How do companies foster the creativity needed to produce their next great business idea, product or service?
Josh Linkner believes he has the answers to that question.
Linkner’s new book, “Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity” (Jossey-Bass/Wiley), recently debuted at No. 1 on the Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists and No. 4 on The New York Times Bestseller List.
Linkner will share his ideas about generating creativity in business when he comes to Milwaukee to be the keynote speaker at the Executive Strategies Breakfast to kick off the BizTech Expo and Conference to be presented by BizTimes Media LLC on Wednesday, May 11.
Linkner’s presentation is tailor-made for Milwaukee’s growing creative economy.
“One idea is all it takes. One idea is all it takes to change your career. One idea is all it takes to change your company. One idea is all it takes to change your state. One idea is all it takes to change America. One idea is all it takes to change the world. And if you think about, one idea is the only thing that ever has,” Linkner said.
An early Internet marketing visionary, Linkner is the founder, chairman and former CEO of ePrize, the largest interactive promotion agency in the world. Over the past 12 years, ePrize has grown to have more than 1,200 employees and provides digital marketing services for 74 of the top 100 brands in the world.
Linkner’s creative insights are helping companies in a variety of applications:
- New product innovation.
- Building and leading creative cultures.
- Creative approaches to sales and marketing.
- Crafting differentiated competitive strategies.
- Expanding into new markets.
- Unorthodox problem solving.
- Applying creativity to startups and high-growth companies.
Linkner has been featured in hundreds of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, AdAge, Inc. magazine, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and AdWeek, and he is a frequent keynote speaker at industry events and conferences. He has won multiple business, technology and design awards, including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, The Inc. 500 (six years in a row), Crain’s Detroit Business 40 under 40, Fast Company’s Fast 50, the Detroit Executive of the Year and the Automation Alley CEO of the Year.
By age 30, Linkner had started four companies and sold three of them. Linkner recently launched his fifth company, Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm. Along with business partners Dan Gilbert and Brian Hermelin, Linkner is actively investing in early-stage technology companies looking to help rebuild the Detroit region through entrepreneurship.
Linkner was recently interviewed by BizTimes executive editor Steve Jagler. The following are excerpts from that interview.
BizTimes: Now that you’ve taken to the road to promote the book with public appearances, what kind of feedback are you getting from readers?
Linkner: “It’s just been terrific. Like every author, you write a book and hope that it is going to make a difference in the world. The feedback has been outrageous. I’ve had feedback from principals at high schools who email me and say what a difference it has made on their educational system. I’ve had business leaders say that it has changed their direction. So really, it is a significant impact. I’ve spoken to audiences. It is very rewarding to get applause, but what’s much more meaningful is for someone to later say, ‘Hey, this has really changed my approach to life’ or made their business grow, and that’s the reason I wrote the book and the reason I speak to audiences. It’s making a difference in people’s lives, and I’m very fortunate to see that that’s happening.”
BizTimes: In the epilogue you write about the “Power of One.” For me, that’s where all of this starts. Having the audacity to pursue one idea. Can you expand on that for our readers?
Linkner: “In many business systems, they only drive value if you apply them 24/7 for years in a row. Creativity, being non-linear, isn’t so much the case. In fact, that’s a good thing. In other words, one big idea can have an enormous impact on your company, on your career or even your community. If you think about it in history, often the biggest transformational change has been driven by one big idea. Having the audacity to launch an idea and follow through on it and not let the fear hold you back. What I really learned is that each of us as human beings has tremendous creative potential, but we so often hold those creative ideas back because of fear and other reasons. It’s having the courage to dig deep and grab onto that one idea and then let that one idea come out to play.”
BizTimes: You say that playing it safe is the riskiest choice of all, especially given the pace the world moves these days. What do you mean by that?
Linkner: “Thirty years ago, playing it safe meant you get a college degree, go get a job at a big company, put your head down, do what you’re told and then retire 40 years later with a gold watch. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Today we live in a world of ruthless competition, busying speed and exponential complexity, and what’s happened is that the seemingly safe choice, meaning keeping your head down and not trying new things, those are the first people that get laid off. The companies that behave like that are the first ones to get dislodged and disrupt their innovation. Really, today we don’t have the luxury to sit back and watch the world go by. We need to leap into action and apply creativity to stand out.
“The world has become so complex that ‘me-too’ competitors don’t win anymore. We live in a world that is a sea of sameness. For companies and individuals to stand out from the crowd and ultimately to win, they need to exhibit a much higher level of creativity than we did in the past.”
BizTimes: How does a company go about creating a corporate culture that encourages and nurtures creativity?
Linkner: “The good news is that, not only from my own experience, but I also interviewed 200 thought leaders, artists, musicians, billionaires, nonprofit leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs and found a lot of common ground in what the best of the best do to build, nurture and manage creativity. So, that was the basis of the book. There’s this proven system to drive creativity both in the individuals and as a team. This is a five-step process, very easy to follow. It doesn’t require years and years of study, it’s quite intuitive actually and when applied can make a huge difference.
“The first step is ‘ask,’ which is about defining your creative target. In other words, finding out where you want to lead your creativity. It’s also about awakening curiosity and opening your mind to awareness. A lot of this is about challenging conventional wisdoms, shaking up the status quo and really not just saluting the flag of the past, but moving forward in a more thoughtful and meaningful way for the future.”
BizTimes: In the second step, you mention the importance of creating a physical workspace that fuels creativity; can you expand on that?
Linkner: “In the ‘prepare’ phase, it’s all about getting ready for optimum creativity. Think about an athlete. If you were playing in the Super Bowl, you wouldn’t just jump out of a cab, run onto the field and five minutes later play in the game. No, you show up early, have the right equipment, you train, practice, stretch, you have a pump up meeting with the coach.
“‘Prepare’ involves preparing three things: preparing your physical environment, your mental state, as well as your culture to drive optimal creativity. We found that putting people in windowless rooms, with bad fluorescent lighting and no stimuli is not the way to drive creativity. Think about great artists and musicians and authors who for decades have gone to beautiful places to be inspired. It doesn’t mean you need to redecorate, but even if you take your team to the local art museum, it can be a big source of inspiration.
“Also, in regards to culture, in this stage, it’s about setting up the groundwork for a culture of creativity and essentially giving yourself and colleagues permission to be creative. Often we hold ourselves back or work in bureaucracies that sharply criticize and punish any fresh ideas. The biggest thing here is making sure your culture is one that supports responsible risk taking, open mindedness and helps nurture ideas, rather than quickly extinguishing them.”
BizTimes: What happens in the third step, the “discover” step?
Linkner: “In ‘discover,’ it’s almost like you’re an archeologist on the lookout for clues, so you’re sort of looking underneath the rocks and finding creativity where it often hides. Getting all types of input and gathering little ideas for creativity that can then be used toward your business problem. So, you’re looking for things like inflection points in the marketplace, and what are some of the forces of change that are happening right now? For example, we are trying to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, so what type of business opportunity does that spur? Or we have a certain type of population shift in terms of demographic, so what do those opportunities uncover? This is kind of like gathering ammunition and discovering little pockets of creativity that you could ultimately drive toward the task at hand.”
BizTimes: In the fourth step, the “ignite” step, you talk about the importance of creating “small sparks,” even if they are incomplete. Can you explain that for us?
Linkner: “In ‘ignite,’ this is the fun stuff, this is where the rubber hits the road, where you take all this work and preparation and let your ideas really come on out to play. It’s a really interesting phenomenon that in the business world, we think that a new idea has to be fully baked. Often we hold ourselves back if we have a little spark of an idea vs. being fully baked. We don’t share it at all. It’s so strange. The equivalent would be, giving birth to a child and then expecting them to be a college graduate five minutes later and fully self-sufficient. Of course it is ridiculous, but we expect that with our ideas, and really the way creativity works, if you have a little spark of an idea, it’s more important to get it out there. Just like an infant, you nurture it, coddle it, support it and feed it and then that idea can grow into something that’s very powerful.
“Its not like Steve Jobs with the blink of an eye got the idea for the iPod and had the musical distribution system change. Of course not. It started with a little spark and then built into something very powerful. The idea of letting sparks come out, little pieces of ideas, rather than fully baked ones, and nurturing them rather than jumping on them and extinguishing them.”
BizTimes: That’s intriguing. The final step is ‘launch.’ I loved the Chinese proverb you cited, “Man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.” What does that mean and how does a small spark of an idea materialize in the real world?
Linkner: “When I wrote the book, I wanted to have a rigorous business system around the process of creativity, and to do that, you need to think, ‘How do I put these ideas into action?’ ‘Launch’ is often an overlooked step, which is sort of like saying this: ‘Now the whiteboard is full of ideas, you may have 200 cool insights but how do you separate the not-so-good ones from the good ones and pull them into action?’ ‘Launch” is reintroducing your analytical mind to the creative process, saying, ‘How do we shape these ideas into something that’s practical that we can execute and drive real business value?”
BizTimes: How can an old-line manufacturer benefit from an influx in creativity?
Linkner: “Those companies can benefit more than anybody else because many companies are used to doing things in a traditional way. But the thing is the world has changed dramatically, especially over the past five years. There’s another great quote from Jack Wallace that says, ‘If the rate of change on the outside is greater than the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.’ And so many of those companies have probably suffered a lot of pain. There’s been outsourcing, foreign manufacturing, there’s been different changes with auto manufacturers, and so the world is in a state of flux. If they just rely on the models of the past and hope for the best, that can really be a significant problem.
“These companies need to get creative. They need to get creative in terms of their approach to business, even if they’re still going to make the same goods, with the same piece of equipment, it doesn’t mean they need to make it in the same way, it doesn’t mean they need to sell it in the same way, it doesn’t mean they need to run their businesses in the same way. Often creativity and product innovation are intermixed, when they shouldn’t be.
BizTimes: How important is the creative economy to a region’s economic future?
Linkner: “It is incredibly important, because we’re seeing in the off-shoring and outsourcing of other types of roles, so what I think is happening is we’ve become a creative society, and I believe that we went from the industrial age to the information age, now we are really in the creative age. In other words, information is no longer a way to win; everybody has the access to information with Google and Wikipedia, so that’s not a winning strategy anymore. Today, it’s what you do with that information and how do you solve customer problems or internal business problems in an interesting, new, remarkable way. I know a lot of people talk about the creative industries and the creative class. I actually think that today, creativity is everyone’s job. We often equate creativity with job title, and I think that is very wrong. We might say a musician is creative and an accountant is not creative, but there are musicians in professional symphony orchestras that aren’t creative at all. They play the notes on the page, they’re brilliant technicians, but they aren’t creating anything. On the other hand, we know just how creative accountants can be if we look at Enron, so I don’t think that job title and creativity are that linked. Someone can be in an industry like manufacturing, but today they may need creativity more than ever.”
BizTimes: Your latest venture is a venture capital fund to drive the rebirth of the Detroit economy. How is this venture going, and how will you see a new Detroit ultimately being formed?
Linkner: “I really believe Detroit is on the verge of tipping point. When Detroit was born through entrepreneurial fire, people like Henry Ford put us on the map. And then unfortunately we suffered several decades of decay, and that was because we had a sense of entitlement, we started pointing fingers at each other, we built stifling bureaucracies and we got away from that creative entrepreneurial root.
“The good news is that we are at the tipping point of coming back to that creative fire. My firm, Detroit Venture Partners, was started with the hopes of rebuilding the entrepreneurship. The thing about the impact that one or two successes can make on a region – two venture companies in Seattle – Microsoft and Starbucks transformed that entire region. If we could have a couple hits here in Detroit, help diversify the economy a bit and help drive not only tax-bases and jobs, but hope. I think that you’re going to see a really profound change over the next five to ten years. We are seeing a lot of people deeply committed to their regions.
“There are actually a lot of positive attributes about being in Detroit. I think Detroit and Milwaukee have many similarities. I think a lot of things that are going to help Detroit’s renaissance and rebirth could also have a positive impact on Milwaukee. We are seeing a lot of positive changes in Detroit right now, which is good. To a certain degree, Detroit is a microcosm of the U.S., and we made a huge impact on the world in our heyday. We suffered a bit over the last several decades, but now is a pivotal moment. Now is a defining moment to rebuild and once again be a beacon of hope throughout the rest of the U.S.”
