81: Creativity is for Everyone – Featured Interview with guest expert Lisa Bodell

Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO of futurethink

Lisa Bodell talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about creativity, positive thinking, and spring cleaning.

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com  for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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Interview Insights

Listen to this interview to learn:

  • The reality behind how innovation occurs in business.
  • What makes leadership harder than it has to be for some.
  • The importance of mindset in approaching solutions.
  • How you can unlock creative energy in your company by killing stupid rules.

Read the Show Notes from this Episode

  • 1:37 Lisa’s days in advertising showed her that she was creative in a strategic way, leading her to create innovative businesses.
  • 2:53 “I thought that everybody could be creative and innovative, they just needed to be able to flex it in different ways.”
  • 4:40 A big misunderstanding in business and innovation is that only artists are creative, and Lisa wants to make sure people understand that every person at every level can be creative and innovative.
  • 6:11 “It’s often the folks that are stereotyped as least innovative, that want to be innovative the most.”
  • 8:20 Lisa observes that one of the biggest obstacles to fostering creativity is skepticism and that business leaders need to break down their propensity to immediately be skeptical of new ideas.
  • 9:10 “Skepticism definitely does [have a place in the creative process]. But what we’re talking about is a balance with potential. What we’ve groomed today are professional skeptics, and when that’s all you do, you don’t give ideas that have potential a fair hearing, and you might miss out on big opportunities.”
  • 12:10 Lisa estimates that 80% of companies around the world are committing a grave mistake: having a complacent culture, where employees are resigned to the status quo and not make waves.
  • 13:25 There is a diagnostic in Lisa’s book “Kill the Company” where an employee can see how complacent they are, and she outlines three things one must do to no longer be complacent: diagnose oneself, figure out which behaviors one wants to change, and then figure out what small things one can empower others to do to contribute to an overall cultural change.
  • 15:00 Lisa is careful to point out that these changes should be implemented from the middle out. In other words, it is not effective to have upper leadership telling people what to do, instead, empowerment should come from the people at the center.
  • 16:01 Lisa implements something she calls ‘Little-Bigs’ in which a company can see the biggest overall change by doing little, everyday changes. She gives two examples that have been effective for her clients.
  • 17:30 One of the most effective exercises Lisa has used with executives is having them imagine they were trying to kill their own company as a competitor would, which helped them identify the things which were weak or not working, enabling them to root out the bad to make room for more prosperity.
  • 21:03 Lisa makes sure her own company implements these practices she teaches and does a lot of ‘spring cleaning.’

Expert Bio

Lisa Bodell is the founder and CEO of futurethink, an internationally recognized innovation research and training firm that helps businesses embrace change and become world-class innovators. She founded futurethink on the premise that everyone has the power to innovate — they just need to know-how. Clients such as 3M, GE, and Johnson & Johnson look to futurethink to develop new styles of thinking and generate innovative ideas.

Lisa is globally recognized as a leader and pioneer in the field of futuring and innovation — creating a unique, straightforward approach to an otherwise complicated topic. She created the widely adopted SIPC Innovation Framework (STRATEGY, IDEAS, PROCESS, CLIMATE), which has helped innovators around the world easily embrace innovation, providing a clear method that breaks innovation down into manageable parts.

In addition to running futurethink and lecturing, Lisa currently serves as an advisor on the boards of the Institute of Direct Marketing in London, The Women’s Congress, the Association of Professional Futurists, and the prestigious Institute for Triple Helix Innovation think tank, the only innovation initiative of its kind within the U.S. government. She also serves as a finalist judge at the annual Idea Crossing Innovation Challenge and FIT’s innovation challenge (which futurethink co-created), has taught courses on marketing and creativity at American University and serves as a faculty member of the American Management Association.

She is the author of Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution, and an author of Success Simplified, a collection of works featuring other chapters by Dr. Stephen Covey, Dr. Tony Alessandra, and Patricia Fripp. Lisa has appeared on FOX News and in publications such as Crain’s, Business Week, The New York Times, WIRED, Investor’s Business Daily, Successful Meetings, Harvard Business Review, and The Futurist.

Contact Info for Lisa Bodell

Books Authored by Lisa Bodell

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