So your job as a leader, job number one as a leader, is to create the right conditions for creativity to blossom naturally. If you ran a greenhouse, you're like, Yeah, I got to have the right temperature and humidity and water and fertilizer. That creates the right conditions for plant growth. So now as a leader, you say, Well, how do I create the right conditions for creativity growth? And the way that you do that is essentially remove the fear. All ideas are celebrated, not just the ones that work. You encourage when someone screws something up. Rituals and rewards that support responsible risk-taking and even failure, if that's how you do it. Just a quick example. One company that I work with issues every year a failure of the year award. And this goes for the team or individual that had a great idea. They went for it. Their numbers didn't look good, and it didn't work out. But instead of getting fired, they get a standing ovation. I just want you to think, if you worked in that company, how would that make you feel? You would feel empowered. Your chest would pop up. I'm going to be like, Cool.

I'm going to go try something, too. I'm not going to be berated if I screw something up. And that's what we need to do as leaders. You remove the fear, you create in the right conditions, creativity will blossom organically.

Welcome to business, Bourbon and Cigars, the podcast for ambitious leaders who want a backstage pass to the top. Every episode, we're going to sit down with ultra successful industry leaders who have a proven track record and a deep understanding of how to grow a business. We're going to learn the secrets and strategies that took them to the top. On this show, you'll gain access to exclusive insights and resources that will give you what you need to achieve your most audacious goals. And of course, we may even sip on some fine bourbon and light up one of our favorite cigars while we chat. My name is Scott Joseph. I'm your host, and this is business. Business, Bourbon and Cigars. Welcome to an exciting episode of business, Bourbon and Cigars. This is the podcast where we dive into the minds of visionary leaders who are driving innovation, growth, and success in the business world. I'm your host, Scott Joseph. Today, we have a true pioneer when it comes to creativity and entrepreneurship. Josh Linkner is joining us. Josh's journey starts off as a jazz guitarist. He has been the founder of multiple tech companies. More importantly, he grew those companies to a valuation of over $200 million combined, which is nothing short of remarkable.

He's also a New York Times best-selling author, and he's a a huge advocate when it comes to innovation. So today we're going to explore the art of unlocking innovation and drawing on Josh's wealth of knowledge and experience. Welcome to the show, Josh.

Thanks so much. Great to be with you.

All right. You've got an incredible entrepreneur journey. Share with us your path on becoming successful, especially when... Let's focus in on the tech entrepreneurship.

Yeah. Well, for me, the funny thing you mentioned is my background really started playing jazz guitar. I've played over a thousand concerts around the world. I went to the Berklee College of Music. I'm very much in jazz music. I still play it regularly. I played a concert in Vegas last week. And so I had no business experience. I'd never taken a business class. But in jazz, you basically figure stuff out. You're improvising, you're adapting to changing conditions, you're finding a way. And so I started a tech company at age 20 with absolutely no experience. I just saved some money playing jazz music. And got a little team of company off the ground. And like jazz, I made a bunch of mistakes, screwed up a bunch of things, but learned a lot. And you start to adapt and pivot. And over time, figured out. So while I did enough over time getting more business training and lots of experience, that early jazz experience allowed me to launch a business career that's now spent 34 years.

All right. You've received a lot of numerous rewards, accolades, including the Ernest & Young entrepreneur of the year, correct?

Yeah, it was actually twice in 2004 and 2014.

All right. What achievements or moments are you most proud of when it comes to your career?

Funny enough, not that. I shouldn't say that. I'm very grateful for that, and it's awesome. The recognition is nice. But the things that really move me the most are the things that are less outward-focused and more inward-focused. There was a young woman that came to see me one time. My company had about 500 people at the time. She knocked on my door. She's like, Hey, you probably don't even know my name. I'm a software engineer. I've been here a couple of years. I'm not a fancy title or anything. But I just want to let you know that my husband and I just bought a house, and we closed down at this morning. I'm the first person to own a house in my family, in either of our families ever. I entered this new category as a homeowner, and we hugged. It was a beautiful thing. And so it's the moments like that where you're creating impact on others, where you're finding ways to lift the world up a little bit. Those are far better than any fancy award at a Black-Tie event.

Doesn't that feel good when you bring up something important? I've started a new mastermind group with Me plus Ultra. We were talking about that a little bit earlier. It really comes from a place of the impact, like you just mentioned, the impact you can have on other people. I'm actually started journaling some of the success stories that have come out of this. It's not like I'm advertising or marketing any of that stuff, but I do it because it reinforces why I'm doing this. I want to stay focused on the why and not focus on some of the gains or success from, let's say, financial stuff. I really want to focus in on the impact that I'm having with other people because it gives me a tremendous amount of... A real high. I don't know how else to describe it. I was really happy to hear you say that because that goes above and beyond. I think a lot of people think when they see someone like you, you've accomplished so many different things. That's why I brought up the award, because I had a feeling that's not what you were... You say it and it's great and it's great social proof, but why you really do it is for a much deeper reason.

I love to hear that. So innovation is the core of your work. I mean, it's the core of what you do, correct? I mean, you're speaking on it. You and I have talked before. I've actually stolen some of your innovation tips in my own events that I do. I give you credit for it, all right? But we're getting to a point where I've said it so much, I'm going to just start assuming it's my own. But so far you've gotten all the credit. Could you define what innovation means to you and why it's crucial for business today, for businesses?

Yeah. So I think innovation is often misunderstood. We think of it as these giant breakthroughs like inventing the printing press. And that is innovative, to be clear. But that's not the only flavor. When you think that innovation has to be worth a billion dollars, the bar is so high, we maybe just think to ourselves, I can't be me. That's out of my reach. I really focus on everyday innovation, helping everyday people become everyday innovators. And that could be a small adjustment to the way that you talk to a client or conduct a job performance review or hang out with a colleague and solve a problem together. Or even things like showing up for your family. And so what I try to do is help people unlock the dormant creative capacity that all of us have and find ways to put it in both their work and their lives. And sometimes it's big stuff like the printing press, and other times it's little stuff. But those little things add up. And really, innovation should be the great equalizer. Creativity is accessible to us all. We can de-risk it if we take smaller bets. And ideally, it becomes part of your daily groove.

That's what I help people do. And I help people think about creativity not as something that you do, but more like something that you are.

When you talk about unlocking all of that, give us some tips. What are some things people can do real quick to unleash some of that innovation?

I think, first of all, it's an acknowledgement that we're all creative. And by the way, the research is crystal clear. I studied human creativity for over 20 years. And the truth is that all human beings are creative. We're hardwired to be creative. That's our natural state. The thing is that many of us don't feel that way. Maybe it's because your middle school teacher I told you you weren't good at art, and so therefore you're not an artist. And that breaks my heart because we're all artists. It shows up differently for different people. I play jazz guitar pretty well. I can't draw a stick figure if I tried. So someone doesn't need to do interpretive dance or spoken word poetry to be an artist. You might be a sales artist or a legal artist or a customer service artist. All that's good. But I think that we can build those skills just the way you build any skill or any muscle through repetition and practice. And one simple thing that I try to do every day, it's a one minute exercise. One minute. Do it for 30 days, give it a try, you'll be blown away.

One minute a day, try to take on what I call an unrelated problem. So I live in Detroit. If I said, hey, the traffic in Atlanta has nothing to do with me. I'm not personally invested in it. But if I said to myself, okay, for one minute, what are some things that I could do, some creative ideas that I could generate that might reduce the traffic in Atlanta? Now, crucial to this, I'm not saying, how could I solve the traffic in Atlanta with one idea. That puts too much pressure for some silver bullet idea, and we would lock up. But instead, I'd say, how many small ideas could I generate in 60 seconds to make an impact in Atlanta traffic? So think of that like jumping jacks for your creativity. You're building muscle mass. You do an unrelated problem like that for 30 days in a row. For example, how could you improve the TSA experience at an airport? Things are unrelated to you professionally. You don't have a stake in the outcome. But you do that for 30 days, one minute a day, you will be blown away at the advancement of your creative capacity.

So you're suggesting to do it on things that have nothing to do with you as a practice? Or should we apply it to the things that were actually relevant that we're dealing with in our own lives? I want to make sure the audience is clear on this.

Of course, we want to do both. But for this exercise, it's actually things that are unrelated to you. Because when it's related to you, then you got it stake in the outcome. You're not going to be as creative because you're worrying about the impact or the risk of it. Unrelated, if you don't care about, how can I boost revenue at my local coffee house by 38% a year, you're going to start really You're going to be doing creativity for the sake of creativity, not for a specific outcome to you. Now, of course, once you build capacity, that's just like a workout, one minute a day. Then what will happen is you'll start to actually see the world more creatively. And you will, of course, then be able to apply creativity to the things that actually do matter to you. But for this exercise, it's better to be unrelated.

Okay. You've got a new book, your latest book, The Big Little Breakthroughs, and it's all about driving innovation, right? Give us some of the listeners or the people watching this, sneak peek into some of the key principles or strategies that you discuss in the book. That might have been one, but let's expand a little bit further.

Yeah, the book Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small Every Day Innovations Drive Oversize Results. I set out on a bit of a crazy mission. I wanted to understand how do the most innovative leaders think and act. And I went out on this pretty big process. I spent over $1,000 in research. I interviewed CEOs, billionaires, celebrity entrepreneurs, Grammy award-winning musicians. I tried to understand, what do they do every day? How do they come up with such great ideas? And what I discovered was actually shocking. We envision these guns of blazing risk-takers, swinging for the fences with every pitch, taking high-risk moonshots. The best of the best do the opposite. They actually don't do that as often. They cultivate instead small micro innovations, big little breakthroughs on a high frequency basis. They make small acts of creativity a regular act, three or four times a day. And so in other words, again, it's more about being creative than doing creativity. And it's a remarkable difference, and I think a way more prudent approach to creativity. Now, you're asking for other ways to... Tips from the book. In the book, I cover the eight core obsessions or mindsets of the most innovative people.

They're pretty fun. I'm happy to unpack some of them. Back to tactical, I'll share another one. One of the principles in the book is around experimentation. The more we can think of ourselves as experimenters, the better we will be at innovation because experimenting derisks the process of innovation. You're trying stuff out rather than rolling it out globally. And it gives you a lot of at-bats to refine and tweak ideas. So the suggestion is this. Every one of us has a to-do list. My suggestion is keep a second list on your phone, keep a to test list. And your to test list, it just goes like this. Any time an idea pops in your head, big, small, stupid, funny, inappropriate, it doesn't matter. Just stick it on the list. The mere existence of that list will boost your creative output because it keeps it top of mind. You're not thinking of yourself as an innovator, as an experimenter. And then periodically sit down and say, Hey, what am I going to test this week? And the truth is that the best leaders are the best experimenters. And so ideally, each of us should be testing four or five things a week, by the way, most of which will fail.

That's okay. Dump them. And the things that show some promise, don't go crazy. Just expand the size of the experiment. But through experimentation and keeping that front and center, it allows each of us to become an everyday innovator.

You've been deeply involved in a lot of different startups. What qualities or ideas do you look for when you're considering possibly investing in some of these?

I look much more at the people behind the idea than the idea itself because ideas change and technology changes. We generally invest in early-stage tech companies, so I don't invest in coal mines or something. But once it's in our real house, we We look at the entrepreneur carefully or the team, and we're looking for things that you might not expect. It's not so much like, hey, are they super Steve Jobs-like in a meeting? It's not charisma. It's, Are they open-minded? Are they coachable? Are they flexible? Are they really committed to solving the problem rather than boosting their own ego? Do they have a proven ability to think through problems in a nontraditional way? Are they are they are they fluid and flexible? Can they adapt the change of conditions? And so to me, you They're really betting, at least where we invest earlier on, much more on the people than on the idea because ideas, again, they shift and change. So we actually created this whole scoring metric. I think it's like 21 different factors. And we do a quantitative analysis on the entrepreneurs and look at their ability to execute, their ability to innovate, their ability to communicate, and effectively create a narrative around their idea.

We look most carefully at the people. Then, if everything looks good, then we move on to exploring the idea.

I've got a guy I'm going to introduce you to that can help you. It's interesting you say that because I've talked to three different people now, all about startups, all about VCs or investing in these startups. And you're the third person without question, with zero hesitation. It starts with the people, the leader. Who's the actual entrepreneur? What's that leadership team look like? I've heard it from you. I've heard it from another VC. And then I actually heard it from a person that helps investors determine, is this the right leader and person we want to invest in? I'm going to introduce you to him. I'll do it by email after our show, because I think you guys could probably help each other with that. You've got Platypus Labs. I want to make sure I pronounce that right. Is that correct? All right. It's all about unlocking innovation. Share a specific example An example, maybe a case study, where your team has gone in and has helped an organization break through barriers and achieve innovation.

One example is we work with the good folks at CIBC Bank, who is a large global bank. Banking is very restrictive from a regulatory standpoint. Obviously, people in banking are very cautious, like you don't want to lose people's money and such. By definition, no fault of their own, it's a conservative organization. And so what we did is we went... We've not done this a few years in a row. We've done this innovation accelerator program where we bring people through a series of training workshops and then help them focus their creativity on particular ideas for the bank, generating new ideas, and then almost work it through like a startup pitch. And so we generate the ideas, we flush them out, we field test them, and ultimately get to the point where they can be presented to senior leadership for an internal investment. And so think about it as almost like we're training people who are, appropriately so, regulatory-focused bankers to be entrepreneurs. And it's been really fun. They generated a whole bunch of very cool ideas and our ability to come in there and help people rethink their approach and reconnect it to their sense of childlike wonder, reconnect to their reservoir of creative capacity.

It's very rewarding.

We've talked a lot about startups, but a lot of people in our audience, small business owners, we've obviously got new entrepreneurs, but we've got plenty of entrepreneurs that have been at this for 5, 10, 15 plus years. Some of them maybe have plateaued. Some of them maybe have achieved levels of success that when they first started, maybe they probably didn't think they were going to hit those levels, surprise themselves. But here they are. I think for the entrepreneurs that have done that, and at one time I was one of these, there's a new comfort zone. There's new limiting beliefs that sneak into their mind. Maybe they have achieved much higher levels of success, and now all of a sudden, they don't think they have a comfort zone. They think themselves as risk-takers, but Maybe ego steps in a little bit, and now they start making decisions or act in a way that, listen, I want to protect. I don't want to lose all of this that I've achieved. For those type of people, what advice do you give to stay adaptable so they can continue to thrive and not plateau like that?

As I built my companies over the years, I had a saying, and I repeated it so often, my folks got sick of hearing it. I still say it today. And the saying is simply that someday a company will come along and put us out of business, so it might as well be us. It's really a nod to the notion that success is a temporary Commission in the context of many external factors that today are changing at a rate like none other in history. And so I think it's our responsibility to be that source of disruption rather than having it thrust upon us. And that applies both as a business, but also personally as a leader. I do this. I try to put the Josh of six months ago out of business with a new and better version. I wrote a book in 2014 called The Road to Reinvention. And the basic principle is that reinvention isn't a once a decade initiative. It's an ongoing process. We should always be reinventing. You want to isolate various aspects or reinvent everything at once. But the notion of always looking to rethink, re-imagine, discover new and better versions of things, I think that's crucial.

It's funny. I wrote in the book, Big Little Breakthroughs. If you remember this game, Froger, when you were a kid. But Froger, if anyone that doesn't know the game, you're like this little frog, you have to cross the river. Problem is in this game, the frog can't swim. So you have to jump on things that are solid, that are floating in the river, like a log or the back of an alligator or a lilypad or something. But the thing is, those moving objects Those objects in the river are moving. And to me, frog is the perfect metaphor for business and life, to a degree. The point is you jump to a point of success. But if you stand still too long, if you stop jumping, you're like, Oh, isn't this glorious? I'm on the back of a lily pad. You fall in the river and die. And so really, our responsibility is to leap to a point of success. We're on dry footing for a moment. Let's celebrate it. Let's enjoy it. But then we better pretty quickly get jumping out of the next thing. The longer we stay still, the greater the risk really is.

We live in a three-dimensional world of Froger. I think it's incumbent on all of us as readers to make sure, again, that we are that source of change and disruption rather than allowing the competitor to do that to us.

That is a great point. It's one question I ask I was on Clubhouse several times, and the room was, Everybody wants to be a disruptor. One of the questions I asked some of the people on the stage was, if you had to start an identical or a direct competitor to the business that you're currently operating. Let's say it's a brick and mortar, and you had to put it right across the street, or let's just say it's similar right there. If you're searching online, they're going to show up one and two. How would the new business put the old business out of business? What would you do different? What changes would you make? What would you keep? But how would you put that business out of business? Which goes right into what you just said. When you were saying that, it popped right into my head, and I love it because I think sometimes the questions we ask ourselves, intelligent questions will get intelligent answers. For all the people that are listening, and they're like, Oh, here's another consultant, all right, telling us how to do it. But the difference is you've really done it. You've got real-world experience.

You've got multiple tech companies that you've grown to incredibly high valuations, and more importantly, sold them for those numbers, not just valued at... You've had high success going in and exiting out. Share with us an example of a significant innovation or innovative challenge that you faced in your career and how you overcame it.

Yes, I've failed so many Three times I've lost count. It's funny, too, because I've interviewed very successful people. The people that win more tend to fail more also because they're willing to take responsible risks. That's part of the process. If you really want innovation, you're going to have to tolerate some setbacks. And you hit it right on the head. You got learn from those quickly. If you're going to lose your money on it, you better get that money back in an education. So I've invested in companies and taken zeros. I've done businesses on my own that didn't work out the way I hoped. I think that the real question is, can you find a way through it? Is there a way to use grit, determination, tenacity, and creativity to navigate a bad situation, ultimately come out strong on the other side? One of those that comes to mind, we invested early on in a Detroit-based company, and I We had high hopes for it. Super talented entrepreneur, very creative, awesome guy. We launched the company, we were the lead investor, and it just fizzled. It didn't go the way we hoped. And that's where most people would just cut bait.

Actually, we had many advisors of ours told us, Hey, just take your lunch and move on. But we really believed in the entrepreneur and kept working with them. And like, Hey, let's figure this out. Let's pivot. Let's adapt. And that company did, to their credit, not mine, of course, become very successful. They changed their name. The company is called StockX, which is now a global trading platform for high-end tennis shoes and other They employ 2,000 people around the globe today, and the company has been valued at $3.8 billion. And just to be clear, I didn't create that. The team did. But that was an example where there was a failure, frankly. It didn't pan out. And if we just tried to stay the course and do what we've always done, it wouldn't have gone anywhere. But it was Greg and team's ability to pivot and adapt and shift and tenacity and creativity fused together. They found a path forward, found a path through, and the results now speak for themselves.

You You talked a little bit about fear there. When you talk about throwing it away, or I call that throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes there's something very prized and valuable in that you don't abandon the whole thing. I love to hear that story with the pivot. But we hear a lot about the fear of failure, and that comes in a lot of different ways. If you're an existing entrepreneur who's had some success, maybe it's a fear of failure. It comes in the form of an ego blow. It's not necessarily that you're going to do something that is going to cause great harm or anything like that. But maybe you got enough ego there. You're like, you don't want to be embarrassed. You got a certain brand, certain reputation you want to uphold. You have a fear of putting yourself out there and doing a certain thing. Then there's the obvious fear of failure where, I don't want to risk all this money in and lose it. Where I'm going with this is this. Talk to us a little bit, how do you personally view failure? You've mentioned it a couple of times where you failed a lot.

Clearly, you don't dwell on it, but how do you view it and what role has it played in your journey in terms of... Give us a real specific on that, because to me, it's a big roadblock for a lot of people.

No one enjoys failure. Failure sucks. But it is a part of life, and it can't really be totally avoided. If you avoid failure, then you're just probably not trying hard enough or taking enough risks. It reminds me of the great quote by Mario Landradi, the race car driver. He said, If you feel like you're totally in control Well, you're probably not going fast enough. And if you want to grow a business and be an entrepreneur, you're going to have to have some tolerance for failure. Actually, one of the principles I cover in the book is called fall seven times stand eight. And I borrow that phrase from a Japanese proverb. But the way I look at in terms of failures is twofold. First of all, it's a recognition that there's never been a lab, even the ones that have come out with billion dollar drugs, that didn't have some failed experiment. There's never been an entrepreneur that hasn't failed. You look at Warren Buffet, whoever, Mark Zuckerberg, They've all made mistakes. Nothing's always worked out perfectly. So let's recognize that. And when we screw something up ourselves, which is inevitable, which again, if you're failing, the optimal failure rate is not zero.

If you're failing zero times, you're just not pushing the bound as much. So when you You have those, you say to yourself, Okay, that sucks. I'm going to sit with that for a minute, but I'm not going to dwell on it. I'm not going to eviscerate myself and gut myself and sit in shame and be humiliated. The quick thing is, how do I dust myself off and how do I learn from it quick? How do I get to extract the educational value from that. And then, crucially, when you get back after it, it's not just dogged persistence, like doing the same thing again and again. It's trying something new each time. So, okay, that experiment didn't work. But what about this slight variation on it? What if I tried a little different angle? What if I added some creative a refresher to it? And so that's the real trick, is get back up quickly, try something new, and learn as fast as you can. The best successful leaders, it's about learning capacity, learning agility, how quickly you can learn, your organization can learn. It's not that you're expecting to get it right all the time.

Just one last thing you ask about failure. I get asked a lot because I play jazz. Jazz is a very complicated art form. It's technically demanding, it's fast moving. And people always say, hey, you're in front of a discerning audience. You've never rehearsed this. You're making it up as you go. How do you know you're going to get it right? And I always smile, sometimes chocolate and say, I know I'm not going to get it right. Never have. I've done, again, over a thousand live performances I've never once gotten through without an error. Not once. I always fail. But the point isn't that... So you start to say, where does creative confidence come from? It doesn't come from expecting you're going to get it right. It comes from knowing how to bounce back. So my confidence on that stage isn't like, Oh, I'm going to be perfect. I'm going to get it right. It's like, I don't want to make some mistakes. I'm going to learn quickly. I'm going to figure out how to course-correct. And that's where real confidence resides. I think we got to just accept that failure is a part of success.

That's a part of the process, a crucial part.

I love what you're saying that. I mean, it's so easy to take... You're using it in the jazz guitarist field in terms of, I know I've made all these mistakes, how you bounce back. You can easily take that into sales, right? Because most salespeople get rejected more than they get accepted. How do they bounce back from that? I mean, I've never met any successful salespeople that do not do a good job of bouncing back from rejection. It's an important aspect. But when we talk about innovation, gosh, there's so many... Or creativity. It crosses so many different things. I think a lot of people, when they hear innovation or creativity, their mind immediately goes to some disruptive or new product or service that a company might provide when we're talking about it in the business world. But innovation comes from a lot of different stuff, right? Within the company, you've got innovation in terms of improved processes that make us more efficient, make us more productive. Maybe some innovative things that are behind the scenes that the client never sees However, they experience a much better client experience, whether that's online or in-store, it doesn't matter.

Or let's even go back to the sales thing. Innovative ways to make your, for of a better word, say pitch, more effective. It crosses so many different things. How do we, as leaders, create a culture within or organizations that foster a continuous improvement, continuous innovation, where we encourage new ideas coming from our employees. Because it's very easy as someone that's a leader, and you get bombarded with a lot of stuff. Let's say you get some new process or you got some new product and you finally got things everybody rowing in the same direction. It's finally starting to go where you need it. Now, here comes a new idea and you're thinking, I don't even want to mess with that right now because I just finally got this going. Of course, then you run the risk of shutting people down where they don't want to bring these ideas to you. How do we foster this continuous innovative approach and encourage people to keep bringing stuff to us Well, first thing you brought up before the question was, you can apply innovation to everything.

That's really an important point I just want to reinforce because you think of innovation like a product breakthrough or maybe a marketing thing. But you can be innovative in the way that you organize your desk or the way that you chat with a colleague when you're getting a coffee or the way that you manage a report, read a legal document. And so I like to think of creativity more like a magic wand. And imagine you're carrying around this magic wand in your pocket. And you're a leaner and you're like, Oh, I need to improve safety on my factory floor. Hey, cool. I got this magic wand in my pocket. I bet I could do that. So that magic wand actually is in your pocket. It's called your creative capacity. And whatever you crave, it could be, how can I boost profits? How can I improve efficiency? How can I navigate a supply chain issue? That magic wand's waiting. It doesn't have to only be used on product stuff. It can be used on just about anything in life. The second part of your question is, what can you do as a leader to foster that?

The single biggest blocker of creative output is not natural talent. Natural talent is something that we all have. The biggest blocker is fear. Fear is the poisonous force that robs people and companies of creative output. Actually, fear and creativity just cannot coexist. So your job as a leader, job number one as a leader, is to create the right conditions for creativity to blossom naturally. If you ran a greenhouse, you're like, yeah, I got to have the right temperature and humidity and water and fertilizer. That creates the right conditions for plant growth. Growth. So now as a leader, you say, Well, how do I create the right conditions for creativity growth? And the way that you do that is essentially remove the fear. All ideas are celebrated, not just the ones that work. You encourage when someone screws something up. Rituals and rewards that support responsible risk-taking and even failure, that's how you do it. Just a quick example. One company that I work with issues every year a failure of the year award. And this goes for the team or individual that had a great idea. They went for it. Their numbers didn't look good, and it didn't work out.

But instead of getting fired, they get a standing ovation. I just want you to think, if you worked in that company, how would that make you feel? You would feel empowered. Your chest would pop up. I'm going to be like, Cool. I'm going to go try something, too. I'm not going to be berated if I screw something up. And that's what we need to do as leaders. You remove the fear, you create the right conditions, creativity will blossom organically.

That reminds me of something I learned from Anthony Robbins. He was working with a pole vaulter, and the pole vaulter was a world last Olympic pole vaulter, but was struggling. He noticed, he just said, Let me watch you do a couple of things. The guy would miss some of the higher tiers that he was, I don't know the technical terms for pole vaulting, but he would miss out, not clear, I guess, the pole on certain things. It might have been a high jumper. In fact, I think it was a high jumper. The guy would beat himself up mentally after every failure. When we golf and we hit a bad shot, it's like we tear ourselves down. What Tony did was after every missed jump, he had the guy celebrate it as if he'd just broken world records. It's the same thing you're saying. It's almost like it's conditioning our mind or our body differently about failure. I put myself in the story you just put. If I was that guy that won that award and people were giving me a standing ovation for some idea that didn't work or some type of failure, and I was the best one at it for the year, it would almost make you fearless in a way that you just celebrate it and laugh about it versus feeling bad about it.

I love that. And by the way, I shared something earlier that you had taught me that I've been using, and I want us to go back to it for the people who have never heard you say this. You You had a trick when people get into some of these meetings and groups and you want them to be more creative. I do this on every one of our events when we do our mastermind breakout sessions. I want people to imagine themselves as someone that we view as extremely innovative, whether it's Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, or something along those lines. Could you go in? I don't know if you remember that conversation we had a while ago, a couple of years ago. But can you go into that a little bit? Because I think that's a great mental, I don't want to say mental trick, but it is a mental trick a little bit, and I think it's very effective.

Yeah. So what you're talking about is a technique that I developed, and I'm sure others have done something similar. It's called roll storming, R-O-L-E. Roll storming is better than brainstorming, because in brainstorming, when you share an idea, you're almost implicitly responsible for it. So in other words, if I share an idea and my boss thinks it's stupid, then he thinks I'm stupid. If I share an idea and my partner thinks it'll never work, then she thinks I'll never work. So you know what I mean? It's almost a reflection on us. So what we do, generally, in a brainstorm, is we share our safe ideas. But any idea that's half baked or not perfect or whatever, our crazy ideas, we hold them back. Role-storming solves that. It creates a safe environment because you're playing the role of somebody else. You're pretending that you're Steve Jobs. You're pretending that you're Hemingway or Kim Kardashian or Paul McCartney or whatever. And so You actually take on a real challenge. Stay in character. That's the crucial thing. Stay in character. Pretend that you are Warren Buffet. Pretend that you are Dorth Vader or an alien from 300 years in the future, whatever.

But stay in character and then speculate ideas ideas, what would that... How would Oprah Winfrey solve the problem? And so what it does is it immediately takes all blame off of you. Hey, it wasn't me saying it. That was Elon Musk. Us must say that a crazy idea. And so it creates, again, safe conditions. There's psychological safety. People really start to push their own creative boundaries because you're now thinking like, How would any Van Halen solve this problem? And in doing so, you actually unlock better ideas, more frequent ideas, and ideas that really push the creative boundaries because you're not constrained with your own identity.

It's interesting. When we do this in some of the events that we do, and in those events, I'll have people making anywhere from low six figures. I mean, some of these people that attend are 50 to 100 million a year in income. They all love it, and the people that are making the 50 to 100 seem to love it even more because it exposes... I think everybody likes to be challenged. I think they like the way they think challenged. I love talking to you because I feel like at the end of every conversation I have with you, I feel like I'm a smarter person for it. You challenge the way I think, and you make me think about things differently. I always appreciate that. I think people, some of the most successful people, tend to gravitate to people who challenge the way they think in a respectful way. You just have a good, unique ability to do that. It's not a surprise after listening to you talk that you Excel on things like creativity and innovation because you make people feel very comfortable in doing that. Talk to us a little bit. What's on the horizon for you?

Well, I do a number of things. I'm And funnily enough, I still feel like I'm a jazz musician. Sometimes I play jazz with a guitar, sometimes I play jazz on a spreadsheet and coming up with business stuff. But I run a venture capital firm called Moudita Venture Partners, M-U-D-I-T-A. Mudita is a Sanskrit term, which means taking joy in other people's success. That's the philosophy that we have in our fund. Anyway, so we're investing in a really stage tech company, so that's time consuming. I do a lot of keynote speaking and writing. I've written, as mentioned, four books, and I do probably 70 keynotes a So I'm traveling frequently. Planet+ Labs is our small consulting practice that often supports the keynote work. When a client like Cardinal Health says, great keynote, can you help us drive these ideas deeper and wider? We have a capacity to do that. I'm also involved in a company called Impact 11, where we help thought leaders and other keynote speakers launch and scale their speaking practice. And we're now applying those skills also to corporate executives. We want to get better at presentation skills and persuasion of influence in presentation.

So I've got my hands on a lot of different pies, so to speak. But to me, man, it's always like just playing some jazz. You get to see what is and see the gap between what is and what you want it to be, and then find a way. Use your creativity to get there.

I want you to think. If you're in the audience, I want you to think about that for a second because I wrote this down. If I was thinking about working with another company or whatever it might be, and their mission or their vision or their tagline is taking joy in other people's success I mean, it's just I love that. I wrote that down. I obviously can't steal that, but I'm going to find a way to work that in. And I will always give you the credit for it. I absolutely love because it goes back to what I was talking I was going to say to you earlier about your why. You sat here and you talked about what you were most proud of. It wasn't the awards. It was the impact you had on someone else. And then you come back and Basically, your tagline in this one business that you have, Taking joy in other people's success, things are aligning there, and people are getting a very clear picture of your why, which is not a coincidence as to why you're so successful. Lastly, for the listeners or the people watching here that are eager to work with you, how do they find you?

Yeah, thanks. It's a pleasure to be with you today. The easiest way to find me is just on my site, which is just my name, joshlinkner. Com, J-O-S-H-L-I-N-K. Com. Knener. Com. There's links to all the other crazy stuff that I do.

All right. Well, that concludes this insightful episode of business bourbon and cigars. I want to shout out a big thank you to our guest, Josh Linkner, for sharing his wisdom. His Insights on Unlocking Innovation. To our listeners, I encourage you, as we just heard, go visit Josh's website, joshlinkner. Com. That's Josh, J-O-S-H-L-I-N-K-N-E-R. Com. Com, and explore his books, his resources, so you can further enhance your innovative journey. As always, don't forget to subscribe, share, leave a review, especially the five star ones, if you found this episode valuable. And until next time, stay inspired and keep innovating. Cheers. Thank you so much for listening to business bourbon and Cigars. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with other business owners and friends. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to the show on YouTube and your favorite podcast player. My goal is to bring you conversations each week that challenge you and give you a no-nonsense approach to grow in your business. Make sure to join me next week on business, Bourbon and Cigars. For more information on our latest episodes, masterminds, and events, head to businessbourboncigarspodcast. Com. Again, that's businessbourboncigarspodcast. Com.