Paul Sloane Tips…

• Use innovation & lateral thinking to Crush Your Competitors
• To be an effective marketer use both left brain and right brain tactics
• The purpose of your prototype is not fast payback, but fast feedback
• To be innovative Don’t try just one big idea, don’t bet the company on one huge experiment. Try lots of little things if you can.

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Doug:    Well, welcome back listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I’ve got joining me Paul Sloane, he is the author of 30 books. A few of his books are Think Like an Innovator: A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, How to Be a Brilliant Thinker, The Innovative Leader, and A Leader’s Guide to Lateral Thinking. In addition, Paul has about 43,000 followers on Twitter, and he’s been described by Klout as one of the leading experts on social media with regards to innovation. Paul has spoken on lateral thinking, creativity, and innovation to over 100 corporate clients in Europe, the US, South Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. His talks combine humor, stories, tips, and examples, and challenge to provoke, amaze, and entertain his audiences. He is recognized as one of the leading professional speakers on lateral thinking and the leadership of innovation in the UK.

Paul studied engineering at Cambridge University, he worked for IBM in manufacturing, sales, and marketing, and he’s been the marketing director and then marketing director of database at Ashton-Tate. He went on to become the vice president of operations and CEO of several software companies. Paul now focuses his time to help organizations improve innovation. Welcome to Real Marketing Real Fast.

Paul Sloane:       Thank you, Doug.

Doug:    I’ve had a chance to do a little bit of background research, and I’m always looking for excellent guests, and I came across your profile and I spent a lot of time looking online at the various things you’ve done and the books that you’ve written on innovation and lateral thinking, and really loved your podcast. I was hoping you would share with us today with our listeners just a couple stories and a little bit of background on what you do and the advice and the direction that you take your clients on.

Paul Sloane:       Yes, well I believe that marketing professionals, well all professionals really are in marketing and creative services these days, I sometimes start my talks by saying, “Who’s in the creative services sector?”, and a handful of hands go up, and I say, “No, you’re all in creative services nowadays, because the opportunities for you to be creative are unbounded, and in fact if you’re not creative, you’re missing a trick because the opportunities are really significant, and the smaller guys will run rings around you if you just use conventional methods.” The key to being different is to use some lateral thinking, to approach problems from a different direction, that’s what lateral means, and I help people do that.

Doug:    Could you give us an example of how you helped somebody do that, to approach a problem from a different point of view?

Paul Sloane:       Well, what I do is I run workshops and I get groups of people from diverse backgrounds to look at serious issues, like how can we surprise and delight customers, how can we double our average order value, how can we break into new markets, and they come up with all sorts of creative ideas using lateral thinking techniques, random stimuli, displacement techniques where you deliberately move people out of their comfort zone and think about things in new ways. The results of that, pharmaceutical companies have found new ways to launch products and new ways to do clinical trials. With a major pharmaceutical client, they found an entirely new way to run clinical trials, and telecoms companies have found very useful ways to do things.

I’ve helped in all sorts of different ways, but the examples I tend to give tend to be ones that come from general industry and things that I see around me, which I think are lateral and good examples, and there are many of them.

Doug:    Well, when you say “different”, so how would your approach differ, so if we’re VP of marketing, we’re sitting with our creative team and we’re looking at breaking into a new market, so we might go through SWAT analysis and we might do some market research, whether we do it internally or externally, how might your approach differ and what advice would you give people that are in that situation, they go, “Hey, let’s expand into a new market.”?

Paul Sloane:       Well, yes, there’s two approaches, there’s a left brain and a right brain approach, and the left brain approach would be very analytical and you’d get a lot of data on the market and you’d get market surveys and you’d get analyses of who’s strong in the market and who isn’t and what the opportunities are, and you study that. That is essential, but that’s only half of the story. Then the right brain thing would be much more intuitive, imaginative, creative. We might say, “Well, do some conventional things,” but we’ll do some crazy things to get noticed as well. There I might take a technique such as what’s on TV tonight, where you look through the TV listing of the major programs that are on TV tonight and you say, “For each of these characters or each of these programs, how would they approach this problem, what would they do?”, and you exaggerate it in a ridiculous fashion.

If it’s Columbo, the TV detective, you’d use his approach, or if it’s Jack Bauer, you’d use his approach, or if it’s Breaking Bad, you’d use Walter White’s approach, and you deliberately go to extremes in order to explore new avenues and new approaches, and it throws up a lot of stupid ideas and a lot of bad ideas and a lot of crazy ideas, and occasionally, a really creative idea.

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Doug:    That’s an interesting approach, I’ve never considered that. I’m going to look at the TV a little different.

Paul Sloane:       I believe marketing is a unique combination of the logical and the lateral. To be really good at marketing, you have to be analytical, you have to understand the numbers, you can’t ignore the numbers at all, and you must live by the numbers and analyze what works and what doesn’t work ruthlessly, but at the same time you should be always trying new things and you should be always dropping things that don’t work. You should do more of the things that work and less of the things that don’t work, and you should try some new things, and you should try some crazy things. If they don’t work, you drop them, if they do work, you do more of them.

Doug:    That makes sense. I mean, we are big advocates on testing, testing, testing, and always running new tests over the baseline, so yeah, I totally agree with that.

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, and the opportunity to do cool, interesting things that appeal to your audience I think is marvelous. Kentucky Fried Chicken, @KFC on Twitter, do you know about this? I only learned this recently and it amazed me, so there’s a secret formula for Kentucky Fried Chicken, for the coating they put on chicken, and it consists of 11 herbs and spices, and it’s a top secret theoretically, nobody knows what it is except for a handful of people.

Doug:    That’s right.

Paul Sloane:       If you go to @KFC on Twitter, you’ll see they’ve got 1.25 million followers, but they only follow 11 people. The 11 people they follow are the five Spice Girls and six men who are all called Herb. Kentucky Fried Chicken on Twitter follows 11 herbs and spices, how cool is that?

Doug:    Yeah, I remember when I saw that, I thought, “Good for them, I mean there’s a big brand and whether you like their brand or not, it’s a big brand, and somebody was very creative,” I did see that come out in social media.

Paul Sloane:       That’s the whole point you see, you can do really clever things on a cheap budget. Burger King launched a left-handed hamburger on April the 1st 1999, I think it was, and they put out a press release saying, “We’ve got a new hamburger with all the condiments and flavorings rotated through 180 degrees, specially designed for left-handed people, so they can eat their burgers left-handed and get the full flavor.” People went to Burger Kings asking for left-handed hamburgers, other people went in saying, “I want my normal right-handed hamburger.” They had to put out another press release saying, “This was an April Fool’s prank.” You’ve just got to admire the fact that, and they got a lot of media coverage for that, they got TV coverage.

Doug:    That’s awesome.

Paul Sloane:       I know, and that is what I would call lateral thinking in marketing. Also, I like what I call topical mischief, where you do things which are just a little bit edgy and mischievous in order to get attention.

Doug:    Yeah, I was looking at a video that’s gone viral, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, and it’s a guy, I think it’s an Australian guy, asking his girlfriend about if she orders a 12-inch pizza, you know how many times did she want the pizza cut, would she want it cut into eight slices or 12 slices, and she said only eight, because she can’t eat 12 slices of pizza. It’s a really hilarious spoof, and she’s totally confused why he’s laughing, but that would be an easy take for a pizza company to say, “Hey, it’s January, I know everybody’s interested in their diet and their weight loss and getting in shape, so ask us to cut our pizza into eight slices instead of 12, so you eat less.” You’re right, I mean it wouldn’t be a big deal for someone to take something that’s already viral and play on it.

Paul Sloane:       Yep, that’s true.

Doug:    I want to ask you about a specific story I heard. I listened to your TED talk about Are You Open-Minded, and I thought that your take on bidding on the advertising area in the UK in the one section was very interesting, so I don’t want to try to retell the story and kill your story, but could you just share a little bit of the thinking that you talked about during your TED talk?

Paul Sloane:       Yes. I gave a talk a few years ago and somebody came up and told me this story afterward, and I’ve used it ever since because I think it’s a very good example of lateral thinking in marketing and lateral thinking in leadership. Until 1952, there was only one TV channel in the UK, it was called the BBC, and then in 1952, the government decides to auction licenses for commercial TV stations by region. A lot of companies thought this was a fantastic opportunity, a license to print money, we can sell advertising on TV for the first time in the UK. They put teams of analysts on the case to work out which regions had the best demographics, the wealthiest people who would generate the most advertising revenue.

There was a little chain of cinemas in the south of England called Grenada Cinemas, run by Sidney Bernstein, whose parents had fled persecution in Eastern Europe and come to Britain in the early part of the century, and they only had about seven or eight cinemas. He said to his marketing team, he said, “I’d like to bid for one of these regions, but I don’t want you to find me the richest region in the UK. I want you to find me the wettest region in the UK.” They went away and they came back and they said, “The area with the most precipitation per head of population is the northwest of England,” it’s Liverpool and Manchester and Bolton and Bury and all those places.

He said, “Right, let’s bid for that.” They bid and they got it fairly cheaply. He’d realized there’s no point in getting Chelsea and Westminster in London if everyone’s out walking their dog in the park or they’ve gone to the restaurant, you want somewhere it’s pouring down outside and people stay in to watch TV. The point of the story is this, that when everyone else is looking for the richest, the lateral thinker deliberately looks in a different direction, for the wettest. The bonus is this, he says, “You can’t look in a new direction by staring harder in the same direction. You’ve got to shift.” As David Bowie said, “Turn and face the strange,” and that’s what I advise people to do, to physically turn and to look in a different direction, and that’s what lateral thinking in marketing is all about.

By the way, of all the companies that won a franchise in 1952-53, only one has survived to this day, and it’s Grenada, the company that won the northwest of England. They’ve done some very very innovative things.

Doug:    That’s an amazing story, and that should really enlighten us to when we’re looking at opportunities in the marketplace that maybe we need to look at some different points of reference and not necessarily just the age, income, education.

Paul Sloane:       That’s right. We tend to do the analytical … I’m not saying the analytical stuff is wrong, I’m not saying throw out logic, throw out spreadsheets. What I’m saying is, the really brilliant marketers marry both, they come up with a crazy idea, and then they do rigorous AB testing on it, and they’re always trying new things, new words, new approaches, changing little things, changing big things and seeing what works.

Doug:    Is there an example of a product or a company or somebody that you worked with that you were most proud of, what was your biggest, when you saw, your personal success?

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Paul Sloane:       Well, I worked with a company in the UK called the AA, the Automobile Association, and they service cars, or they did at the time, they’ve stopped doing it now, but they had service centers where they would do car testing and servicing, and they wanted to drive more traffic there. We did a brainstorm and we came up with this idea called the atlas amnesty. See, they print maybe 500,000 road atlases every year for the UK at the time, this was before GPS became widespread really, and they sell them reasonably cheap. Now they’ve got a lot left over, and we came up with this campaign which was called the atlas amnesty, and we said, because people drive around with old atlases, they waste a lot of time and they go to the wrong places.

If you come into one of our service centers and give us the details of your car, when its next test is due, we’ll change your old atlas for a brand new one. They put out a press release saying, “This will save so many million miles driven and so many million hours of motorists’ waste time if they just come along,” and they got a lot of coverage for this, the atlas amnesty, it was called. It was just a way of using something, a resource they had which they had plenty of, but seemed to have a value to other people, and to play on this idea that a lot of time was wasted going down blind alleys and wrong paths because people were using out of date information. By using that, they were able to generate a lot of traffic and a lot more business.

Doug:    That’s a really cool idea, I mean what a great concept, and especially today with people’s concern about the environment, you wouldn’t have to go far to be able to pick up a recent press release or a recent article or a news story to say, “Hey look, if you can reduce motorists’ driving time by 15 minutes by using our app, you’re going to save so many million pounds of whatever that goes into the environment from the car exhaust.”

Paul Sloane:       Well you know, there was a report just last year, in 2017, about some researchers who’d studied washing machines in the UK, and washing machines over here are shipped with a big concrete block in them. The concrete block stops the washing machine waltzing across the floor when it does the spin cycle. It’s there, and it’s been there in washing machines for years, and it weighs about 25 kilos or something, or 40 pounds. It’s a lot of weight in this concrete block. Some guy said, “Why don’t we replace the concrete block with an empty plastic box? Then when it arrives at its destination, you fill that with water and that will serve the same purpose.”

They tried it and it worked, you’d actually need a bigger box because water isn’t as dense as concrete, but it saves a tremendous amount of weight, and also when you make concrete, it generates a lot of CO2 gas. It’s better for the environment, it reduces cost, it makes transport easier, it’s such an obvious idea, and yet no one had thought of it before. The opportunity is to do just a little bit of lateral thinking and say, if you ask the question, “Is there a better way to do what we’re doing?”, the answer is always yes. There’s always a smarter way to do things, and it’s just a matter of time before somebody finds that. If you start with the attitude that every system, every method, every process in your business is going to have to be replaced by something better pretty damn soon, then that’s a very good attitude to take.

The innovative leader is always restless, he or she is always curious to find new ways and better ways. They’re never complacent, they never sit back and say, “Wow, we’re doing great,” and we just carry on doing what we’re doing. They’re always looking for new and better ways to do things.

Doug:    Well, it’s interesting because I guess there’s two sides to that. One is the opportunity to grow your business, expand your market, create a new product, which the space that I’m in is always exciting, but then there’s the other side of the risk of being complacent, and you know someone like myself coming along and barging into your marketplace because you’re doing things the old way, the example of the guy with the concrete block versus the water.

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, there’s a little company out there that wants to take your market away, it wants to take your customers away from you, they want to put you out of business, they want you to starve to death. They’re smart, they’re working late into the night thinking up smart ways to better serve your customers, so everyone’s under threat.

Doug:    Well, in America, we had a company that’s been around forever, it was called Sears.

Paul Sloane:       Yes.

Doug:    Sears did very well, they were the Amazon of the catalog shopping. As kids, we grew up and were excited that the catalog would come, and then the Christmas catalog would come and then you’d circle all the stuff you wanted Santa or your mom and dad to buy you for Christmas, and they’ve just filed for bankruptcy protection. It’s kind of interesting when you look at the fact that they pretty much owned the catalog marketing business, and somebody like Amazon came along, and Sears just didn’t adapt, they just kept sending out print catalogs and never got with the program. Now they’re talking, you know they’re looking for someone to buy them.

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, and in their day, they were very innovative. When they first came out with the catalog, it was a major innovation and it went with the railroad and it transformed retail, because you just had a very tiny store out west, and then the Sears Roebuck catalog had all of these magical things in that you could order, and they’d be delivered. It was quite something, but Amazon are really tough guys to compete with, they’re putting a lot of companies out of business. I wouldn’t want to be in retail at the moment.

Doug:    I mean, my point was that Amazon wasn’t there when Sears owned the marketplace.

Paul Sloane:       That’s right.

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Doug:    Obviously Sears left a window or door open, like many of the big retailers have left this door open for someone like Amazon to come in and take their business because they didn’t innovate and they didn’t keep moving, saying, “Hey, you know how does my customer want to be served?” With the work that you do, I mean I’m fascinated because I love innovation, one of the reasons I love it is because most people stick their heads in the sand, so for me I think there’s a lot of opportunities, because while most people are hiding hoping it’s not going to affect their industry, I’m looking for opportunities. What do you think the biggest myth is, if you’re talking to the chief marketing officer or the vice president of marketing of a decent sized corporation, what would prevent them from going through the process that you’re suggesting here?

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, well that’s a good question, and one of the first things I ask on my workshops with companies around the world is, “What’s impeding innovation in your business today?” Do you want more innovation? Yes, are you good at it? Not as good as we’d like. The next question is, “What’s stopping you from bringing more products and services to market faster?” We get a whole bunch of reasons, and most of them are excuses, to be honest, “We’re too busy, we’re complacent, we’re risk-averse, we’ve got a fear of failure, it’s not a priority, it’s not in our KPIs, we don’t get a bonus for it.” There’s all sorts of reasons, and the fact of the matter is that most organizations are designed to deliver a process efficiently, without variation.

Innovation is the antithesis of that, it’s about trying crazy new things and disrupting the process, and so there are natural antibodies inside the organization which oppose crazy new ideas. Einstein said the really greatest ideas always look absurd initially, and so there are people who say, “No, we can’t do that, because it’s going to upset our customers and it’s going to look wrong, it’s going to damage our image, it’s too much risk.” It’s always easy to find reasons not to try new things, it’s what [DeBono 00:20:44] calls the “intelligence trap”, the smarter you are, the easier it is to find fault with other people’s ideas and shoot them down. You’ve got to overcome that, and the leader has to change the culture to one where risks are encouraged and experimentation is encouraged, rather than discouraged, and one in which people have an incentive to try new things, and are rewarded for trying things that fail.

It all comes down to leadership, and it comes down to courageous leadership, because being innovative involves making bold decisions, fast decisions, risky decisions, some of which will be wrong. It involves wasting money on things that don’t work, but until you try them, you don’t really know. You’ve got to be constantly trying new things, and that means you’re trying things that fail, and people just don’t like failure, and they don’t like admitting failure, and yet you need an atmosphere in which you learn the lessons from failure very quickly, so you share what happened and you admit to it.

[John Adair 00:21:47], the great leadership guru, says, “The most important sentence for a leader to be able to say is this: ‘I admit that I was wrong.'” He says most leaders can’t utter that sentence, and most political leaders never utter that sentence, and it’s a very important sentence.

Doug:    That’s a different topic. Yeah, it is, absolutely. Yeah, now you had, I heard at one point in one of your talks, you talked about failure, and I can’t remember exactly how you phrased it, but I think you asked what was the percentage of your failure in a particular task during your week or whatever, and you said there needed to be some there. Could you just expand on that and correct the way that I described your quote?

Paul Sloane:       I’m not quite sure which quote you’re talking about, but you should be trying lots of new … If everything you try succeeds, you’re not being bold enough. Typically, if I say to a company, “How many new products have you launched, and what was your success rate?”, and if they say, “Well, we’re 90% successful, 100%,” typically they’re just doing line extensions and variations of existing products, is what they’re calling “innovation”, they’re not doing anything that’s new and bold. The really innovative companies constantly try new things, and the big concept in innovation now is the minimum viable product, and what Eric Reese in his seminal book, The Lean Startup, argues, is that what you should do is ship the smallest, crappiest working version of your new idea that you can, and you should put it in the hands of customers and say, “Is this what you want?”

The guy who founded PayPal, what’s his name? Peter Thiel.

Doug:    Elon Musk?

Paul Sloane:       He says, “If you’re not embarrassed by your first release of your product, you haven’t shipped early enough.” You should ship a product that you’re embarrassed about it’s so unready for the market, it’s so immature because that way you get fast feedback. The purpose of your prototype is not fast payback, it’s fast feedback. You want something that tells you what’s right and what’s wrong about that idea because your initial idea is almost always wrong, but you don’t know it until you put it in the hands of customers. Just describing it isn’t good enough, you’ve got to actually build a mock-up, build a wireframe, build a prototype, it might be a number of screenshots, it might be with clay and string and wire, but you put something in the hands of customers and you say, “This is what we’re doing, what do you think?”

They’ll say, “Yeah, we like this, but this is completely wrong, and you’ve got this wrong,” and that’s so valuable to learn that early. Fail early, fail fast, fail cheap, is what I advise my clients.

Doug:    I love that, the purpose is fast feedback, not fast payback, that’s a brilliant statement.

Paul Sloane:       That’s one of my quotes, yeah.

Doug:    Well we’ll make sure we highlight that. Years ago, I went to New York for an event that was put on by Fast Company, it was called the Innovation Summit, and I was really quite impressed. The organizers had done a good job. We hopped on the elevator to head up for our first session, and there were a couple people there with brass instruments and a violin in the elevator, and kind of looked at them, and they said, “Well, we’re your elevator music.” That’s how the summit started. I thought, “Well, that’s really cool.” I was so, that’s probably the most exciting summit I had ever been to, because I came back after listening to brands like Lexus and NASDAQ and the Wall Street Journal talk about innovation and where they were, and people said, “Why are you so excited?”, I said, “Because they don’t have a clue, they are so stuck in their own ways. What they think is innovation is so old school and they’re not moving.”

For me, being from Vancouver, Canada, there’s only two Canadian companies at that event, a company called Telus, which is a big communications company there, and myself from Canada, and everyone else were big brands from America. I was so excited just to see what they were doing, and they put us through a whole bunch of exercises not dissimilar to what you’re talking about, where we had to form a band, we had to play music, and we had to do art, and things that were as you would think of executives from these companies, very uncomfortable doing, because it wasn’t part of your typical workday, or maybe even a space that you’re comfortable in in your spare time.

Paul Sloane:       It’s good, and you’ve got to place yourself out of your comfort zone every so often, you’ve got to deliberately force yourself to take a different point of view, because it’s so easy to get into a rut.

Doug:    Well yes, and I guess I’ll take the opportunity, you threw an easy lob ball for me, and I say the rut is a grave with the ends kicked out. I’m sure you’ve heard of Tim Ferriss.

Paul Sloane:       Yes.

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Doug:    I’ve just been reading his book, Tribe of Mentors, which I received for Christmas this year, and so there was a question in there that I just wanted to ask you, it’s question number nine. He sent this out to several people, and he had 100 people respond, and one of the questions was, “What are the bad recommendations that you hear in your profession or area of expertise?”

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, I think one of the bad recommendations is we’ve got to try the CEO’s idea and we’ve got to make it work because we’ve put so much into this now, we can’t stop. If it’s the CEO’s idea, it doesn’t make it any better than anyone else’s idea necessarily, and sometimes the smartest thing to do is to stop and to kill an idea, so as to free resources to try something else. Don’t try just one big idea, don’t bet the company on one huge experiment, which is what Motorola did with the [Eridium 00:27:33] whole scheme. Try lots of little things if you can. Sometimes you can’t, sometimes you have to take a big, big gamble.

If you’re Nokia and you’re up against Apple, and you’ve got to make a decision on a touchscreen or not, it’s a big, big decision, but very often you can do lots of little things and try those. Innovation isn’t necessarily one big idea coming from the top, coming from the research and development department, innovation is everyone’s job, and everyone has to find a better way to do what they’re doing.

Doug:    That’s great feedback, and that’s why I like multi-variant testing, it takes all the emotion out when we’re writing ad copy or producing a campaign, so you can get everybody’s feedback on the marketing team, the CEO, and then you put it online and the analytics tell you what the consumer likes, so then it takes the ego out. I might think my copy’s the best, well it doesn’t matter if it’s not converting.

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, and it’s amazing what little changes can make a big difference, isn’t it? You just change a couple of words in one sentence, and it can increase or decrease response.

Doug:    Well, one of the tests that I was most impressed with, and when you think about it logically after the fact it makes sense, this one company made one minor change in their website and saw significant boosts in sales, and all they did was make their font larger.

Paul Sloane:       Yes.

Doug:    You’re going, “Well, why would that make a difference?” Because they were targeting seniors, so not a very expensive task, but anyhow, they were thinking out of the box and did something different.

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, it’s amazing, isn’t it?

Doug:    Let’s move into this closing up here, who’s a guest that you think I should have on my podcast, one guest?

Paul Sloane:       You should get Jeff Bezos if you can.

Doug:    Okay, then I’ll leave that to you to make an introduction, that’d be awesome if you could.

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, I know a chap who worked for him who ran Amazon UK for a long time. When he went for an interview, I did a podcast with him and he went for an interview with Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Bezos asked him this question, he said, “How many windows are there in London?” My friend Brian, he estimated, he said, “Well, I mean I guess about 30 million.” Jeff said, “How did you work that out?” He said, “Well, there’s about eight million people, and [rambles],” he went through his working, and Jeff said okay, and he offered him the job, and he got the job running Amazon UK. Afterwards, he said to Jeff, he said, “What is the answer, how many windows are there in London?”, and Jeff said, “I’ve absolutely no idea, but I just wanted to see how you thought.”

Doug:    Wow, that’s really cool.

Paul Sloane:       “I just wanted to see how you handled the problem, you’d never heard it before.” It was just one of those things.

Doug:    The one guy I’ve been super inspired about in terms of innovation is, I listened to an Elon Musk book on audiobook. People criticize him for what he’s done, and every time he faltered, the press attacked him. I think of what he’s done and how he’s helped America in terms of the space industry, and on and on he goes, and I just think that over the years, he’s going to be looked at as someone who really took huge risks. He played hard, he put his own money in, and he’s made a big impact on the world.

Paul Sloane:       Yeah, so one of my recent books is called Think Like an Innovator, and I take 76 great innovators, and I talk about how they think and what lessons we can learn from them. He’s one of the people in the book, and the lesson from him I think is he thinks big. He made his first billion, he didn’t stop there, he didn’t say, “Right, I’m going to sit by the pool now and take it easy.” He went from PayPal to Tesla, SpaceX, he’s got the HyperLoop plan, he wants to change the world, he wants to change transport, he wants to change space travel, he wants to change the human race. He really thinks big, and that’s inspirational, I think.

Doug:    Absolutely, and I heard, you know I listened to Sir Richard Branson speak once at an event I was at, and there’s somebody else who was just very humble and had an appreciation for making the world a better place, and not just sitting on your laurels once you’ve had some success, but to continue to give back and to innovate.

Paul Sloane:       Yes.

Doug:    What are the best ways for people to reach and connect with you? I know you’ve got a long list of books, and we’ll happily share all the links, so where would people find you?

Paul Sloane:       Well, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook, but the best place to find me is to follow me on Twitter, I’m @PaulSloane, P-A-U-L-S-L-O-A-N-E, all one word, I’m on LinkedIn, and my website is destination innovation, destination, a little hyphen innovation .com. If you search for me on the internet, you’ll find me, I’ve got a Wikipedia page and various other, and I’m on YouTube of course with some video clips, so I’m fairly easy to find. If you want me to speak at your conference or get your people thinking differently, that’s what I do.

Doug:    Well, that’s excellent. Well, thanks so much for sharing today. I love the topic of innovation. It looks like I’ve got some new books to add to my reading list when I finish up Tim’s last book. There you go listeners, you have it. The purpose is to fail fast, fail cheap, and fast feedback, not fast profit. Thanks for listening, and as usual, we’ll have all the information, Paul’s information and links to his books, his website, his LinkedIn, all social media connections in our show notes. If you’re not subscribed to iTunes, subscribe to iTunes, if you like the show, feel free to leave us a comment or feedback. ‘Til next episode, keep working, keep failing and keep prospering.

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Resources:

• Web: destination-innovation.com
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloane
• YouTube/TedEx: https://youtu.be/4vgl3v8rjj8
• Think Like an Innovator
• A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing
• How to Be a Brilliant Thinker
• The Innovative Leader
• A Leader’s Guide to Lateral Thinking

Tweets by PaulSloane

How Can You Use Innovation & Lateral Thinking … Crush Your Competitors

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My personal approach to business and marketing has always been

• What if all the barriers are imaginary? Have a listen to GOAL SETTING TIPS FOR 2018