatar, it seems the market has shifted again – flatscreen is old news, 3D technology is everywhere.

How do you manage tough feedback? What is your favorite example of a product/service/company/individual that singlehandedly moved the market?

For more information and insights from Tim, check out www.timsanders.com or on Twitter at @sanderssays. His most recent book is Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence .

Just a quick post: if you’re interested in listening to the conversation with Jeff Hayzlett from start to finish, here is the complete podcast. And send us your thoughts!

For more information about Jeff and The Mirror Test, visit hayzlett.com or on Twitter at @jeffreyhayzlett.

I’ll keep this short. Tim has one of the best routines I’ve heard to get his day going. If you implement these few things, I have no doubt of the positive impact it will have on the rest of your day.

And he brings up an interesting point: be selective on how much ‘junk food’ you put into your brain, because quality of input has a direct correlation with quality of output. Design your day so a) you own your technology so your technology doesn’t own you (to paraphrase Tim) and b) you don’t spend all your valuable free time on activities with so-called ‘empty calories’. Now, no one is chastising you for your favorite guilty-pleasure television habits (or video games, or whatever your brain junk food might be). I’m saying this as someone with a serious addiction to The West Wing, and every year around Christmas I put on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and really let myself just stop. Everyone needs to turn off sometimes. But for the rest of your day, be selective about where you get your news, be disciplined about how much time you spend on YouTube or Facebook, and beware letting yourself become a slave to your inbox.

What’s your favorite way to feed your mind?

For more information and insights from Tim, check out www.timsanders.com or on Twitter at @sanderssays. His most recent book is Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence .

Just a quick chat from the podcast series with Jeff Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak and bestselling author of The Mirror Test. As a rockstar CMO, Jeff really understands what drives people not just to buy, but to buy from you, and gives us a few tips on how to align with the Influence competency we discuss in Making It Happen.

Jeff also knows a thing or two about achieving scale and ‘adding zeros’, so I asked for some of his insight on the next competency in Making It Happen: Acceleration. This is the idea that when you get your business rolling, you begin with disproportionately poor returns on the time and effort that you put into your offer, but once you cross the mental barrier of the market you suddenly receive disproportionately good returns on your investment; in other words, this is the art of generating revenue without working 27 hours a day, eight days a week. Sounds pretty good, right?

What are you doing to accelerate your returns?

For more information about Jeff and The Mirror Test, visit hayzlett.com or on Twitter at @jeffreyhayzlett.

In this installment from my conversation with bestselling author Tim Sanders, he gives us his insights on how to prepare for confronting the three decisions you have to help every buyer to go through:

1) “Do I really need this?”
2) “Do I believe your offer can satisfy that need?” and
3) “Do I feel like you’re the person I want to buy this from?”

We talk about this in Making It Happen, and Tim says the key is to clarify and start living your value proposition. It’s knowing what business you’re actually in. It’s about understanding understanding customer process – from their side of the equation – and how to better serve your clients. If you stop thinking about the product, put some thought into refining what business you’re in, you can enhancing and embodying your value proposition which will unequivocally set you apart from the competition.

Listen here, and then let us know what you think.

For more information and insights from Tim, check out www.timsanders.com or on Twitter at @sanderssays. His most recent book is Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence .

Then we gave a certain equal number of poker chips to their board and they got to divvy up their chips in whatever way, shape, and form that they liked. The results were surprising and provided a key insight into the way the group was communicating: one jar got more than 90 percent of all the chips, and that jar was probably one of the most underserved initiatives currently being run by the association. So related to that, I think that we often spread ourselves out too thin with our ideas, either by trying to sell it to too many people at one time or to appeal to too many markets at one time.

To bring that down to the level of the individual entrepreneur or change-maker, I’ve seen this be a real trap for many early-stage businesses. The compulsion to be everything to everyone is natural, especially in the beginning when we are so full of ideas and possibilities. Combined with the eagerness to see your customer base grow, suddenly the offer has gotten so broad that no one really knows what you do, and you end up cutting yourself off from the market instead of growing. Let me say it another way: getting sharp in the beginning will earn you the trust of the market, which will in turn create more opportunities. Done right, getting narrow early gives you the ability to go broad later.

So to sum up: the first one reason we see ideas fail is that the idea itself is too abstract. It’s communicated in too abstract a term like ‘I want to do social media.’ Number two is inertia, whether it be from fear or overcomplicated bureaucracy. Third is the reluctance or inability to narrow in who you’re targeting with ideas. Be sharp in what you want to do, take decisive action, and be clear on where you want to go.

I’ve often said that the world is not short of new ideas. We are short of people who can execute those ideas, and so many potentially brilliant enterprises end up on the cutting room floor. I was recently asked why these ideas fail; what are some of the reasons that entrepreneurs, idea generators and change makers stop short of bringing their ideas to life?

I would say the very first reason is that no one gets narrow enough in taking that idea and packaging it in what I would call a commercial offer. If you’re not in business, don’t let that term scare you; ‘commercial’ simply means that it’s something that someone can actually buy into. It is one thing to have an idea, an aspiration; it’s a whole other thing to package that in such a way that people can part with time, money, and energy for whatever that idea is. So I’d say number one is that people fail to get too narrow in exactly what that idea is.

For example, I speak most often at corporate events, and I don’t think there’s a conference I’ve been at in the last three years where I haven’t heard, “We all need to be on Twitter,” or “we all need to be on Facebook,” and “we must be onboard with social media.” And that’s an interesting idea, but to what end? What’s the purpose of it? What’s the focus of it? What’s the contribution of it? What value are you going to add in that environment? What value are you going to take from it?

Going that extra layer down helps you get much more focused exactly on what it is you want to in, say, social media and then with that more narrow focus you have a much greater ability to pick your messaging, designate who is in charge of it or depending on your business, you might actually create no content yourself, merely syndicate content from people around your industry. But make sure that whatever you decide to do, you are actually creating value, not just adding noise, and make sure that you’re receiving value as well. Don’t let things like social media be a time-suck just because everyone is buzzing about it; it may turn out that social media actually isn’t right for your business, or not right now, and you are better off dedicating your resources to more important tasks.

I’d say reason number two is simply a lack of activity. One of the challenges I’ve witnessed in some environments (I think is particularly difficult for not-for-profits or other cause-related environments) is the presence of usually quite large boards and very diverse stakeholders, all of which have some say in the future direction of that organization. As a result of that, you sometimes become paralyzed by attempts to gain consensus. It is vital to have passionate people on your team, but sometimes they are holding on to a set of beliefs or set of assumptions about what that organization may need to look like in the future, but they’re anchored in the practices and processes of the past. The big challenge is overcoming that inertia, and leaders need to take the reins in driving activity and even being a little more guerilla in their attempt to influence their stakeholders.

<< Stay tuned for Part II >>

This is the second episode in the podcast series with Jeff Hayzlett, celebrity CMO and bestselling author of The Mirror Test.

Today we focus on understanding and crafting a more effective elevator pitch, the counter-instinctual (but crucial) process of ‘weeding out’ your customers, and the potential pitfalls of ‘the strategy of free’. A hint: even if you’re giving it away, be it time, money or energy, never let it be passed off as ‘free’ – because it isn’t!*

For more information about Jeff and The Mirror Test, visit hayzlett.com or on Twitter at @jeffreyhayzlett.

*And if you’re having trouble naming the value, refer back to this conversation with Dan Ariely in which he talks about finding value through association.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking with Jeff Hayzlett, bestselling author and former CMO of Kodak. Jeff is an absolute force of nature; he has driven some of the most innovative (and aggressive) marketing strategies I’ve known. His most recent book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing? is a must-read for anyone in business, and particularly anyone in the early stages of starting a business.

In this first podcast, Jeff talks to us about some of the practices from The Mirror Test and why it’s so important for entrepreneurs to ask the toughest questions early on. Think about it: why would anyone take on so much risk if we aren’t willing to take on our own reflection and get real about what we’re doing? Isn’t that just increasing the amount of risk we’re assuming, unnecessarily?

He also gives some examples of practical questions to ask and how to go about getting those answers. In Making It Happen, we talk about the idea of “10,000 hours to mastery,” and Jeff gives some great insight into his experience with that as well.

Hope you enjoy listening, and keep an eye out for the next few episodes in which we’ll hear more from Jeff developing a more effective elevator pitch, weeding out your customers, achieving scale and naming value vs. the “strategy of free”.

For more information about Jeff and The Mirror Test, visit hayzlett.com or on Twitter at @jeffreyhayzlett.

On the other side, Stibel weighs in to say, “I have heard plenty of people argue that no one individual is worth the price of many. But interestingly, I have never heard it from a leader.” Turning to his research in neurological science, he notes that in fact, “our brains work very well individually but tend to break down in groups” and that there is a point of diminishing marginal returns when teams reach a certain size.

I’m going to agree and disagree here; neither is entirely right or entirely wrong. There is no discounting impact of the super-productive individual employee, and every company has its bright spots. If you look at people’s participation—you can chart it on a bell curve—generally you’ve got 10%-15% who are highly active. Tapping that 10%-15% is the key to generating new approaches and propelling growth. But, as many of the commenters on either article point out, once the decision has been made, an individual will reach output capacity at a certain point. Consider Michaelangelo and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; one individual genius envisioned the piece and was able to communicate it to a team to carry it out. The team of builders could not have come up with the design, but it was beyond Michaelangelo’s capacity as an individual to complete. Or Beethoven and the 5th Symphony: no individual can play it, but no orchestra could have written it. That’s the difference. Conceptual genius is almost always individual. Crowds don’t innovate. Individuals innovate; crowds evaluate, support, and obviously are an essential component to achieving scale.

The value in collaboration is when it is interdisciplinary, bringing together genius across siloes to understand the bigger picture. Just think: what could your company accomplish if you all knew what you all know? I just posted a review of the book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson. Johnson cites work by Koestler which looks at real time studies of breakthroughs in labs, finding that key breakthroughs are often made in the meeting of cross-functional teams. Real discoveries are made on the very edges of expertise between fields or functions; or as I like to say, money gets made in the cracks.

Now, I happen to think that my company ChangeLabs is an outlier in this respect: we have a disproportionate number of super-productive individuals who also collaborate extremely well when brought together in teams. It is a phenomenon for which no one person in our organization can take all the credit; it is reinforced through company culture by each individual player.

One great performer can be powerful enough to elevate an average team’s performance. The trick is to spot that genius early on and begin grooming that person for leadership. Maximum efficacy rests not just on being outstanding as individuals, but also in ones ability to interact with and inspire others. Part of this relies on company processes and making sure potential bright spots are not overburdened with extraneous procedures and red tape, or they will turn that genius to interests outside the organization.

Weigh in here. In theory, what would you think makes more sense? In practice, where has your organization (small or large) found the most value – individual rock stars or complimentary teams?