When Marcus Whitney moved to Nashville in 2000, he was a college dropout with a one-year-old and a baby on the way. He waited tables and lived in a week-to-week efficiency hotel. From the outside, Marcus looked like the furthest thing from a budding entrepreneur. But inside, he knew entrepreneurship was his path to a better life. Two decades later, Marcus has founded two innovative companies in the healthcare space, exited a tech marketing company, and co-owns Nashville’s new Major League Soccer team.
In his new book Create and Orchestrate, Marcus walks you through his unlikely journey from waiting tables to building companies. He demystifies much of what keeps people from pursuing entrepreneurship and explains why it’s the only vocation that allows you to control your time by using your creativity. When you control your time, you can claim your full power by matching up what you’re great at with the problems you see in the world.
In our discussion, we talk about Creative Power, entrepreneurship as a vehicle for your creativity, and the three values for being a successful creative entrepreneur.
Enjoy the show.
https://www.jamestaylor.me/how-to-claim-your-creative-power-through-entrepreneurship-304
Paradigm shifts in business, known as inflection points, can either create new opportunities or present new threats. Those leaders who can “see around corners” and spot these inflection points before they happen, can position themselves for success. Columbia Business School professor and innovation keynote speaker Rita McGrath’s latest book ‘Seeing Around Corners” shows how you can anticipate, understand and capitalize on the key inflection points in your industry.
In our discussion, Rita McGrath and I talk about the dangers of leader isolation, how companies like Adobe use little bets and the Kickbox concept to spark innovation, and why many big company innovations flop. We also discuss ‘webs of inclusion’ and the future of executive education. Enjoy the show. – Business Strategy: Seeing Around Corners
https://www.jamestaylor.me/business-strategy-seeing-around-corners-303
Numbers don’t lie - but they often mislead us. From health risk to financial decisions, it can be hard to understand statistics because they are often presented to us by ‘experts’ who misinterpret the data. In his book Risk Savvy, Professor Gerd Gigerenzer shows us all how we can make better decisions by becoming better-informed citizens and able to judge risk for ourselves.
Professor Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several bestselling books on heuristics and decision making including Reckoning with Risk.
In our discussion, we talk about heuristics and how your quest for certainty can hold you back from taking creative risks. Professor Gigerenzer also shares why intuition or ‘gut feeling’ has such a bad reputation in the business world even though it is essential for successful decision-making in times of uncertainty.
Enjoy the show.
https://www.jamestaylor.me/heuristic-decision-making-301
Instead of shooting for a $10 billion IPO or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus instead on Big Little Breakthroughs – small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By building a daily habit of creativity, organizations not only enjoy a high volume of small wins, but the daily practice of micro-innovations is the fastest route to discover the massive breakthroughs we seek. In his new book ‘Big Little Breakthroughs, innovation keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling author Josh Linkner shows how ordinary ideas can fuel extraordinary results.
Josh is a Creative Troublemaker who passionately believes that we all have incredible creative capacity. He has been the founder and CEO of five tech companies, which sold for a combined value of over $200 million. Today, he serves as Chairman and co-founder of Platypus Labs, innovation research, training, and consulting firm. Josh is also a passionate Detroiter and a great jazz guitarist.
Josh and I discuss the difference between creativity and innovation, how the creative process works, creative problem solving, and the three types of innovation. Enjoy the show.