Why Founders Who Admit ‘I Don’t Know’ Will Win the AI Race - Alan Gregerman

Hey, what's going on everyone? Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you big ideas on how to grow. I'm Mike serious and today we are discussing A counterintuitive one.

What if not knowing is actually your biggest advantage in the age of AI? Joining me is Alan Gregerman, Innovation consultant, award-winning author, a keynote speaker who's worked with over 350 leading organizations including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Verizon, Citibank's and others. Alan's new book, The Wisdom of Ignorance, Why not Knowing can be the Key to Innovation in an Uncertain world, challenges everything we have been taught about expertise and leadership. Alan, I'm so excited to go into that.

Welcome. Oh well, thanks. Awesome. I'm delighted to be here.

Delighted to share some ideas with your audience. Excellent. So we'd love to start with this one. Alan, When I say mastering test growth, what comes to mind?

Well, so think about the fact that every business in some way needs to use tech. Now, they're businesses that are specifically tech focused, but every business needs to use technology to deliver greater value to their customers. So when I think about mastering tech growth, I think about how every business can grow and needs to grow by using technology in the most compelling way. OK.

So let me make this more difficult. From all the things that influence business growth and we want to keep this for technology businesses from all the things marketing, sales, better teams, market fits and all that. I want to say metrics, but it could be just a thing, right? If you choose one, what would be at the top from your point of view?

Well, so from my point of view, it's people and curiosity, OK, and we'll talk about this, I'm guessing more later. But I feel like the key to business success is figuring out something that's more valuable than anyone else offers, that resonates with a significant enough customer base. And so I really think about the way we're going to do this is actually as people to be brilliant and curious and creative. So that's what I focus on.

That's what I've been focusing on in our business for the last a lot of years. And so I really think of people being the key. Find a problem that you believe really matters and it can be a business business problem, it can be a broader problem. And then once you figure out that problem and are really excited about solving that problem, then all these other things come into play.

I need the right technology, I need the right ideas, I need the right people. I need to be good at sales and marketing. But the key first is you've got to figure out something that matters, and then you've got to be passionate about making it happen. OK, so we effectively seeing a problem fit If, if I can define this, this came up as a definition in in other episodes.

Find a problem which exists and people are willing to pay for it. That's what we're saying. And then get excited about this to actually solve that problem. Well, so I think exactly.

I mean we have to figure out a market opportunity in order to be viable as a tech business or any business. As a tech business, we should figure out a market opportunity in which technology helps us to deliver greater value to customer. But also, I want people to think about the reality that the world is changing super fast and technology is changing super fast. So the reality is I could start with an idea problem and the way I solve it today is going to be different than the way I'm going to solve it three or five years down the road.

So what drives me is, am I passionate about something that really matters? And then I'm going to keep iterating and figuring out along the way how to be awesome. Excellent. I love that.

All right, So let me ask this. For a long time, success in business was about knowing more than everybody else, being the expert in our own. When you think back and to that era, and I'm sort of implying that era is over, but when you think back a little bit, what made this model so effective? Well, I think what made the model so effective before was that we tended to believe that companies would be smart and provide us the things we needed.

I believe we're in an era where customers are the ones who drive even more the decisions and the offerings of business. So think about that. In an era before companies used to say, well, I know someone has this need. Let's take a great example.

So many of your listeners are probably aware of the amazing Dyson vacuum cleaner, okay? I do have it. I do have it. I'm not sure every one of your listeners would spend the equivalent of 2000 U.

S. dollars or whatever that is like 1500 lbs to buy one of these things. But so the folks at Dyson said people vacuum, OK, let's figure out the perfect cordless vacuum cleaner. And in fact, they made 5000 iterations before it ever went on to the market.

And Dyson's actually fairly proud to talk about I think it was like 5041 iteration. He said we tweaked it this many times before it was Showtime, OK, and then it went out. There's things that are needs that people have and maybe we figure out using expertise how to make those things better in some way that people want them. But the reality is today customers needs are evolving and we're way better off to not be expert, but rather to engage with our customers or a set of customers we'd like to have as our customers and then ask them what they need and then quickly go back and figure it out.

I don't need a ton of expertise to do that. I might need to rely on a few experts, but rather I need to know what folks need and then I need to be faster than anybody else and figuring out a solution that's valuable. That's excellent. So we basically saying that don't assume you know better than your customer.

You know you might be the best expert in whatever field you created business in, but don't assume you know what needs to get built right. Don't apply your expertise to make that assumption. Go to your customer and ask what they actually need. Well, exactly so.

So our customers are way more important than what we know. But think about it. I start a business because I'm expert in something and so I believe my expertise is the most important thing. But if my expertise and what ioffer isn't tied to the customers being more successful, it doesn't matter at all.

And I think customers are more thoughtful and smarter. Remember, customers can get a lot, a lot of information today. Customers literally have like a supercomputer in their hands and so they can find things out. Customers can see what are the best ideas out there and so they have an expectation about how I and how I might use technology are going to meet their needs.

I have to find that out first before I start to just create something somewhere. OK. So at which point and the expertise stops helping and start holding leaders back or leaders owners of business? Well, so there are two things to think about.

The first is I need to understand what matters to customers. The second is I actually need to understand why they think an offering will be valuable, because I might have the expertise to create something in some way, but it's not the way they really need. And so I want to think about those two things. So here's what I think.

OK, you're smart. You and a few colleagues are super smart. You have an idea for something. Spend a weekend, eat a really good pizza, drink some really good beer, and come up with a 75% solution.

That's a weekend. I'm not sitting for months trying to figure out how to perfect something. Then go out and find some customers and ask them what they think of it and if they say this is pretty awesome, but I would do it this way Now I'm going to tweak it based either on my expertise or stuff I don't know yet, and I'm going to try and figure out how to get them super excited about it. I've invested a weekend of brainstorming and then I've invested a few weeks in getting their feedback and then I figure out what I need to do that's so different than what most companies have done in the past.

Sit and hide somewhere. Try and perfect my app or my software, my website or my product, and then when I got it right, I send it out there. What if it's not perfect for customers? I've made a huge investment.

So where does expertise end? I believe expertise ends as we think of it as expert driven day one. And I believe it's we figure out what need exists and then we're willing to suspend whatever expertise we have if it gets in the way of us being valued. I love that and you would be surprised how much business is actually failed because they don't do exactly that.

They make assumption. I mean, probably you're not surprised that and you know the numbers probably better than I do, but I use that code multiple times through the many episodes through the show where we basically say like 8-8 out of 10 businesses fail, startups fail because they never check if what the building is actually needed for the market and the customers. They just assume and that the assumption comes from them being expert and going like, I would use it, I would use it.

So probably there's going to be many, many people use it. They go lock themselves up for months in a garage or at home to build something and then go to market and it's just no market, just no one wants to buy it. Well, so you're exactly right. And so I joke with colleagues, I'll walk down the street or get an e-mail from a business saying we'd like you to know about our business.

And I say to myself, this business won't be around in a year. And it's because I don't see a strong connection between what they do and customers who really are passionate about the product, service, solution, app, whatever they offer. And so I think you're exactly right is we tend to think because we're smart, we're smarter than the marketplace and I think we rarely ever are. That's a such a strong show talent and I can tell you that I lost so much money by investing in businesses in an open market because I thought I'm smarter than the market and I could predict the future.

My track record is not that great. OK, well send me a note next time I'll give you, I'll give you my candid feedback. Yeah, that's Jokes aside though. I mean, I'm doing quite, you know, a lot better after many years of of sort of training and feedback loops.

But when I started, I really thought that I can, you know, make good judgement calls because, you know, I'm coming from the market. I've been in a tech, I've seen businesses, exited businesses, but you know, a lot of assumptions just never really landed as as you would predict, which means my expertise failed me. Just as simple as that, right. So do you have any examples, Alan?

Where where effectively a success of a business or a success of a founder made them less curious and effectively slower to adapt to the speed of tech change which we're seeing right now. Well, so last year, you know, I focus on the folks who are super curious and end up being successful in business. And what I'd love your listeners to think about is that most new businesses that scale, that become significant are based actually on not knowing stuff as opposed to knowing stuff.

It's based on having a mindset of being curious as opposed to a mindset of believing I know everything. And so could I think of examples of businesses that have not been curious? You know, I'm hard pressed to think of businesses right now because I don't pay a lot of attention to those businesses. I'm really keen on ideas that I think are going to be remarkable based on curiosity.

But let me give you a classic example from the past, which is amazing to me still to this day. So I don't know in the UK, but what I do know in the US is in 1888, these two guys, Sears and Roebuck, had a brilliant idea and that was that everyone in the US, whether you're in a big city or a small town, could have awesome products and services. They could have everything that anyone else had. They created a catalog.

It was like 1000 page catalog. It listed everything that you could buy from books to clothes to farm equipment to all different types of things. And they sent it out to 80 million people every single year. And then people ordered things.

And then the Stagecoach or the train or a bus or truck brought it to them. Now I'm hoping that everybody listening says, Gee, that sounds familiar, kind of sounds like Amazon, OK. But it turns out that those folks kind of misread the marketplace, OK, because they didn't understand that changes in technology, what your podcast is all about. We're going to change the way people still wanted to have of everything, and they wanted to have it easily, but technology changed the way that they could get it.

Fast forward to today, Amazon becoming the largest retailer in the world. Think about Blockbuster, and I think they only had a few stores in the UK, but at their height, these people had stores, retail stores that rented videos. OK, They had 9000 stores, mostly in the US and Canada. Suddenly this company came along called Netflix, and Netflix had a really, in retrospect, lame idea.

You don't have to go to a store. We'll mail you a DVD with your favorite movie. And so folks thought that was like a leap of faith. OK, Had Netflix continued to mail people DVDs, they'd be out of Business Today.

But what they realize as technology changes, everything is driven by Is there a better technology or better way to deliver something? So Netflix suddenly says, why don't we just stream this? You know, why mail people DVDs? Let's stream.

And so Netflix starts to stream, becomes wildly popular. But then Netflix says streamings become a commodity. There are lots of folks out there that stream in the US, the UK, everywhere around the world. So Netflix says, how are we going to get them to stick to us?

We have to develop original content. How are we going to develop original content? We're going to ask the people who are subscribers what type of content matters to them, and then we're going to create content that's awesome, that meets their needs. You know, so the reality is there are a lot of examples of folks who kind of messed up, you know, But I talk about the whole idea of not knowing stuff.

So everybody, I'm guessing who listens here uses Uber. They probably take an Uber or they get Uber to deliver food. Uber wasn't developed by people who understood the taxicab business. Uber was invented by two guys who were in Paris, couldn't find a taxi cab and said to themselves, isn't there like a technology that would help us solve this?

Yes, GPS or GIS, global information systems, the ability to locate 2 points on a map and bring those two points together. And so that's what Uber is not A brilliant kind of idea from taxicab people, A brilliant idea from curious people who thought technology tied to something people need is going to produce a result. I love that. Yeah, you've wrote us in the book as well about Kodak and Nokia as a good examples where people believe that they're so good in the space that they just forgot to be curious and innovate and just ended up much losing the whole market, right?

Well, yeah, so Kodak actually invented digital photography but decided that wasn't going to be a big market. Nokia at one point had 49% market share of cell phones. That's mind boggling. But they only thought of a cell phone as something you could talk on and not as something that would become the go to device for every one of our needs.

I mean, I have like a zillion apps on here. I use my phone for everything. The folks at Nokia could have thought of that, but they didn't talk with customers. And so who thought about it?

The folks at Apple, Samsung, a bunch of other folks suddenly said this is pretty cool. Why not empower people with our device, make our device kind of the gateway to all the things they want to do? Well, let's talk about what's taking place right now, which is the AI different ideas. AI is a bubble or AI is here to stay.

And as many people you talk with, you know, I'm afraid to lose my jobs and things like that. But like one very clear thing if you're using any of the AI tools is that it collapses timelines or it just collapses time effectively what it used to take months depending on a function you're doing. It really, it really takes just like hours to days Now if you're utilizing AI tooling in as well, you know, when it comes to learning, it's like you can just where it would take months to learn something.

You can pretty much get that answer just by a few clicks, right. So how do you think the speed has changed what it means to be experienced? And I'm putting this in double quotes for the guys now watching. It's like how it redefines the.

You know what it means to be experienced. Well, so again, go back to my fundamental idea and that is we don't need to know everything to be awesome. We just need to start and figure it out along the way. So AI is a wonderful tool for doing that.

It's not a like silver bullet for us doing the thinking about is there a market opportunity? But what it does say to us is I got an idea, I'm going to test it in the marketplace, and then some of the data analysis that supports my idea can be done really quickly. I think of AI as being able to help us take a lot of information sorted out, see patterns, and then make better decisions as humans. But remember, every business starts with a spark of human curiosity.

Somebody says, I bet there's a better way to do something. And, you know, to go back to what you said a moment ago is I believe, you know, and I'm not the youngest guy on the planet. I believe AI is here. I believe our job is to figure out all the ways we can use all of the technology that gets lumped into AI to actually solve problems and create opportunities, how it can make us smarter faster, you know, as you said, so that we then can get things into the market faster.

But AI is a tool. But I want everybody listening to just think about the fact that whether you use AI or not, you got to be smarter and faster because. If you're not the first one to get your idea out there and then do a great job of meeting customer needs, you're not going to win. And if you're not the first one to get out there and then aren't agile enough to keep tweaking what you do as customers needs change, you're not going to win either.

So you've got to be super fast. You got to get ideas out there and if you can use AI to reinforce your understanding and make it better or connect with customers there, absolutely do that. OK, so I want to throw in the confidence into this mix as well, because sort of like a leadership question, but I feel like it's, it's very closely related to expertise, right? So usually people who are expert in their domain, they, they, they either present themselves or they, you know, they give the vibe that, you know, there's a confidence around them.

And that's usually what the founders sort of, you know, if you feel like, right, why, why do you think that, you know, there's a pressure for leaders to to always look like that. They always, you know, make everybody feel that they know what they're talking about. They're confident in their domains. Like why?

Why they don't just apply sort of like humility and their curiosity and simply go like, you know, since some years, I, I, I really don't know. Well, so I think we need a new generation of leaders, and the new generation of leaders says it's OK to start. I started this business with an idea. I thought I was fairly smart, but I don't know it all.

And that's OK. That's the humility part of it. I don't know it all. Now we have a team of 20 or 25 people.

We need to figure out how to maximize the opportunity we created. I might have used expertise to see that there was an opportunity, but then we talked to the customer and we realized we need to do some things differently. I want all of us to work together to figure out how to be as awesome as we can be. Or I start with expertise and then I'm admitting, you know, my expertise might not be enough for us to be awesome and launch a super viable business.

And so I want to say it's the starting point, but it's not the be all and end all. If we could be remarkable at what we do, let's take a fresh look, step back and figure out how to be truly awesome. We have a marketplace opportunity, but we need to figure out how to maximize it. So I got to be humble.

I feel like most employees appreciate a leader who's humble, a leader who says, I don't know all the answers. But if we step back, look, I started a company, I'm the boss. People look up to me. I don't want it to look like I don't know what I'm doing here.

That would be a bad look. Actually looking like you know what you're doing when you don't know what you're doing is a really bad look. And people will figure that out and your employees will leave you. And so if instead we say, OK, we started out well, we have to keep changing.

Let's work together to figure that out. That changes the whole equation. And so I anyone who's leading an organization listening to this should understand that it actually is not only OK, but it's the sensible thing to do, to say together we can figure out how to be brilliant. I only know how to get a so far.

You, you said there's a new, new generation of leaders. I feel like you see some like you, you, I work with a lot of people and you know you as well. And so you often see that humility and empathy being there where they go. Like, you know what?

I, I really don't know. That's why I hired you. Smart people, you know, let's talk about it. You tell me what I should be doing, but then there's a lot of these, I want to say old school type of mentalities where where they, you know, live there with me.

You know, I know all the answers and often they don't, you know, they will they will go in with talk people in the backgrounds on like 1 to ones to source information. It's like, Hey, we just been in this workshop together. You know, it would have been fine to raise a hand and go like, you know, I really have no idea. Let's figure this one out.

And I love that Jeff Bezos talks about this like he he how he talks about meetings is that he loves curiosity and wandering around and actually finding a path to a solution. Like, you know that's his workshops, right? Well, but I think you did a good job of identifying I mean it's simple, but it's helpful. The old style of leadership.

I work my way up and each time I demonstrated more expertise and more competence and eventually they made me the boss. OK, that's different than entrepreneurial firms. OK, I got an idea. We got to respond quickly.

I have to surround myself with an awesome team of people because I alone, I'm not going to make it happen. But together we'll figure out how to be awesome and they'll be even some checks and balances. Someone will have an idea on the team, we'll debate it. That might make us better.

So I think the new style of leadership is I got to be flexible, we got to move fast, I got to build a good team. We've got to consistently be responsive to our customers. And so that does contrast with the old style, but I feel like the old style is kind of like the dinosaurs stuck in the tar pits. And that is older, bigger companies are either going to fall apart because they can't move quickly, or they're going to buy smaller tech companies and hopefully let them continue to run with bigger resources.

OK, all right. So relevance. In the book, you make a point that relevance has replaced expertise as a real measure of intelligence. What does that actually look in practice like?

How can founders make sure they keep learning faster than the world is changing? How can they keep themselves relevant? Well, so here's the thing. In most companies, and this is even tech companies, we go to work every day, We go to the office, we think we know what we're doing.

We figure out the next challenge. We do the things in our inbox. We keep moving forward, we think. I encourage all the companies we work with to spend at least a day a month getting out of the office.

OK. Because while I'm sitting in the office, I might read stuff, but while I'm sitting in the office, the world is actually changing outside my window. And so I need to regularly get out there and look and see what those changes are. So as an example, yesterday I'm in based in Washington DC.

Yesterday I'm downtown and I'm just wandering around looking for new ideas. I see new restaurants, I see a Waymo driverless car go by. I might not get in that car today, but I certainly am thinking about all of the products and services our customers offer that don't require a person to be there that can use technology to do that. I stopped to buy something at IKEA.

You know, the giant Swedish like HomeGoods company. IKEA has a really interesting business model, and that is high design, OK quality. You build your furniture yourself. It's all in a box.

You find it in the warehouse, you wrestle it to the ground. You put it on the roof of your car. You bring it back, take out the little wrench and make it. That tells me something.

That tells me that a new generation of customers are willing to exchange cost. You don't want to spend a lot of money for doing it yourself. I now say to myself, what are all the other businesses in which an element of it should be do it yourself? An element should be that I'm there for you, I support you, but an element should be do it yourself.

But the reason I give these examples is we just need to get out there, you know, and we need to engage the world cause the world is showing us all these trends. I don't know what the world will look like exactly in five years, but I know that there are tons of clues out there that are going to give me a better idea of how to run my business. So if that's the case, then how do I remain relevant? I don't remain relevant by staying in our office.

I don't remain relevant by sitting around the table with all the other people who stay in our office and are trying to remain relevant. I stay relevant by engaging the world. Now, of course, I can engage the world a bit by going online, but that's not the same as actually getting out there and engaging the world and seeing what's going on. So wherever you're located, if you're located in a big city or a small town or remote area, go someplace where you'll get some clues.

I like to go to modern art museums. Modern art museums give me a sense of what artists are thinking about. I like to go to concerts by new artists. New artists give me a sense.

And I like to look around, not only listen to the music, but look around and see how it resonates with the new generation of folks. The reality is, part of getting out is I see a new generation of people. They have different habits than the older generations of people have. And I don't know whether we're past Gen.

X, Gen. Y, Gen. ZI don't know what generation is the newest generation. But I do know that preferences are changing, desires are changing, ways I interact with products or services or solutions are changing.

Ways I even use my phone are changing. Go to some other places, see what they do. You know, my wife is from Sweden, and so Sweden is kind of a cashless society. And so everything is handled by your phone.

You do banking, you order at restaurants, you buy a transit ticket on your phone. You do literally everything on your phone. I went into a bank to deposit some money and the banker said to me, oh, no, no, no, this is a bank. We don't take cash.

That was like mind blowing for someone my age. A bank that doesn't take cash. No, it's a bank. All of our money is electronic.

That's a different world. All of our transactions need to be electronic. You know, I'm an author. I used to go and sell my books and people would tell me how much is the book and I'd say $25 and they'd look in their wallet for cash.

Now I just hold my phone up to the app and then they just scan me or Venmo me or square me or Stripe me or whatever they do. So the world is changing. I got to get out there. So it's a bit of a long answer to what you asked, but how do we remain relevant?

By paying attention to what's relevant. And if I ignore that, I miss the chance to be. I love stay relevant by engaging the world. I love that sentence.

All the time, all, you know, it's not like people say to me, oh, we went out a few months ago when we looked. People don't understand how fast the world is changing. And so I got to get out there all the time. When do you do work then, Alan?

If you, just if you. Just well, no, so, but that's a good point. And people say that, OK, here's the deal. I want everyone listening to think about are they absolutely efficient, effective, valuable 30 days a month or 22 days a month or whatever number of days they go into the office?

I think not. So let's put on our calendar a day a month when as a team we go out and engage the world. And then let's just be more efficient the other 21 days of the month. And then let's come back with the ideas that we've discovered and say, what did we learn that might help us to figure out how to navigate the future?

How can we be different and more value? I love that it's such a simple exercise. So, so, So what we're saying is as a leader or owner of a business, you want to instill a culture which rewards and promotes curiosity with, with certain processes, right? And that would be just one of many how you can do that?

So that's one of it's my favorite. I've actually taken teams from companies wandering around 22 different cities in the world. I'm super keen on this. I've kind of figured out a way to kind of curate and unlock value from doing that.

But it's only one way. But the key point that you just made, and that is, and it has lots of different ways to do it, is we've got to be curious. OK, so I go to two conferences every year that are on topics I know absolutely nothing about. You know, I just look at a list and say that sounds interesting to me, but I know nothing about it.

I go there and I take a lot of notes and I say, what ideas do they have from this industry or this discipline that's going to help me to think differently about what I do. So I go there with an open mind, thinking about that's a way to unlock curiosity. Going to an art exhibit is a way to unlock curiosity. Listening to musicians, going to a new rest.

Some of this stuff is actually fun and people do it, but they never do it thinking about should I pay attention? You know, we just assume now we go to a restaurant and they say we don't have menus. Can you look at the QR code, You know, or we don't even come up at the end of your meal to for you to pay your bill. Just go on the app that you've downloaded to pay.

So we do all these things, but we don't say to ourselves, wow, is there something in that that would help my business to be more successful? You know, we're even, you know, we were talking about Uber, GPS technology. Is there something about the ability to take people or activities in different places and bring them together that would help my business to be to be better? I don't know.

So I'm just keen on thinking about all these ideas because most people when they want to be better, say who else is in our industry is doing something different. Let's say we copy them or even copy them better. That doesn't even matter. That's already out with their that's something that customers could find.

We need to be better than that. So I need to find who's best, not in my industry but in the world in terms of what I want to do, and I need to incorporate that into what I do. OK, I love that multiple things to actually take an action from this. I really love this idea of just going to conferences you'd know nothing about just to get your curiosity, you know, going.

I had a similar advice by by reading books. Just pick up any book and and read it. You know, could not necessarily needs to be your domain book, but just just read the book. Just be curious and try to understand that feel similar.

And I can definitely see how that could work as an excellent advice island. So you have more things in your book and you know, I, I, I want to say it's your formula potentially, but correct me if I'm wrong, you got purpose. So curiosity second, which we covered extensively, humility, respect, future focus and paranoia. So here's the question.

Why, why these you know, why these six? And if you would zoom in into one or two, which in from your point you are the most important ones. OK, good. So why these sick?

I've spent, you know, as you mentioned at the outset, I've spent a fairly long career. I hope it goes a lot longer helping companies to come up with meaningful innovations. And we've had the privilege of working with companies in lots of different industries, from IT to pharmaceuticals to hospitality to automobiles, to environmentally sustainable products, all kinds of different things. What I've noticed is in a fast changing world that we tend to teach people the wrong skills.

OK, we teach them technology skills, which are great, but they're going to change next month. We teach them, what we call them is soft skills. Some of those are wonderful. We should communicate better.

We should collaborate better. But I said to myself, if I want to consistently be an engine of innovation, if I want to make sure my business continues to remain relevant and valuable to customers, what are the six things I need to do? And you've kind of mentioned that I need to 1st figure out a purpose. So we talked a little bit about that.

That I think drives everything is I've got to figure out my place in the world or in the marketplace in which I can be. Our firm can be way more compelling than anybody else. And that's got to be the target that I try to hit. You know, a lot of organizations say to people what we need you to be innovative, but they don't tell them how, they don't focus them.

They got all this random stuff, you know, that's OK. It's not going to move us forward. We need to be focused. So we need to say if this is what we're doing, if we're creating this app, if we're going to support this app, if we're going to use this app to then sell monthly subscriptions to a service that's valuable, what do we need to keep doing?

What are the innovations that get us to do that? Curiosity, we've talked a lot about that. Humility, we talked about that. I got to admit, I don't know.

It's preposterous for anyone out there listening to say I know all the answers. OK, we know. Each of us knows. Even if we're like super expert, each of us knows so little.

But the information's all out there. We can find it. What I need to be as curious and find that information. Respect is important.

We've talked a little bit about future focus, but let me spend a few more moments because I'm really keen on this. The future of everyone who's listening is business is going to depend on them being relevant in the future, not necessarily just relevant today. Today is a good base for our business, but we're going to have to be different in the future. You know, I can't tell you the number of companies, tech companies for sure that come to me and say you don't understand, Alan, our customers love us.

And I go, they may love you today, but they love you because they haven't found anything better yet. As soon as they find you, they are going to drop you in a second for somebody better. And your whole podcast is focused on tech, right? It's a changing world.

As soon as they find better tech and a Better Business model that better meets their needs, they're going to drop you unless you're the one that provides it. So why do I need to be future focused? Because if I lose track of what they need and the way they want to get it in the technology that can deliver it to them, I'm not going to survive. So that's why I want people to pay attention is I want them to keep being valuable.

And then the last thing you know in this one, I don't want to say it's controversial, but I know when I was writing the book, my wife looked over my shoulder and said, you're going to tell people they should be paranoid. I think paranoia is like an awesome skill because what is paranoia? Paranoia is the belief or perception that someone is following you. OK, they're monsters in the closet.

We had nightmares as kids, but somebody is following you. Let me be honest with everyone listening. Somebody is following you. If you've created a good business opportunity, somebody else wants it and they're gaining on you unless you look back, notice what they're doing and respond.

And so that's really important is we all have to be paranoia. Paranoia energizes us to say I. I can't stand still. I got to protect myself and my business from all the scary creatures out there, the three guys in a pizza and beer who are trying to overthrow my little enterprise.

OK. That's a very great overview. Would you choose, would you choose and you're out of these six, would you say they all equally important or or or they are you know some of these are your favorites like you know, like the must and should have type of situation. No.

So would you say like one of your kids is your favorite? So, OK, no, so I believe, and so I'd love people to read the book. And here because this is a great business idea that I learned that was launched in 1912, I'll unconditionally guarantee satisfaction with my book. If people buy my book and don't find it valuable, send me a message.

I'll Venmo or whatever, wherever you live, I'll send you the money. But aside from that, OK, So I believe the six of them together form a formula, a way we engage the world. We talked about how we need to engage and be present. If I were to focus on one or two, of course we talked about it a lot, I would say, well, I'd start out and say if you don't have a purpose, you're not going to make anything great happen.

So I think you got to start with purpose. But then I of course would say curiosity is what drives everything. Curiosity and believing there's a better or an awesomely better way to do something. That's how we're going to kind of be great in business.

That's actually how we're going to solve some of the problems that the world faces that we haven't solved yet. So I'm super keen on curiosity. If folks take nothing else from our time together, but get up and look around and be curious and make notes about things that are remarkable, then we, I think we've been valuable to them. But so curiosity, I also think for a lot of people, humility is really important because a lot of people go to work each day going.

I'm like the master of my domain. I'm like so smart, you know, you could be, I don't want to deflate anybody's smarts, but we all have to realize we can be better. We can know new things. We have to know new things.

So I mean, I love them all. They're all my kids, all six of these. But start out by being purposeful and curious. Find something that you can do that makes business or the world better, and be really curious about how to do it better than everyone.

Else put you in a tough spot that Alan, isn't it choosing A choosing couple out of 6. I mean, they all make perfect sense. They all make perfect sense. And in a book you mentioned, try to replace a proof of being right with the proof of discovery.

Can can you give us a little bit more insight? Is, is that part of just how you enable curiosity? Then you, you just put your mind in the state where like, look, I don't need to be right. I I just need to be, you know, looking for proof of discovery, which is potentially talking with customers or whatever other proof of discovery you might get.

Yes, so. Here's an easy hack, I believe that could get everybody to understand what you're talking about. And that is look at a problem or challenge your opportunity, your business faces, and spend 15 minutes in a conference room or wherever you guys hang out and say to yourself, if only relying on what we already know, our expertise, how would we solve this problem? And then you write that down.

That's all well and good. Now, say here's what I want us to do. I want us to find at least three other ways to solve this problem. And the way we're going to do it is get up off of our behinds and engage the world looking for other people who might not be in our industry but have solved a similar type of problem.

And then we're going to come back here. We're going to write those three things on the board. We're going to compare them to what we would do if left to our own devices and we're going to figure out what's the best solution. So that changes the equation because it says it's OK.

We have a good starting point. We know some things, but I know and here's the leaders role. I know we can be better. I know we can be awesome and have we come to work each day to be OK?

Or if we come to work each day to be awesome, have we come to work to connect with our customers? Or if we come to throw things at our customers and hope they love them. Now part of that discovery is again, we talked about it earlier, I am going to go out and talk with my existing customers or the folks I'd like to have as my customers. Here's an example.

And you know, you mentioned at the outset, so I do work with Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes-Benz provides kind of luxury cars. I mean, we're not talking Aston Martins, but these are not inexpensive cars. Mercedes has a huge problem, and that is they didn't do a very good job of figuring out what young people, people who aspire to own a luxury car, would want.

And so they didn't have a lot of models that were kind of like starter models for kind of young people who were on the rise and viewed themselves being in a premium car. Audi and BMW did. The folks at Audi and BMW thought about that market long before Mercedes did. And they went and talked to young people and said if we could create a car at this price point, what are the things you want in that car?

And they designed cars that had a nice outside design and had enough of the features and functionality that young people were using at a price point that got people to buy the BMW 3 Series initially. Now there's a 2 Series and even A1 series, the Audi A3 series, while Mercedes was saying, well, we have like AC series of cars, are you interested in that? And the C Series was like what your parents or grandparents would drive in a smaller package. So the reality is, of course, the companies that get out there and talk to people are likely to be the winners, right?

And so the discovery part of the discovery and part of sending people out to come up with these three other solutions is send some people out to customers, Ask some what the customers would do if they designed our solution. Put that up as one of the four things we think about, but simply challenge yourself. It's an easy hack. Remember we talked about the idea of getting out.

Here's a very focused way to get out, you know, and so you might once a month say we have this challenger we're trying to figure out how do we provide better tech support? Here's our idea in 15 minutes. Now let's find three other options. Would it be like a dedicated session for curiosity?

Like again, I just I've come come back to tactical execution of of that culture is speaking for for, you know, leaders or business owners and with their teams. Would they just bring everybody in the room and go like, hey, here's a challenge, tell me how you would solve it. Now tell me those other three things. And it just becomes something like a curiosity workshop, which is, you know, you repeat like every month or would any.

Problem. Yeah. So to me it's not a curiosity workshop because to me, as we talked about, curiosity happens when I get out and I'm curious about a world of ideas and practices. So if we want to talk about it in terms of a workshop, I talk about it as an experience.

And that is our experience of being curious is going to make us better. We just meet for a few minutes, you know, we meet and come up with a starting point, but we're not sitting in a workshop thinking about anything other than how would we solve this problem? OK, great. We just spent 15 minutes.

That's awesome. Now we're going to go out and see if there's a better way to do it. So for me, the curiosity is getting out and then I bring those ideas and then we might sit down and talk about those ideas, but we now have a lot more information on which to figure out the best thing we could be doing. So if that's a workshop, eventually yes, But for me it's get out there, engage the world, look for brilliance, and then combine the best brilliance to come up with the best value you can create.

Would it be like a pure leadership thing, Alan? Like, would you say I'm thinking about bigger organization now? Would you say that that would be like in the head of innovation with their, you know, direct reports doing this and then bring in the best ideas they have and trying to filter it with the product team or something like that? Or would you say that?

No, no, no, that should be everybody. Well, so here's my view. So that's a great question. Here's my view of the world on that.

I believe even in a big organization, it should be a very kind of uniquely broad cross section of people that ideally should include senior executives and not just the head of innovation, but the CEO of the company or the head of a division of a company. And they should then pick a team of people, some who have expertise, some who are in departments who've never thought about this challenge, some people who are brand new and will have a very different perspective, and then energize a team of people who bring all these different perspectives and send them out in the world to look for brilliance.

Because now it's not a group think. It's not like 20 engineers thinking about what's going on in the world. It's 20 different people with different perspectives say this is really cool or that's really cool. Now we get really better value from our engaging the world.

But I think about, you know, if I ruled the world, you know, most big companies are organized like the zoo, OK? And I say that by all the C-Suite executives hang out together, OK? And then everybody else in the company hangs out in their own department, you know, like engineering hangs out together. Product development, sales and marketing, human resources.

That's like at the zoo. You go to the zoo and all the lemurs are in their place and all the giraffes are in their place and all the others. They're not interacting with other folks or other creatures. If I ruled the world, I would take everybody in our organization and put them in pods.

And that pod would be all people from different departments and at different levels hanging out and bouncing ideas off of each other. It would be a radically different, but I think radically more valuable approach to how we organize companies. Let's break. You know, companies talk about breaking down silos, but they organize themselves.

And they did as though the silos are what they want to maintain. Yeah, I just get rid of that. Yeah. So that so that would bring like diversity of thought, isn't it?

You would just. Absolutely. And diversity of experience and different seniority and people who said and a mix of people, some of whom say we've always done it this way with some other folks who say why in the world do you do it this way? Yeah, I know.

So I think that's another hack, OK. Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, when you were saying I, I, I started thinking about Spotify's model, which is was very popular maybe 10 years ago, 15 years, and it sort of disappeared. But at the point when Spotify started talking about it in their engineering blog, it sort of exploded.

Everybody were talking to me in conferences. I think there was even books written. And then it just disappeared. But their concept was that two people from every team, they just constantly rotate teams.

So like you would change the team because you would bring that different perspectives. But at the same time, he was always engineering teams though, like he was not really a full diversity when it comes through like vertical slicing of a business. Well, yeah, so I think what a lot of tech companies do, and Spotify is really a tech company. I mean, we stream music, but it's a tech company.

There's a lot of tech companies are heavily engineering driven and so we tend to think that different engineers are different, but they, you know, and they could be, but they also have kind of an engineering mindset. They've been trained to think of the world as problems that can be engineered. What I'm talking about is everyone in an organization, all the different backgrounds and responsibilities and perspectives, we mix them all up and we mix them all up because we know it's going to get better value.

An engineer can say something. A sales and marketing person says I'm talking to the customers all the time. I think this is a stupid idea or I think this is a brilliant idea. An HR person says, can we actually staff this to get the customer what they want?

You know? So I just feel like doing that allows us, again, we talked about being faster, allows us to be faster, more nimble, more capable, get the right things out because we have a way inside to kind of have better ideas that we test our curiosity. I love that. All right, Alan, let's jump into rapid questions.

10 questions, one minute for for an answer. What's one thing you recently change your mind about, especially when it comes to leading or innovating? OK. So I've always believed in the potential of AI, but I'm increasingly changing my mind about the potential value of AI for lots of the businesses we work with.

And so my mind is a lot more open about that. And so I'm spending a lot more time learning about AI, going to AI conferences, just getting smarter. So I understand all the ways that we can use AI and machine learning to help my customers. So you're changing your mind because before you were like, it's a.

It's OK, but you know, I'm keen, of course. I hope what comes through is I believe in the power of humans to do awesome things, but I'm increasingly believing in the power of AI or the value of AI to support their ability to do it. OK, so your belief is changing that it's, it's a bigger thing rather than it's oh. Yeah, yeah.

And we started off and you I think even mentioned, if I recall, you know, is AI something that's kind of as a fad, You know, and I might have thought of everybody's talking about it before now. I say it's part of business. In the future, let's just use it in the right. One.

Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, we did couple of episodes in the beginning way was AI hype. So we had the, you know, multiple people using it and going like, you know, whatever, it's just another tool, another tech. And then it it's so rapidly advancing that it's been a couple of years and, and a lot of people are changing, you know, their minds about what it actually means.

And we're seeing enterprises making big, big moves into adopting a lot more of that. And very recently, like Microsoft and and Amazon as well, they let go people, which is not great. And what they said this instead of that level of skilled people, you're going to use AI agents to support your functions. It's like if you Google around that, there's a couple of articles around that.

So that's a, you know, interesting move for for enterprises, but it just shows the power of, of of executives putting, yeah, just putting trust into the technology that it's actually going to deliver. Yeah. Second question, which companies today best practices enlightened ignorance which you talk about in your book? So that is a really good question.

So I think of a lot of kind of what we might think of as newer companies. I think about the folks at Uber, I think about the folks at Airbnb who realized they had to morph, you know, a lot of issues came up. One of the big issues, of course, being that Airbnb was taking a lot of housing out of the housing stock. And so there were revolts in cities like Barcelona and other places that you can't operate in Airbnb.

So Airbnb is kind of morphing toward the idea of experiences and offering a lot more value to people. And so I think that's an interesting idea. I don't know the answer to that yet and whether that's a winning formula, but I believe it's kind of value. I'm kind of keen on the ability to use technology with several of the car companies that we have worked with, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, to make cars safer and more functional for folks.

So I kind of like some stuff going on there. I like Spotify, you know, I like, I'm a huge fan of Apple. I got to be honest, I have like every single Apple device known to human. You just you buy even if you don't need it.

It just comes out like it's Apple. Oh yeah, they say. Do you need to watch? Sure, why not?

You need an iPad? Sure, why not. Yeah, I just feel like there are folks there consistently thinking about how to make it easier for me to do the work I need to do and consume content without being a techie, though I don't know that we need to be a techie to use any of these tools now. So I do like the folks at Apple.

Then I see all these other entrepreneurial ideas that I'm super excited about. So as an example, there's a new company in Sweden that has figured out, they're experimenting now with how they actually electrify roads underneath the road so that we can literally charge our vehicles by driving on a highway. You know, so supposed to having to go to a charge station with an electric vehicle. I believe in the power of literally driving somewhere far away and my car is consistently charged underneath the lane I'm in and so I don't have to stop.

I have no range anxiety because I believe in a whole generation of sustainable companies. But we again have to think in new and more clever ways. I work with the Sustainable paper company in India. Their businesses, they actually make paper out of the waste products of sugar cane.

I believe that more and more companies will figure out how to truly be renewable and that is fine waste products and figure out ways to use them to provide value for people. So I'm innovation is like everywhere. I'm just super excited to still be working and part of it. Excellent.

Do you believe there's one or maybe multiple leadership skills that are getting made-up solely by AII? Don't think leadership skills are going to be replaced by AI. Look, to my mind, a great leader is a great human being who can unlock the genius in people. Do I believe that AI is going to do that?

Absolutely not. I believe that magic happens when humans, led by somebody who inspires people, come together to try and solve a problem. I believe AI, then, is a tool for figuring out the details of how to do it, but not for doing the right things. So I believe in great leaders.

We need more of them. And I believe in the power of humans as teams led by somebody to figure out something. OK. So we're seeing basically if we don't, even if we get robots, AI robots coming in.

They're not going to be great leaders because we need human to human connection. Well, ABS, I believe that now there might be people listening who don't believe that, but let me just give you a data point, which is, to my mind, scary. OK, so in Japan they have a relatively low birth rate and they don't have a lot of immigration. And So what does that mean?

People get older, OK, In nursing homes in Japan now, a significant percentage of the workforce are robots because there aren't enough people. Robots bring you your medicine. They bring you your meal. They might even say, hi, how are you?

It's good to be with you. I don't want to live in that world. I want to be inspired by humans. I want humans who care, and I want to feel that an actual human has taken the time to be with me, maybe as I get older.

So I believe in the exact same thing for leadership, and that is, I don't believe we can put leadership in a robot. Leadership often is somebody coming to my office, sitting down, asking me what I'm thinking about, and then helping me to figure out how to make it. It's, it's emotional by nature because that's how we connect as human beings. And, and yeah, even maybe sometime, you know, maybe in the future you will be able to express that.

But then if somehow robots plus AI or AI learns to express emotions in such a way that we perceive it like that, then it then would that make them humans? Well, so I'm never going to perceive it like that, but you know, maybe in the future some people will. I personally believe if we get to the point where I'm open to a robot having emotions, for me, I'm just winding down here. Checking out bye bye not my planet right?

So once what's 1 daily habit you use to drive your curiosity and going to conferences cannot be used. OK, fine. I start each day and I just think about what I want to learn that day. So as part of my kind of briefing in the morning, I say to myself, I'm going to learn something new today.

And that new can be a new tool, a new technique. It can be learning some more words to a language. My wife is from Sweden. I'm struggling to master Swedish.

Plus is everyone in Sweden speaks English perfectly, but I'm determined to master Swedish, so I spend a little bit of time that day doing so. I just want to learn something. I feel like if we learn something every day, we keep moving forward and grow. OK, So the the briefing for yourself in the morning, is that something like you do like a journaling wake up?

Absolutely. Well, yeah. So 15 minutes in the morning, it depends. When I get in the office normally 8:00 and it's let's think about what we need to do today to be valuable to our customers, what I need to learn today to keep moving forward and be more valuable in the future.

What's a time when not knowing LED you to your biggest insight? Oh God, they're like so many. I would like to think in most of the projects that we do that we begin in a place of not knowing or being willing to be open minded. So here's an example.

We actually were asked by a big UK company, a pharmaceutical company, if we could help them think about how to reduce the cost and improve the quality of packaging their products. I took a team of people to a produce market, gave them each £20, that's a fair amount of money in a produce market and ask them to buy things found in nature that came in a perfect package. They bought pomegranates and oranges and grapefruits and bananas come in a good package, but they don't last very long.

And then we took all of these ideas back. It's now a field called bio mimicry and that is that there are things found in nature that can help us be better in business. And we took them all apart and started to rethink packaging from the perspective of nature. Fast forward, after we designed the detailed plan, they saved £155,000,000 a year in packaging their products worldwide.

So that was really a good thing. That's that's, yeah. That's a great story. I mean, I have lots more examples, but that's one.

It's a great example, a great results as well. If I would want to buy a product with these with that packaging, would I be able to do that? Well, so the packaging generally goes to like pharmacies or apothecaries. So what happens is it get packaged, a large amount of the medicine gets packaged in boxes that protect it and then it goes to a pharmacy and they put it on the shelf.

So I'm not certain the package that you would buy, you know, with pills is going to be particularly different than the package that they, you know, that you would have got before. Yeah. What's 1 behavior you wish more founders would relearn in the new era which we are right now, which we, let's call it AI era. So OK, yeah, you need to choose like one or couple which you know founders should relearn.

OK, good. So I feel like we've talked about it already, but it's one of my things. And that's that's curiosity. But here's the thing, as kids we were all curious.

So I know when somebody comes up to me, they have the ability somewhere buried within their brains, be curious because as kids we were always trying to figure something out. Yeah. So true, and so I just want found. And then the other reference point I'd like to give is every business started with a moment of curiosity.

This is all right. Whether we connected with the customer or not, this is our idea. Will this work? And so I feel like founders get stuck because they figure I figured out something brilliant, we're golden now, you know, we're going to ride this puppy for as long as we can.

And what I want them to think about is I got to be consistently curious. I can't move forward by standing still. And so, so the whole idea of figuring out whatever tool you use, and you know, if we haven't covered enough and people want other ideas, they can feel free to connect with me. But whatever tool we use, we got to keep being curious.

It's the fundamental thing that's going to make our businesses success. I love you mentioning kids being cuter as I look at my boys and everything is so interesting thing, right? And I'm like, Oh my God, Lagos again. Come on man.

It's like it's been three years. So I feel like I'm shutting down my mind, right? And when I then think about decisions I make, it's always coming, of course, you know, from my head, right? So decision you make, it gets filtered through the knowledge AKA your expertise which exists in your head.

You want or not, you're going to make that decision in that, in that scope, in that context, right? So being open minded and going like maybe that's wrong. Let me be curious and try to discover more. It's something which doesn't come to you naturally.

Like it's just not how our brains are wired. Am I wrong here because? It's something that no longer comes to us naturally, but as you just mentioned, came to us as kids. So here's a fun, simple exercise.

I've even done it in companies. Buy a bunch of packages of Lego bricks. Not Lego bricks that are designed to make a castle or a race car. A bunch of Lego bricks.

Then put together a few groups in your company and invite the kids of employees to come in and be a group. Ask them to come up with something made out of Lego and then ask the grown-ups to do it. The grown-ups will make something based on their frame of reference or their expertise. They'll build a house or they'll build whatever they make.

The kids will create something and go, wow, this is super cool, you know, and so I feel like we all had the ability to be creative and we all have the ability. If we just say stuff we know isn't necessarily the stuff that's going to get us to the future, Let's go out and open our eyes and imagine and see things that are. That's why I do this really simple thing when I take teams out, I've designed where I'm taking them, but I asked them to look for things not related to solving their problem initially, but that make them say, wow, this is awesome.

I am looking for awesome things because I know those awesome things give us a sense of wonder, and if I can get people to have a sense of wonder, they'll have a sense of wonder about their own business. OK, I love that so great advice. You spent all your career right helping people to the thing what they know. What's 1 idea you still figuring out yourself?

God, I think I'm still figuring everything out myself. What's, I mean, I'd love to play in the English Premier League, so I'm trying to figure out how at my age I could get to be that good. But having said that, what's an idea I'm still trying to figure out? I'm trying to figure out an awful lot about what we've talked about.

And that is how I can go into an organization and kind of coach the leaders at the outset to really create an environment in which people believe it's OK to have an open mind. OK. I think a lot of times, and there's a phrase in kind of business and psychology called psychological safety. And that is that even when leaders tell people, you know, we want new ideas, folks don't feel that that's true or they don't feel that they're going to be really supported all the time.

They feel like ultimately there's some penalty for being a free thinker or stretching their thinking or looking at things in different ways. So I'd love to figure out how to crack the code so I can go into an organization and people go read your book, heard you talk. We all feel we can do anything. And we're determined to figure out how to be brilliant.

That would be excellent. I feel like it like this myself, like when I go through organizations, it's it's I tried to deploy what I believe is a, you know, great leadership and things I learned as well on the podcast and then my own mentors and I had this advice, you know, just always ask why. I just we never sort of accept things, you know, we always want to challenge and we always want to ask why, you know, why this, OK, what, what data do we have to support this? You know, this somewhat is so you know, just why, why, why, why?

And you deploy this, you know, at the higher level where you have executives of the board and people go like, you either don't know anything because you're asking all the questions, right, which makes you look bad because it's just asking many, many questions. Well, it becomes just annoying and people go like, stop, just just stop, right? So yeah. So yeah, I do agree with that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what if a leader came in one day and said, we're awesome, but we can be better. I'd like every part of our organization to figure out how a year from now you're going to be better than you are today, more valuable to your external or internal customers and said we're all about that. I want everybody to do it.

If you don't do that, we can't win. That would change the equation. Yeah, OK. There comes a culture of value, right?

It's just if you're getting looked at this and you get getting evaluated as employee, if you engage with that value, that ultimately puts you in a position where you constantly have to do that. No, I agree. I agree. All right, so amazing insights to the island.

If people want to grab your book, The Wisdom of Ignorance or just continue learning from you how they get in touch, how they connect. Okay, good. Well, here's what the book looks like, and it's available. Of course, online is the easiest way to get it anywhere in the world, but in most places you should be able to get a hard physical copy.

It's also available as an ebook and it's available as an audio book that I narrated. So if you want to hear 6 1/2 hours more of me, I know our kids have no desire to do that. Get the audio book. I'd be honored by that.

You can connect with me or find out about me by going to my website, alangregorman.com. ALANGREGERMAN, Connect with me on LinkedIn. Same spelling of my name.

I would love people actually to connect with me and not just follow me because I'd love to know who's interested in my ideas and I'd love to connect back with you. So please do that. So LinkedIn is certainly a place you can send me an e-mail. I think in the show notes we'll put that, but my e-mail is simply Innovate Adventure, Adventure VENTURE dashworks.

com. That's our company. Venture Works. Yeah.

Reach out to me, send me an e-mail. I'd love to hear what people are working on and where they get stuck and. But what awesome things they're doing. Yeah.

Excellent. We'll have everything in the show notes for people listening to This Not Life and for everyone tuning in. I appreciate your time. Drop your questions in the comments and head to masteringtechgrow.

com to check our community out. And as always guys, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.