Tag Archives: Entrepreneurship

Leveraging the Power of Play to Innovate!

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Leveraging the Power of Play to Innovate!

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

One of my most potent memories from my career in organizational learning and development was the power of play as an effective adult learning method during a “Money and You” workshop with Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

It was a business game called “Win as Much as You Can”, also known now as the “XY Game”. The game involved forming four teams of two players, who alternated scoring across four rounds by choosing to throw either X or Y. The scoring process was the key to unlocking and understanding the game’s impact; if your team kept throwing X’s, you were awarded a significant number of points, enabling you to win as much as you could.

The scoring process subtly shifted in round eight, when the key to winning the game was for all four teams to throw Ys, yet not all teams did!

Because we were all unconsciously stuck in a competitive win-or-lose mindset, aiming to win as much as we could rather than adopting an approach where everyone could win, or being collaborative and playing a win-win game.

It was a moment of deep shame for me when I was announced the winner of my small group of eight players — a deeply impactful moment I have never forgotten, because for me to win, the other seven players had to lose, and they weren’t happy about losing.

Critical Foundational 21st Century Skills

These key lessons are encapsulated in my latest innovative co-creation – The Start-Up Game™. This hybrid board game combines experiential learning with achievement and competitive elements. It features an AI learning component that teaches critical foundational skills—collaboration, mathematical thinking, and adaptability —essential for both individuals and companies in a fast-changing AI world. As technical complexity rises, the glue that keeps talent productive is social skill—communication, empathy, conflict resolution, and the ability to coordinate diverse expertise. In addition to social skills, other fundamental capabilities — such as critical thinking, complex problem-solving, and reasoning — are crucial components of a dynamic, collective work environment in the modern enterprise. Together, they offer a shared platform that unlocks the full value of individuals’ specialized know-how, enables adaptation and innovation as technology and markets shift, and is increasingly in demand.

Games as Metaphors for Real Life

Since games are often metaphors for real life, I have spent many years shifting from the win/lose competitive mindset and way of being I grew up with to recognize the value of experimentation and co-operation, and to understand what it means to be truly collaborative.

Adults Learn by Doing

With the ongoing war for our attention, time scarcity, our increasing reliance on mobile devices, and the seductive nature of AI and TikTok as sources of knowledge and information, we have largely forgotten the importance of developing these foundational skills, especially in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

All adults can learn these skills through harnessing the power of play.

Play is essential for developing our emotional and cognitive functions and fostering stronger social connections. In organizational learning and development, experiential learning involves gaining knowledge through direct experience and deep reflection, rather than just passive observation, like simply watching a learning video. It is a highly effective adult learning method that allows participants to link theoretical concepts with practical, on-the-job applications.

This approach involves active engagement in simulated real-world scenarios and:

  • Requires critical reflection on the experience to develop new states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills.
  • Helps players increase self-awareness and gain a clearer understanding of how their mindsets and behaviors influence the people and teams they lead or interact with.

The Power of Play

Because focused, structured and intentional play, in the context of experiential learning, can:

  • Stimulate players’ curiosity, imagination and creativity.
  • Help players shift their emotional states, mindsets and behaviors.
  • Develop players’ emotional and cognitive agility.
  • Enhance players’ decision-making and problem-solving skills.
  • Improve leadership and team effectiveness.
  • Build players’ courage, boldness, bravery and resilience.
  • Reduce players’ stress levels by providing a safe space for improvisation and a break from business-as-usual responsibilities and habits.

Engaging in experiential learning activities, such as structured business games, boosts brain function, improves emotional regulation and self-management, encourages experimentation, and builds and strengthens constructive collaborative relationships with others.

In organizations, the power of play can be structured to boost players’ skills in key areas crucial to 21st-century success, including accepting responsibility, building trust, being accountable, communication, teaming, innovation, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, and achievement, resulting in overall performance improvements.

The Start-Up Game™ Leverages the Power of Play

The Start-Up Game™ engages and encourages players to think and act differently by safely experimenting with language, key mindsets, behaviors, and the creative and critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving skills used by successful intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and innovators.

It enables players to develop critical social, emotional, and cognitive mindsets, behaviors and skills that are the crucial components of a dynamic, collective work environment in the modern enterprise.

How to Incorporate the Power of Play into Your Organization

  • Create an environment of permission, safety, and trust, giving people agency and autonomy to learn through play and experimentation, and allowing them to learn from mistakes and failures.
  • Encourage people to “learn by doing and reflecting” to stretch their thinking by shifting business-as-usual mindsets and behaviors, to push the envelope by developing new 21st-century mental maps, behavioral deviations, and crucial new skills in critical and creative thinking and acting that result in smart risk-taking, intelligent decision-making, and innovative problem-solving.  
  • Commit to building an organizational or team culture that promotes continuous learning at a pace faster than the competition.
  • Encourage people to develop a regular reflective practice to harness their collective capacity to create, invent, and innovate by establishing a set of habitual reflective practices.

We are living in an age when technical expertise can become irrelevant in just a few years; foundational skills matter more than ever. Adopting an experiential learning approach to Innovation enables people to be agile and adaptive, to develop creative and critical thinking skills, to collaborate, and to sense, see, and solve complex problems, thereby thriving in a constantly evolving environment.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™. Discover our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that provides a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams, developing their future fitness within your unique innovation context.

Image Credit: 1 of 1,000+ quote slides for your meetings and presentations available at http://misterinnovation.com

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Act Like an Owner – Revisited!

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Act Like an Owner – Revisited!

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

One of my favorite concepts to cover in my customer service keynote speeches is to act like an owner. I originally wrote about this in 2011 and shared the story of an 18-year-old server at a pizza restaurant who took so much pride in his work that the guests thought he owned the restaurant.

In preparing for an upcoming speech, I worked with Anthony Demangone, CMO of the National Association of Federally Insured Credit Unions. We discussed the ownership concept and how everyone can act like an owner or leader. Anyone can be “that person” everyone admires and wants to emulate. He shared the remarkable story of Richard Montañez, a janitor at a Frito-Lay plant in California. Here’s the short version:

One day Montañez heard Roger Enrico, the CEO of Frito-Lay, share an inspiring message: to “act like an owner.” Montañez took this message to heart, and for almost 10 years, while still working at the plant, tried to learn everything he could about Frito-Lay. One day he asked a Frito-Lay salesperson if he could spend a day and learn about the sales process.

The salesperson took Montañez to a Latino neighborhood where he noticed something that would eventually change his life. As he helped restock the shelves, he noticed that the Lay’s, Fritos and Ruffles were all plain – in other words, no spicy products. And right next to their display was a shelf of Mexican spices. Montañez wondered what Cheetos would taste like if dipped into chili powder and other spices, so he went home and made his own version of spicy Cheetos. He liked what he tasted and reached out to the Frito-Lay CEO to set up a meeting.

Somehow Montañez landed an appointment to meet with the CEO and other company executives. During the meeting, an executive asked, “How much market share do you think you can get?” Montañez nervously opened his arms wide and said, “This much!”

The CEO smiled at Montañez and said, “Put the mop away. You’re coming with us.” The rest is a corporate fairytale come true. Montanez became an executive and worked his way up to VP of multicultural sales for PepsiCo America, the holding company for Frito-Lay.

I love this story for two reasons. First, it’s about an employee who took initiative and thought beyond the role he was hired to do, which was to be a janitor. He took such pride in his work and loved his job so much that he was willing to step out of his comfort zone and reach out to the CEO of a major company with his idea. And second, just as impressive is that Roger Enrico, then-CEO of Frito-Lay, imparted the inspiring “act like an owner” message and was willing to meet with Montañez!

So, are you an employee who’s willing to share your ideas with leadership? Or are you an executive who’s willing to listen? Not every idea will have a Richard Montañez fairy-tale ending, but every idea has potential. So, I encourage you to adopt and embrace the “act like an owner” mindset inside your organization.

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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The Seven P’s of Raising Money from Investors

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The Seven P's of Raising Money from Investors

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Budding sickcare entrepreneurs inevitably want to know, “How do I raise money for my idea?” Most of the time, they are not ready for fundraising prime time and they have not taken the necessary steps to begin to do so or understand when and if it is the prudent thing or right time to do.

Here are the 7 P’s of raising money from investors:

1. Preparation

You should prepare to raise money by 1) derisking your idea as much as possible and 2) understanding what it will take to raise money i.e. technical, clinical and commercial (traction) validation.

When you have an exciting new idea, it’s easy to focus on all its benefits and jump to action. But doing so can lead to failure. Your limited perspective may mean you’re not seeing potential hurdles — and you may be leaving other promising options unexplored.

If you want the best ideas to flourish, you need to open your mind to different people from people beyond your team, whom you don’t usually talk to — and ask open-ended questions. After presenting your idea, ask: What stands out to you, and what’s missing? What would our critics say? Consider the failure of your idea: What would your premortem reveal? Consider other people outside the room and ask: What would someone on the frontlines say? Finally, put yourself in your competitors’ shoes. What flaws or weaknesses in your idea would they celebrate if you were successful?

  1. Do you understand the regulatory requirements and rules for raising private money?
  2. Do you know how much money you should raise and in what form: debt, diluting funds or non-diluting funds, like grants, contracts or some proof of concept awards?
  3. Have you validated the underlying hypotheses of your business model and demonstrated product-market fit? Do you have traction? What is the evidence? But, is product-market fit really enough?
  4. Do you have a reimbursement or revenue plan?
  5. Do you have a plan to create and protect your intellectual property?
  6. Do you have a regulatory approval or compliance plan?
  7. Have you created the appropriate corporate entity and corporate governance documents?
  8. Are you prepared to bootstrap your startup and dedicate the time, effort and capital required to be successful?
  9. Have you created the necessary fundraising and marketing collateral like a website, executive summary, social media channels to create awareness, engagement and buzz about your company?
  10. Can you answer these three questions: Is the market for the problem you want to solve big enough to make your journey worth it? How many customers want it and are willing and able to pay for it or get someone else to pay for it? Can you win at it give market competitors?

2. Plan/Strategy

After answering these questions, assuming you decide to proceed, you will need a capital raising plan and strategy. A capital raising strategy is essentially a roadmap for how your organization will pursue and obtain the funds it needs to fuel its growth. The capital raising process can take a long time and it’s a serious undertaking. However, while you may stay up late at night searching for new investors, writing pitch decks, and pouring over financial spreadsheets, building your strategy is the simplest part of the entire process. Here are the parts to the plan.

3. Pitch deck

Your pitch deck should tell your story. Who are the villains? Who are the heros? How did they win? There are many resources available to help you craft and polish your short, medium and long pitches, depending on the circumstances and the audience. Here is something to start:

4. Platform

You will need a CRM or tracking platform to keep track of the people who have contacted and how you intend to convert them as leads to investors. Crowdfunding platforms are another resource.

5. People

Do you have the right people on your startup team who can raise money? Are the founders the right people to do it? Do you have robust enough networks and contacts? Do you need a fractional of full-time accountant, controller or chief financial officer?

6. Process

The process should describe how and who will execute your fundraising plan, whether you are starting a company or scaling one. Since what you are doing is selling and marketing your idea and your team, what is your marketing, sales operations and sales enablement process?

7. Performance indicators

Performance indicators help you measure your progress and inform your strategy and execution adjustments moving forward. Here are some fundraising metrics for non-profits.

Raising money from investors is a lot like renovating your kitchen. It will take much longer than you thought it would, the costs in time, money and effort will be much bigger than you assumed and, when you see the final results, you will wish you had done some things differently.

Good luck and be sure to follow the right rainbow.

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How to Balance a Culture of Conformity with Creativity in Medicine

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How to Balance a Culture of Conformity with Creativity in Medicine

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Medicine, by its nature, is a culture of conformity. We are trained to do no harm, be risk averse, and conform to the standard of care. We follow “best practices” i.e. what everyone else is doing, and are encouraged to follow evidence based guidelines. Medical students are chosen by their ability to score highly on standardized tests and check off the requisite boxes in their application. They know what to say in interviews…over and over again. Physicians have to pass standardized tests to get a license and be board certified to practice and maintain certification.

Now that medicine has become corporatized and more and more doctors in grey flannel suits are working for the man, things have worsened.

Successful innovation and entrepreneurship, on the other hand, encourages a culture of creativity. Now that students, trainees and clinicians are getting more and more interested in physician entrepreneurship and the business of medicine, how do we encourage and balance the two cultures?

  1. Encourage cognitive diversity, not just demographic diversity, in decision making
  2. Don’t penalize failure. Showcase it instead.
  3. Create ambidextrous organizational departments and units that can plan for not just the now, but the next and new as well.
  4. Use evidence based techniques for ideation and creative problem solving. Here are 3 to get you started.
  5. Recruit, hire, develop and promote for creativity
  6. Create psychologically safe spaces to say things
  7. Forget brainstorming
  8. Hire leaderpreneurs who can drive cultural change
  9. Know the difference between good rebels and bad rebels
  10. Don’t confuse disruptive doctors with disruptive doctors
  11. Learn to resolve the conflict between the ethics of medicine and the ethics of business

Sometimes thinking outside of the box will get you in trouble. Other times, not doing so will box you in. You decide.

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Dreaded Perfect Entrepreneur

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The Dreaded Perfect Entrepreneur

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

“Perfect is the enemy of good” is a quote usually attributed to Voltaire. He actually wrote that the “best is the enemy of the good” (il meglio è nemico del bene) and cited it as an old Italian proverb in 1770, but the phrase was translated into English as “perfect” and made its way into common parlance in that form.

Perfectionism is a problem. Here are some reasons why.

  1. It drives other people you interact with, who are not perfectionists, crazy
  2. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world where there is no definition of perfect. There are only solutions we test until we find out whether they work or not and then change if they don’t.
  3. Defining something as perfect is a value judgement, not an absolute, Perfection is a pipe dream. As Psychology Today explained, “‘perfect’ may exist as a concept,” but it’s not a reality. After all, its definition is entirely subjective. “Achieving perfection” is entirely a judgment call, depending on who’s trying to achieve it and who’s watching.
  4. It could be a symptom of a more serious psychiatric problem like obsessive-compulsive disorder which is a personality disorder characterized by excessive orderliness, perfectionism, attention to details, and a need for control in relating to others. It is one of many entrepreneurial syndromes that are characterized by entrepreneurial psychopathologies
  5. Meeting the expectations of others to be perfect is bad for your mental health. It will make you unhappy.
  6. There is reason why the Golden Mean has been around for several thousand years
  7. Innovation starts with mindset Being a perfectionist is not consistent with revising the “good” with evidence based business idea testing results
  8. There are reasons why we say doctors, actors, athletes, lawyers, entrepreneurs and other service providers practice their craft. You never get it perfect, even if someone gives you a 10, or a Facebook like or an Oscar for your performance. There is always room for improvement, but almost never perfection. Failure is part of the drill and inevitable. What’s on your failure resume? That’s why, when it comes tapping into a source of entrepreneurial internal motivation, you should make it personal, but don’t take it personally.
  9. The goal of making something perfect or doing something perfectly will get in the way of starting something, like:
  • Business Idea: Instead of waiting until you have a complete airtight business plan, simply start your business.
  • Software: Instead of ironing out every last bug, release your beta.
  • Products: Instead of adding every conceivable improvement and feature, ship your product. Release improvements later.
  • Health: Instead of finding the right gym, selecting the right outfit and picking the right workout, just go for a walk.
  • Website: Instead of finding the best server, CMS, theme, appearance and font, just get a landing page up and start selling.
  • Email: Instead of trying to create a well-written and grammatically impeccable email, just get the message out and click “send.”
  • Value proposition and business model canvas: Define your underlying assumptions and validate them with evidence. It’s called minimal viable product, not perfect product, for a reason.

10. Underbidding everyone by making something “good enough for government work” and then submitting endless add-ons leading to cost overruns is a tried and true profitable business model and there is little or no chance you will go to jail or get fired doing it.

If you want to know how to get to Carnegie Hall, it’s just easier to practice, practice, practice and focus on the journey, not the destination.

Image credit: Pixabay

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