Amy Draves: Thank you so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm thrilled to welcome
Dorie Clark back to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series.
Her first book, Reinventing You, focused on creating your own brand. In Stand Out, she interviewed
several thought leaders and chairs how to identify the ideas that will set you apart in how to promote
them successfully.
She is an adjunct professor at Duke and a visiting professor for the IE Business School in Madrid. She
has guest lectured at Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, MIT, and more. And in 2013 and 2014, she was
named one of the 100 must-follow people on Twitter. And this year's Forbes put her on the list of 25
professional networking experts to watch in 2015.
Please join me in giving her a very warm welcome.
[Applause]
Dorie Clark: Good afternoon.
So two years ago I was here at Microsoft speaking for the first time. I had a new book coming out.
Then it was called Reinventing You. And at the time when I was doing research I actually had
interviewed this fellow. His name is Steven Rice. And he was, and I think still is, for the moment, the
Executive Vice-President of human resources for Juniper Networks, your neighbor down south in
Silicon Valley.
And he told me something interesting, which was that whenever he is asking people interview
questions for the highest level jobs at Juniper, he's trying to figure out if they should get a really high
ranking job, he asked them one question, which is, "How are you reinventing yourself?" And he says if
people don't have a good answer to that, he didn't want to hire them.
And it really struck me, that was one of the anecdotes that I included in Reinventing You. I actually
include him here in this presentation today because about a week ago I got an email from him, and he
said that he had been thinking recently about our conversation and realized that he actually hadn't been
practicing what he preached. He had been doing the same job at the same company for too long and he
needed to reinvent himself. So he's actually going to be moving up here this summer to now take a
chief human resources officer opportunity at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So that's someone
who I think in a lot of ways we're all in this position, that we want to try to find ways wherever we are
in our jobs to try and reinvent ourselves.
Now, Microsoft is an incredibly exciting place and there are many ways that you can make a mark. But
I think all of us have found at one time or another in our professional lives that we feel like maybe
we're hitting a plateau. We need to keep reinventing ourselves within the context of our job or within
the context of our community.
So two years ago when I was here, it was a little bit of a moment of turmoil. It was literally a couple
days after Steve Ballmer had announced that he was stepping down. There were people just flooding in
saying reinvention, yeah, that's what we're after.
So two years later, as you guys know, things were looking pretty exciting. The ink is good. And a lot
of things had been happening at Microsoft, which I've been really pleased to witness in terms of the
reinvention of how people are talking about Microsoft and how things are being approached.
But there's a question that happens naturally, which is once you have reinvented yourself, once you
have shifted modes, once you have changed into the place that you want to be or in the process of
becoming, how do you then become recognized as truly being the best in your field? How do you
stand out in the place where you want to make your mark?
And that's why I wrote my current book. Because I wanted to solve the problem of what comes next.
In an increasingly crowded noisy world, in a world where, you know, Amazon and Google and
Facebook are getting all this ink, how do you find a way, as an individual, and as a company, to say we
are the best and we are doing amazing things?
And I think Microsoft is exemplifying it these days. And I wanted to try to really get a sense by
interviewing about fifty top thought leaders in a variety of different fields, everything from business
and technology, to real estate and genomics, to understand what makes the people who are recognized
as being the best, what makes them the best? And how did they come to that place?
So today I'm exciting to share with you some of the things that I learned in the course of interviewing
these people, about how people found their breakthrough idea and then in turn how they came to be
recognized for it.
So the first strategy I'm going to share is three with you. There's more in the book, because there's so
much we could talk about. But I want to share three top strategies with you about how some of the best
thinkers are able to develop their breakthrough ideas. So this is Eric Schott. He actually used to live in
Seattle. He moved over a couple years ago to New York, where I met him. He's now a top scientist in
Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. But what's interesting about him, he is recognized as one of the
most prolific and interesting biologists operating today. He has written more than 200 peer reviewed
papers, on anything from Alzheimer's to diabetes.
But when he first started out, he was actually a fairly controversial figure in the field. There's a lot of
blow-back that he got. And a lot of times these things go hand in hand of course. When you're doing
something really interesting, really innovative, there are critics. But what Eric's special sauce was, you
could say, was that he didn't actually start out as a biologist. That wasn't his training. He was a
mathematician and computer scientist that only later went into biology. And as a result in the late
1990#s#, when the kind of technology emerged that would allow for rapid gene sequencing, a lot of
biologists looked at that and said, "What good is that? What good is that going to do us?"
But Eric, because he had trained in quantitative methods and was comfortable and familiar with it, saw
the potential and said "Let's get on it." And as a result he's been able to make some of the most critical
breakthroughs in biology in the last decade. He's been profiled twice in Esquire Magazine alone.
But what that comes from, and I think one of the key things that is really a driver that I discovered in
the course of writing and reporting on Stand Out, is that he was willing to mix perspectives. He was
willing to mix disciplines. It is very hard if you are steeped in the ideology of one company, of one
field, or one way of doing things. To even see what other potential options are, to even know what they
are. There's the old joke that someone asks a fish, "How is the water?" And he says, "What's water?"
And I think that's true for a lot of us. That if we are not consciously seeking to draw on past
experiences we've had or expose ourselves to new ideas and new disciplines, it becomes very hard to
see what's the way that things have always been done versus what's the way things must be done. So
the first step is learning to mix these perspectives.
Something that's also really important is the concept of what I will call tackling a worthy challenge.
You hear these days, especially in the tech world, you know, there's almost an epidemic of people
seeking startup funding with these tiny incremental improvements. Oh, you know, "It does this tiny
little thing. We're the uber of window washing, please give us money." And of course that's not really
what the world needs.
If you want to create something that can get people excited about it, if you want to create things that
people are dying to work on, to be part of, to write about, to invest in, it has to be a worthy challenge
from the beginning.
This woman is Rita McGrath. She is a Columbia Business School professor. And she wrote a book a
couple of years ago called The End of Competitive Advantage. And this is something that actually a lot
of people, here and elsewhere, talk about. I mean we all understand, I think, intuitively, that change is
happening more rapidly than before. Disruption is everywhere. But the problem is we don't
necessarily know what to do about it. No one's created a road map for handling disruption. But people
are aware that the products that they had and loved five years ago are in some cases obsolete because
things have happened so fast and moved on. So what do you do?
Well, Rita McGrath wrote this book. And part of the reason that she is considered today one of the top
strategy thinkers in the world, there's literally a ranking, it's called Thinkers 50, and every couple of
years they rank the top 50 business thinkers. She is No. 6 on this list. And the reason is that she was
willing to go headlong into those questions, to look at what do you actually do in an era of disruption?
So she threw out suggestions, things like instead of annual budgeting, switch to quarterly budgeting so
you can pivot faster, so you can innovate more. Innovation can't be something off to the side of your
organization; it has to become core to the fundamental operations. Because that is how you can survive
and thrive in that new context.
Now, if you are tackling a big challenge, a worthy challenge, it's quite possible you're not going to
solve all of it. It's quite possible you're not going to address the totality of it. But because people are
already paying so much attention to it, even if you make a small improvement, even if you get part way
there, you are going to get a disproportional amount of energy and attention. We think about Elaine
Musk going to the moon or something like that. These are the kinds of visions that get people excited.
What are moon shots, literal or proverbial?
Another strategy that I outline in standout is the niche strategy. And this is a pretty helpful, pretty good
entry-level strategy into thought leadership and expertise, I would say. Part of the reason in general
why I think this is so important, you know, why does it matter to have breakthrough ideas or to build a
following around them, why do we care? It's because ultimately we think about where the work force
is going, where the economy is going.
I mean you guys see this all the time. There was an Intuit study that says by 2020, 40 percent of the
work force is going to be freelance or contractors. There's a push toward commodification for just
about everyone, unfortunately.
And what that means as employees is that if we want to stay employed, if we want to have the kind of
careers we want to have where we can work in great places and advance and grow, we need to make
sure in a world where you can get someone to do almost anything on Pfiffer or E-Lance or
Freelancer.com, we have to give people a very good reason to hire us and not someone else that might
do it cheaper.
And if you develop a reputation as an expert, doesn't have to be a world expert. Of course not
everyone can be a world expert at something. But if you can develop a reputation as an expert in your
company, in your division, in your community for something, that gives people a reason to seek you
out specifically. That becomes the best kind of career insurance possible.
And so one of the easy ways of beginning to dive into this is the niche strategy. So this is Sophal Ear.
He is a political science professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles. And he's an expert on
Cambodia, which might seem like a bit of a narrow topic in some ways. If he was choosing what to
study just based on what would be hot and sexy, you know, what's in the news all the time, he probably
wouldn't have chosen Cambodia. But he chose it because when he was a baby, when he was less than a
year old, his mother fled Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. She had five children. She
managed to get them all to safety. They were refugees first in France. Eventually they made their way
to the U.S. where Sophal grew up, graduated, got his doctorate. He wanted to study his homeland, he
wanted to understand what that was like.
But what he told me, and part of I think what makes his experience, his strategy so interesting, is you
might think on the surface that being an expert in Cambodia is pretty narrow, limiting your options.
But the truth is if done right, it's not. He told me, "Cambodia is the first door. But it opens on to a
hallway and you can open just about any door from there."
He became an expert. Ironically, you wouldn't imagine as a political scientist necessarily, but he's
become a recognized expert in criminal justice. He gave a popular Ted talk based on the facts that he
had become expert in studying the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge tribunal. He studied and wrote
his dissertation on foreign aide in Cambodia and has been able to extend that to becoming someone
who is quoted and recognized for his expertise on foreign aide in general.
And because he had studied Southeast Asian livestock extensively, he had studied their agricultural
practices, he was actually able to become a noted expert, again, sited repeatedly in the media when the
bird flu epidemic broke out. You can start with Cambodia and go in a lot of different places.
And similarly for all of us, if we can find a niche, if we can find a place that we want to go deep, that is
powerful. For a couple of reasons. One is that once you are recognized as being truly an expert in one
thing, you build connections, you have opportunities, you get to speak at conferences, you get to meet
people from the media, whatever it is. But you make connections as a result of that initial expertise.
And if you were able to then strategically move into adjacent areas, you can leverage it.
There's also a phenomenon in psychology known as social proof, which is the halo effect. And it
shows that if you are considered an expert by other people, if they look around and say, "Oh, you know
he's on TV. He gets quoted in the media." That impresses them. And by extension of the halo effect,
they assume not just that you're good at that one thing, but you must be smart overall, you must be
good overall. These are things that are really powerful psychological forces.
So if you start small and start with a niche, if you're able to then expand out into the adjacencies, you
can do quite well.
So the question I have for you, what are the niches that you can own inside the company or in your
field? And how then can we expand it out strategically?
So the final piece that I wanted to share when it comes to this first part about how to develop your
breakthrough ideas, this is the story of a guy named Michael Waxenburg. Michael lives in New York.
He's an IT manager at a financial services company. And about fifteen years ago his family was
deciding whether or not to buy a condominium. Their apartment was being condo-ized, and they had
to decide whether to pull the trigger and do it. So they started going to open houses, like a lot of
people.
But Michael was a very analytical guy. He wanted to keep track of the open houses that he was going
to. So he started writing reviews of all of the properties that he was going to. And he posted them on a
website, a real estate website called Street Easy. Now, lots people go to open houses. Some of them
even write reviews, but usually because they're doing it as a hobby. They're pretty short reviews,
they're pretty crappy, let's face it. They don't put a lot of time into it. Michael had written these
beautiful in-depth reviews. They were so valuable to other people that before too long he started to get
people through the website, "I love your reviews, they're brilliant. Would you represent me?" But he
wasn't a realtor.
So at first he'd offer some advice and they'd give him a box of chocolates, but that was all he could do.
But eventually he kept doing it. And before long an actual realtor wrote to him and said, "Look, if you
haven't gone through this yet, I will sponsor you. You already have a client base." So Michael took the
courses, became a realtor, and now to this day has a very successful lucrative side business that he
doesn't have to market at all. Because the clients come to him through the reviews.
Now, what does this tell us? For me what I discovered in the course of doing this research about
thought leaders is that one of the things that is most powerful, especially in today's world where
everyone has an opinion, everyone wants to share their opinion on the internet. And half of what we
see on the internet is opinions about opinions about blog posts about other opinions. If that is the world
that we're dealing with, if you can be dealing in fact, if you can be dealing with original research and
data, as compared to just opinion upon opinion upon opinion, you will actually get noticed
disproportionately, talked about disproportionately. The way Michael did it was through his own
reviews that he wrote about properties. You could review anything. You could review Smartphones or
bed and breakfasts or beers, doesn't really matter.
There's other ways to create original research too. If you are a data person, can you crunch data, you
can conduct surveys, you can do interviews with experts or interviews with people in the field to get
their actual experience. You can write case studies, you can write white papers. But whatever it is, if
you are creating original primary research -- doesn't have to cost a lot of money. This can literally just
be thinking like a journalist and going to talk to people. But if you do that, you will set yourself apart
from the people who are doing half-baked efforts. You will get noticed for it.
So the first half of all of this is about how to come up with your breakthrough idea, how do you begin
to do this. And in fact I'll just mention briefly that for folks who are interested in that question, how do
you apply all of this to your own lives, I'll mention that on my website DorieClark.com, D-O-R-I-E-CL-A-R-K. I actually created a free 42-page workbook that I adapted from standout where I ask 139
different questions that can walk people through how to come up with their own breakthrough ideas
and build a following around it. So I just wanted to make sure that you guys know that that was
available for free on my site.
But the first part is coming up with this idea. The second part though, equally important, is how do you
spread it? Because we can't rely on the old platitudes that we've been taught. Oh, yeah, you work hard
you'll get noticed, you'll get appreciated. That doesn't work anymore. That has been broken down.
Because we live in a world where everybody has a gazillion Facebook friends and Linked-In
connections and Twitter feeds going, and their inbox is pinging all the time. We are overwhelmed with
connections; we are overwhelmed with information.
And the result of that is that people, unless literally it is your spouse or maybe your immediate family if
you're lucky, everybody besides them is paying only half attention to you. They're not really clueing in.
So somehow we have to find a way to rise above the noise. We have to crack that code.
So what I learned in the course of researching Stand Out is that when it comes to spreading an idea, it's
actually a three-step process that people go through. The first step is what I call building your network.
This is one-on-one connections. Because you have to make sure in the early days of having an idea
that you are vetting it first with a small trust group of advisers.
You need to do it frankly because a lot of our ideas don't start out that great. That doesn't mean they're
bad ideas. But does mean that sometimes they need a 5 percent tweak or a 10 percent tweak to make
them great. And sometimes they are bad ideas and you need someone that you trust to tell you that. If
you can do that, if you can cultivate that circle, that is enormously powerful.
The second step is building an audience. This is where you're going from one-to-one communications
to one-to-many communications. And I'll talk about this in a minute. But this is the more traditional
version of marketing. This is where people, when they think how do you spread an idea, this is what
comes to mind. It's blogging, it's podcasting, it's sharing things on social media, it's giving lectures.
It's someone making yourself and your ideas findable to like-minded folks who are interested in your
message.
And then the third and final step is you've gone from one-to-one communications to one-to-many. The
third and final step is about many-to-many communications. This is where your audience turns into a
community. And they turn into a community because they start talking to each other. That's where the
magic begins. Because they're able to help spread your message beyond what you could ever do on
your own.
So where does this start? In some cases it starts with what this woman, Cory Anderson did. She is now
a professional speaker. She started out as a generalist. She was an Emmy Award winning journalist.
And in 1989 she formed essentially a mastermind group of fellow journalists where every month they
would meet and get together and trade ideas, talk about the profession, share resources, share advice
about different sources. And it was helpful and very powerful for her.
But a few years after that, she switched careers, became a professional speaker. And she thought, well,
maybe I'll form another mastermind group just for speakers so I could have that community. So she did
that too. But over time she has kept both of them up. Now given the way the industry has gone,
unfortunately half of the people who used to be journalists are no longer journalists. But they're still
meeting. One group was founded in 1989, the other 1994. They have been meeting literally every
single month since then. She says that this has become the form active experience of her professional
life.
Now, not all of us, in fact probably very few, are going to have a mastermind group that lasts for twenty
years. But I'll tell you something that we all can have and should have. And that is a group of trusted
friends and colleagues that we cultivate and can turn to when we need to.
For a lot of us we are on reactive mode. If somebody emails us and says, hey, let's meet up. Let's have
a cup of coffee. You'll say yes to that person. But we're so busy, we probably are not proactively
making the time to invite out to coffee the people that we really would like to be with and that we can
learn from and that we know we ought to be holding close to us in order to learn more about ourselves
and just have the companionship of a professional who we really believe in and trust. We need to get
more deliberate about taking back our schedule and building connections with those people proactively.
So I challenge you today to think about who are those four or five other people that you respect, that
you want to learn from. And how can you find ways to invite them more into your life, whether it's
inviting them for coffee once a week, whether it's just shooting them a quick email to stay in touch
when you maybe haven't been in touch for a while. But how can we be more deliberate about that?
Now, of course, the other challenge that many of us face is the fact that some of the people that we
already know are going to be really helpful and important to us in terms of our professional lives. But
for a lot of us we still need to meet a lot of people. I mean the reason that networking is important is
that for literally almost everyone, you don't currently know all the people that you need to know in
order to get where you would like to go ultimately in your career.
So how do you expand your network? How do you do that strategically? Because you could of course
just get lucky and maybe someone's in an event and you meet them. But there's a problem because a
lot of the most successful people are also the ones that have the most demands on their time. If you just
send him an email and say, hey, can we get coffee, can I pick your brain, like everybody says, you're
going to go to the bottom of the list. Because they're too busy. And unless you have a very good
reason, they're probably going to say no.
But this gentleman was able to come up with a strategy around that which I thought was pretty
powerful which I included in Stand Out. His name is John Corcoran. And John is an attorney in the
Bay area. He's also a podcaster. He has a podcast and a blog called Smart Business Revolution. And
he decided that he wanted to expand his network using the podcast as his leverage. That was the tool
that he had, and he realized, all right, I can do it.
So he starts to make a list of the people that he would really like to get to know. And he invited them
on as podcast guests. The amazing thing about that, No. 1, no one ever asks how many listeners your
podcast has. Number two, if you ask at the right time, especially John wanted to meet a lot of business
authors, so he would ask when they had a book coming out, they'll almost always say yes. So John told
me that just an incredible thrill for him was Daniel pink, who if you like business books, many of you
have probably heard of. He's a well-known business writer. He really wanted to meet Daniel Pink. So
he waited for his moment when Daniel Pink's most recent book came out. And he asked if he could do
a podcast. And Daniel Pink said yes. So John just releases the audio. But he says that he always liked
to do the interview with video. And the reason for that is he wants the other person to know what he
looks like so that he can build an actual relationship with them. He thinks that that's really important.
Even though John, and interviewing him in San Francisco and Dan Pink lives in Washington, that they
would get to see each other face to face.
So several months later, John told me, he was at a book event in San Francisco. And it was packed.
There was 500 people in the room. So John is waiting patiently in line. He's never met Dan Pink
before. And he goes up, and he gets finally to the table where they're doing the signing. And Dan Pink
looks up and says, oh, hey John. And that was the moment where he knew that his strategy worked.
So in the intervening several years he's made enormous connections. He's been able to talk with his
heroes and build the kind of network that a lot of people can only dream of. But he realized that when
people say lead with value, sometimes it's not totally clear what that means. But one way that I like to
think about it, if you ask someone "can I pick your brain," you're asking for their time. The first
interaction is a favor from them to you. But if you say "can I interview you? Can I share your insights
on the internet with my community and with anyone who finds it?" Then you're leading with value
because your first interaction is you doing them the favor of helping to share their ideas. So that's a
powerful tool when it comes to building the network you need, that first step, the one-to-one
transmission of ideas in building your ideas.
So I would be remiss, when we talk about audience building, the second phase of sharing your ideas
with the world, if I didn't talk about blogging. Now blogging is not the sexiest thing any more. We
have a lot more things that are sexy. People love talking about Periscope and internet piracy. They
love talking about Pinterest and Tumbler and how much -- what app is being sold for, all these things.
That's what's sexy now. But what I'm interested in is what is effective for you as a professional and for
all of us these days as knowledge workers.
It's really important to help other people understand how you think. Now, if you're a coder, there's
other ways to do it. You can post things on GitHub and get noticed there. But especially if you are
someone who is trafficking in the ethereal, in ideas, if you're a project manager, if you're a marketer,
how does anyone know if you're any good? I mean they could call references. But we all know, unless
they have the back channel of who to talk to, references don't really say very much. You want to give
people a way to understand how you think. And the reason that's valuable is that No. 1, it gets your
ideas out there so that those like-minded people can find you. But number two, it is a way of de-risking
someone doing business with you. It is very risky to hire someone. It takes time, it takes money. You
might be hiring a headhunter. You're training somebody. It's tens of thousands of dollars, and it's a
reasonably senior employee.
How can you make it less risky for someone to want to hire you or for someone to tap you inside here
at Microsoft to work on a special project or if you're working with external folks to have a client say I
want to work with her on my team? How do you make that less risky? Well, blogging is actually
incredibly powerful. Because just about anybody can snap a picture or send a two-sentence Tweet.
That doesn't necessarily tell you a lot about the person or how they think. But if you are able
consistently to share your ideas thoughtfully, 700-word essays, people really begin to see how you
think.
But the most important thing, it's not about putting words on a page necessarily. Some people hate
writing. That's okay. There's podcasts, there's videos. It's about sharing your ideas in a sustained
fashion. That's what's really crucial here, to make your ideas accessible to draw people in.
And I'll tell you another story with another way that you could potentially do this. This is a guy named
Mike Lydon. He actually is a former employee of mine. I got to know him more than a decade ago
when I hired him for his first job out of college. And so of course I have taken an interest in what he
has done since. Sadly he left us far too soon.
I was running a none-profit at the time. And he went off to graduate school to become an urban
planner. So he worked at a prominent firm for a few years. And in 2009, which as we know was not
the greatest time in world history to start a business, in 2009 he decided that that was the moment that
he was going to start his business. Now this was particularly challenging, because if you're an urban
planner, who pays for that, who hires you? Most of the time it's government. This was not a time
when government were feeling flush. So Mike knew he was going to have to do something dramatic in
order to get noticed, in order for people to want to do business with his nascent firm.
So he became interested in a phenomenon called Tactical Urbanist. He actually even name it. Came
up with a name tactical urbanism. And he decided that he wanted to try to capture case studies about it,
you know, what people are doing when they do it right or what people are doing when they do it wrong.
So he gathered them together, created this book of case studies. And this is not something that's
necessarily going to be the Fifty Shades of Grey. You're probably not going to get a big publisher to
publish your case studies about tactical urbanism.
But he decided he wanted to share it, and it was important to share it, to add his voice to the dialogue.
So he put it together as a PDF and put it on his website for free downloads. And amazingly within just
a couple months ten thousand people had downloaded it. It's a huge number if you think about the total
number of urban planners in the country. It was making a splash.
So he and his business partner decided to double down on it, and they create Tactical Urbanism,
Volume 2, and put it up on their website; same thing, PDF. Now they were getting even more pings
into them.
A south American planning firm wrote to them and said, "we love this. Can we partner with you to do
a volume just with south American case studies?" They said, "Why not?" So they wrote this book,
they put all three PDFs for free on their website.
It's now five years later. A 160,000 times these books have been downloaded. Today Mike's firm
literally will receive RFPs, requests for proposals, from communities that will say written into the RFP,
we want a firm with experience in tactical urbanism. They're writing it for him.
If you are willing to share your ideas, these days more than ever, you don't need a fancy publisher, you
don't need someone in New York telling you you can do it. It's about creating your ideas, creating new
research, putting it out there and being willing to share it. Sometimes even just a free PDF can make
all the difference.
The other thing that's important here, as somebody who made his name working here for a while,
Robert Sobol. Many of you may be familiar with him. Technology opinion leader extraordinaire. He
told me something interesting when I interviewed him for Stand Out, which I think a lot of us can
apply. Fundamentally when it comes to scaling the impact of your ideas, we have to think about
leverage, right, we have to think about how do we get more leverage?
So here was Robert Sobol's life hack that I will share with you. He says he gets a lot of emails, of
course. And a lot of times people are asking him questions, "Well, how do I do this? How do I do that?
How do I get my startup noticed?" And he says what he always does is he writes back and says, "I will
answer your question, but not on email." He says, "If you write your question on Cora, the Q&A
website, I will answer it there." And the reason he told me that he does this is he says, "If I email one
person I'm helping one person. But if I put it on the internet, that's helping five people or fifty people
or 500 people." That's how we have to start thinking. We have to start thinking about how to get
leverage in our professional lives, how to help more people, share with more people.
Finally I wanted to share this story with you guys, because I think it's something that we all can learn
from. It might sound like a little bit of a paradox to suggest that somehow we can or should get luckier.
But this gentleman, his name is Anthony Chan. And he is a venture capitalist. And a few years back he
wrote a book called Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck. He and his partners wanted to try to understand
what made successful entrepreneur successful. And so they did hours and hours of interviews, really
trying to probe into the questions about how did they think and what motivated them. And what they
came up with, what they discovered is that all of these entrepreneurs really fell into four categories, the
four described in the title of their book. The entrepreneurs were either heart driven, smarts driven, luck
driven, or they were guts driven.
Now, some of these make a lot of intuitive sense. If you're a hard-driven entrepreneur, I mean we can
all think of people who are just so passionate. Of course they're going to succeed because of that
passion that keeps them going.
Smart-driven. We think about the Bill Gates of the world. Everybody knows their brain has just
carried them forward and they made it happen.
We think about guts. There are a lot of people, there are a lot of stories when it comes to
entrepreneurial success, the people that were turned down a hundred times but kept going. The people
who created the company and failed and they pivoted and pivoted, and they finally did it because of
their guts, because of their Hootspa.
But luck, it's almost a little weird in some ways to include that in the category. What could luck
possibly have to do with it? But what Anthony Chan discovered was that this is not just a subset of
people that were in sort of dunces of the entrepreneurial world who just suddenly got tapped and
discovered like somebody discovered them at a shopping mall. Luck means something very different.
Luck, it turns out, is actually an orientation. If you boil luck down, luck is something that we ascribe
after the fact. It is a post-facto designation.
What luck looks like in the moment, because who knows what's going to turnout to be lucky, right?
What luck looks like in the moment is a hybrid of curiosity plus humility. If you have those two things,
which not all of us do. Maybe we all want to, maybe we all aspire to, but not all of us do in the
moment. If you have curiosity and humility, you can become lucky. And the reason for that is that so
many people, you know, they go it a networking event, they're constantly the people scanning over
their shoulder looking for who's more important, who should I be talking to now? They're always
trying to get to the next thing, to drive to the next place.
Whereas the luck-driven entrepreneurs are the ones who are actually willing to hang back just a bit.
They're the ones who are willing to talk to the person in the corner. They're willing to talk to the
outliers, the person who's dressed in shabby clothes or the person who's older than everybody else in
the room, or whatever. They're willing to see where it goes. They're willing to see what they can learn
from that person or that encounter. And it is only later that we call it luck, because they were willing to
have the conversation and to take the chance spending their time with someone that everybody else
overlooked.
If we can get more luck in our lives, that's also one of the most our powerful ways that we can begin to
share ideas and to stand out.
So with that I would love to open up the floor to your thoughts and to your questions. And thank you
so much for coming.
[Applause]
Dorie Clark: Also mention, by the way, I am signing books afterwards. So if anyone is key for that,
I'm hanging around for you. So folks and thoughts, anybody wants to diver in, feel free if you do. We
are here for you Microsoft. Anybody?
Yes, sir?
>>: Just when you talk about niching down, that I resonates really well, because that's just a thought on
the topic, and going this other way, that's one of the strategies I've used with teaching retail sales people
how to sell. Because I do Windows and Office training here. And what I continually tell new sales
people is you've got five thousand, ten thousand different things in your store. Forget it. Find one,
learn one, learn everything about it, and learn the product next to that on the shelf. Do that with
technology or do that with a feature. There's so much stuff in what we do with Office. Go ahead, be
the person in the store that learns Publisher and then learn the other stuff separate from that. So I think
that's just really an interesting thing, just chunking it down like that, getting really specialized, being
able to grow from out there and then those people tend to become the overall experts or it becomes
really interesting to talk about that way.
Dorie Clark: Yeah, great story. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's true, absolutely true. One of
the case studies that I profile in Stand Out is a guy named Michael Lecke who is a Vice-President at
Gardner, the big research firm. And he told me that when he was first starting out he was really
interested in, in his case, in coaching, in training, and development. But he didn't know that much
about it.
I mean that's where all of us start; you're interested in something but you don't know very much about
it. But he decided he wanted to learn. And that's like a point of learning. And so he essentially
apprenticed himself to an outside consultant that Gardner had brought in. And he started hanging out
with this guy and taking all of his sessions. And eventually he would start assisting with the sessions.
Then he would start co-teaching the sessions. And before long he had actually developed a reputation
within his company as being the go-to guy on coaching and development.
And if you at that point had taken Michael and compared him to the world experts in it, I mean he
wouldn't have compared. He was just starting in a lot of ways. But he knew more than other people in
the company. And he was honest about what he knew and what he didn't. And he was willing to share
his knowledge. So if over time you develop inside an organization or inside a division as being the goto person on something, who knows just all it is, you start out all you have to know is more than your
colleagues. You will become the go-to person, and that gives you a kind of gravitous that you can then
use so that over time you can learn more and more to truly become an expert and to truly master what
you're doing. So great story. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Let's go to the gentleman in the back.
>>: So does the future belong to the specialist? Or is there still a place for generalists?
Dorie Clark: Yes, the profound question. So niching down, the niche strategy, it's one of the paths,
definitely not the only path. I actually wrote a piece for Entrepreneur Magazine just a couple days ago
that came out, and it's called "What to do when you have too much passions." And this is something
I've certainly faced in my own life, maybe some of you guys have two.
There's kind of two people in the world, there's people that they know their thing and they want to
pursue it. And then there's kind of Renaissance people where it's just a little harder. Maybe they are
generalists. I, to a certain extent, fit into that category myself.
If folks are interested, they can find it on my website, DorieClark.com. I actually have about 400
articles there, so there's a lot of material. But what I suggested in that post, and we'll say here, is for all
of us if you're not sure, if you have a lot of passions, if you're not really sure what to pursue first even
because you want to do a lot of things, I'm a big advocate of placing small bets. And I'll tell you how I
did this in my own live.
So since I was kid I wanted to write a book. I thought it was really cool, just wanted to do it. But I
wasn't really sure what to write a book about. I had a million ideas. So I actually started out in 2009.
That was when I got serious. I'm like I'm going to do it, I'm going make it happen.
So I wrote three different book proposals that year; convinced that one of them would take. But in fact
I got rebuffed on all of them because they said no, sorry, you are not famous enough to write a book.
And I realized then that the world had kind of changed; you can't write a book and then become famous
from it. You have to kind of be at least sort of famous, and then you will be permitted to write a book.
So like they say, you have to build a platform.
So I realized for me, I was comfortable with writing, I like writing. I thought okay, I'm going blog.
But there was lots of stuff that I was interested in. So basically what I did, each blog post was a little
experiment; what did people like, what did they respond to, what is sticking? And it turned out that one
of my very early blog posts that I wrote, it was called "how to reinvent your personal brand." And it
came out in the Harvard Business Review. They liked it enough, they asked me to turn it into a
magazine piece for Harvard Business Review. And then when that came out I got approached by three
different literary agents who said, "Would you like to turn it into a book?" I was like, "Oh, the market
has spoken." And so that was my first book, "Reinventing You" that I was able to create.
Interestingly enough, yet another blog post that I did around that time, ultimately turned into Stand Out
as well. But so I'd say if you have a lot of different passions, don't feel like you have to choose. Take it
as an opportunity to try lots of things and then the universe and the market will tell you what people
want you to concentrate on. And it doesn't mean it has to be the only thing you can do, but it can be the
thing you do first.
Yes, ma'am.
>>: I'm very curious about your ideas and interviews with people on tackling a worthy challenge. So
wondering if in the entrepreneurs you talked with you saw any trends or patterns with people who took
up the worthy challenge.
Dorie Clark: Well, you know one thing that I heard from a number of people about this kind of worthy
challenge question, and I think that this is a little bit of a common strand throughout the book, is the
fact that it's really important. I mean if we are coming up with our breakthrough idea, if we are
creating something that is genuinely new and valuable and a contribution that we can make, it's not
necessarily something that comes and hits us like lightning from outside. Oftentimes it's something
that actually germinates from inside based on our own personal unique experience that only we have.
Because that is what enables our perspective to be different on an issue.
So one person who I interviewed who I think is indeed the epitome of tackling a worthy challenge is a
woman named Rose Schuman. Rose, when she was 18 years old, she had grown up in suburban
Maryland. She was 18 years old. She and her family took a family vacation to Nicaragua. And they
went there because her stepmother was Nicaraguan and it was to visit her stepmother's family. It was
shortly after the Contra War that this visit took place. And Rose had never seen anything like this. And
she had grown up in a comfortable suburban environment. All of a sudden she's thrown into a place
where there's poverty everywhere, people are hungry, there's one, literally one street light functioning
in the entire country. The infrastructure is just gone because it's been a decade at war.
And it struck her hard enough that she said I want to do something about this. I want to make an
impact. So sure enough she went off to college and she studied internet development while she was
there. And after she graduated she got a job at an NGO.
And so while she was doing this, while she was immersing herself in this passion of hers that stemmed
from her family vacation. She was walking around one day and she suddenly noticed something that
we all probably see all the time. You probably see it on the Microsoft campus here. But it just hit her
in a different way that day. It was a call box, a little box like at a transit station where you push a
button and you talk to somebody.
A lot of people had been trying for a long time to solve the problem of how do you bring the power of
the internet, which we all know is incredibly powerful and beneficial. How do you bring the power of
the internet to the world's poorest people?
So you're maybe familiar with the one laptop per child initiative. That's gotten a lot of press. Rose
thought about that and she said that's good. First of all you have to figure out how to make the laptops
be cheap. You still have to get money for them. Even if they got it down to $100 a laptop, that's still a
lot of money. You have to somehow figure out how to keep them powered. You have to somehow
figure out to how to keep them safe. You have to teach people how to use them. And then you have to
make sure they're literate, which is pretty hard for the bottom, let's say, one billion. And then you have
to make sure that they're literate in a language where there's actually stuff on the internet in it, which is
very hard for people if they are from rural tribal communities.
How do you short circuit all of that? Is there a way to cut the Gordian knot? And Rose thought about
it, and she realized you can make a call box. And so she spent the next four hours feverishly taking her
journal, writing down her ideas. What was born that day, and in fact has become her life's work for the
last decade, was something called Question Box, which is an NGO that literally does this in rural
villages. They will plant these question boxes, these call boxes where villagers can go up in their own
language, push a button, ask a question to a person stationed at the other end of the line, who's usually
in a city, who is bilingual, and who has an internet-enabled computer. And those people look up
questions in realtime and feed the answers back. Now, it's operating in a lot of India and Africa right
now.
And in fact, last fall during the height of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Rose's question box played a
pivotal role. Because all the aide workers had to leave. They had to vacate these villages. And one of
the only ways the villagers could actually get reliable information about what was happening and
where and how to protect their families was through the question box where they could talk to people at
the other end of the line.
So I would say to your question that when it comes to developing ideas that matter, the kinds of things
that you are proud to share and that can become part of your brand inside the company here at
Microsoft and in the world, a lot of times it starts with our own experiences and finding the message,
the gift that only we can share and that that enables us to keep pushing through.
If you're able to find your idea through some of these strategies and are willing to share it or willing to
be generous by writing about it, talking about it, enabling other like-minded people to find you, it can
begin to gain a kind of traction and a kind of power that will help your career and also help the world.
So I want to be respectful of everybody's time. I know we've got meetings and all of that. We have
books in the back. Some people are all cagey about it. I won't be. Please buy my book. It's awesome.
I think you'll love it. And I would love especially to meet you. So thanks very much. I'll be signing
books.
Is there anything else that you need, Amy?
All right. Team Microsoft, thank you. Take care.
[Applause]