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Skot Waldron:
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of people. And today we're going to talk about unlocking the potential of people's creativity and ideas, because we all have them and we need to know how to unlock them. Well, I'm going to talk today to Bryan Mattimore, who is the Chief Idea Guy. So this is the guy that helps you unlock those ideas and that creativity and bringing that out all out. Bryan, I love this guy, right? This guy is super, super smart, super fun, ideas all over the place, and he super willing to give you all these ideas. So he's led over $3 billion in new sales for the top third Fortune 100 companies. He's worked with a ton of different organizations. He sat next to David Ogilvy and drilled him on ideas, so you'll hear about that in the interview. He's helped name Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Huh? What?
So he's got a lot of weird projects he's worked on as well as really fascinating things. He's graduated Dartmouth. He is the innovation and marketing instructor at Caltech. So this guy kind of knows what he's talking about and I think you should pay attention. I'm just saying. So let's get on with the interview. Here we come, Bryan. Thanks.
Bryan, welcome to the show, it's good to have you. We're excited to... I say we like there's multiple mes here. I'm excited to have you. This is fun times, man.
Bryan Mattimore:
Well, thanks Skot. And it looks like a we behind you, you got two other heads there.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's true. I do have,-
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
That's a cool [crosstalk 00:02:46].
SKOT WALDRON:
These are my friends, so we just kind of hang out.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
[crosstalk 00:02:49].
SKOT WALDRON:
We hang out together. We talk a lot. So I want to know what this Chief Idea Guy title's all about?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Well, we're an innovation agency growth engine that I co-founded 20 years ago with Gary Fraser. And he was named Marketer of the Year by Brandweek. He was my lead client at Unilever. We formed Growth Engine 20 years ago. And so he's chief strategy guy, but I said, "We're an innovation agency. I got to come up with some weird creative title." And I said, "Well, I'm in charge of ideas, I guess I'm the chief idea guy." And it's been interesting people generally kind of laugh at that. The head of the Forbes division said, "Oh yeah, I know that you, I love your title." So it's served its purpose and it's both interesting and accurate. So isn't that nice.
SKOT WALDRON:
It works, man. It's like, you've created this little a differentiator, right? Which is what you're all about. And coming from the brand strategy world, I helped... I've done that over a long time, so it stands out. And well-played. It's memorable and that's a good thing. So good job on that. Tell me about this Total Innovation Enterprise. Tell me about what that is, tell me about what you do, and how that all works?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah. So as an innovation agency... and we were actually the first, even though nobody cares. I mean, we had the notion that, not unlike an ad agency or promotion agency or digital agency to really do innovation well, you need to have an ongoing relationship with the client because you have to understand the brands and the brand equities, and leverage those in terms of new products. So when we formed the agency, it was really to help people and CMOs and their teams come up with new products and services.
But we also discovered that because of our methodologies... and they work against all kinds of business challenges. So we've now, since our 20 years in business, we've done work with HR teams, with manufacturing guys of course, but logistics people. Because if you think about it, I mean, they all have challenges, right? And so the methodologies that we know, these ideation techniques, as we call them can, can be used to solve all kinds of challenges, not just the traditional marketing and promotion challenges. And so that's the notion of a Total Innovative Enterprise.
And I would just say one other thing about that, what we've discovered is that it's so extraordinary when you're asking people in all departments and at all levels to be creative and to help grow the organization. Not only did you get some great ideas to do exactly that, but it builds a company culture that can be really powerful. And we can talk more about that if you want. But I feel that an agent, that a company, to reach its full potential has to help its people unlock, let's call it, unlock their full potential. And my bias is the only way you can do that is having them be creative.
SKOT WALDRON:
So true. And I've seen that a lot too, coming from the creative world, is that when we get in a room and we start brainstorming and there are what we'll say non-creatives in the room, right? You've got your HR, you've got your accounting, you got customer service, you've got even some of your executives in the room. Then we started talking, they're like, "Oh no, no, no, no, no. We're not the creative ones. We're not the creative ones. We don't do that. We leave that to the marketing and designers, the ones in flip flops and T-shirts. We don't do that stuff." And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. Everybody has an idea and you will definitely bring something to the table, person in HR, that that creative over there will not think about." And that's what's so interesting about that.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Well yeah, there's been a lot of research done, as you know, on the power of sort of cross-functionality. The importance of getting people from all different disciplines and backgrounds and experiences and they may not, frankly, be as creative as some of the other people in the room, but A, they often get ideas that you hadn't thought of, and B, even more important sometimes, they will trigger other people to make connections.
I remember I did a talk to 150 clinical trial people with a large pharmaceutical company. And HR and the talent people kept saying to me, "These people aren't that creative." I'm like, "Stop, stop," I didn't say it that way because it was a client, but that's what I was thinking. And we did this wonderful thing, we did a bunch of techniques, triggered brainwalk and customer wishing and all these different approaches, and these people were unbelievable. It's like they have been waiting in the stables or at the starting gate for the last 20 years to be creative, and they were fantastic. to me, one of the greatest contributions, besides the ideas that came out of it, was it helped the company, especially the HR and talent people, sort of redefine how they thought about their coworkers. And so that was tremendously rewarding.
SKOT WALDRON:
That is so cool to hear. I'm interested to hear about these creative training sessions that you do, or workshops or whatever, and what is... So when companies are having an issue, and they're like, "Okay, we need to bring in Bryan," what's that breaking point for them? When do they feel like they need you? When does somebody bring in the Chief Idea Guy to shake things up?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah. Well, let me talk about the creativity training thing, and then I'll talk about what they call. Actually, I'll talk about when they call first. They call when they have some something weird and hard. We tend to get terribly performing divisions sometimes to help, and ironically, we also get some of the best performing divisions because they understand the value and power of ideas, and they're always, always, always pushing for new ideas. In some ways the companies that need us the most, can often call us the least.
But they call us, often it's marketing challenges, but as I said, we have... And by the way, we could call it eating our own dog food, right? We've invented all kinds of different approaches to this new ways of thinking about how to use innovation and ideation processes. So one of our services is called Trade Link, which is joint ideation with the trade. Which is unbelievably powerful. Another thing we've invented is Disruptive War Gaming strategy processes. And on and on and on. And so we tend to get weird calls and it's really, really fun.
We got a call one time from an insurance company and they said, "How do we sell more life insurance to Catholics?" And I'm like, "Who is this?" So that makes it incredibly fun and credibly interesting. Disconcerting because you say, "I have no idea how we're going to approach this," but then you get into it and you do it. And you know, from your design work, it starts and you're nervous and you're scared, and then by the time you're done, you get 200 ideas and it's very exciting. So that's the answer to the first question, which is, who calls us. And it's sort of everybody who has an issue or a challenge, that they have trouble solving. So that's one thing.
In terms of our creativity training, we practice what's called action learning. I don't know if you have heard that term or your listeners have heard it. It came out of GE but it's essentially learning by doing. And so in our workshops, I can mention, LVMH, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, they've been a client of ours for 20 years. They have 50 luxury divisions, Christian Dior, Givenchy, and obviously Louis Vuitton, et cetera. In our workshops with them, we get typically 20 people or so from all their different divisions to come in. But to come, to be allowed to attend, our two day workshop with them, they have to send us a real-world challenge.
So the Marc Jacobs guy says, "Well," and he's in logistics, he said, "My challenge is getting these Marc Jacobs bags in the U.S. quick enough." Or the Sephora person said, "We're opening up a store in Dallas, how do we do that in an innovative way?" Or Christian Dior, "We're launching a new perfume and there are a million of these, how do we get noticed?" Et cetera. So the point of the training is there's a BOGO, right? They were in these techniques, and typically it's 12 to 14 techniques, triggered brainwalking, picture prompts, patent prompts, et cetera, all these techniques we use, which we can talk more about if you want. But we teach them these techniques, by them learning how to apply to their real jobs and real challenges. And in the process, the coolest thing is to get ideas they never thought of.
So there's an ROI to our training that's almost never the case in other trainings. Immediate ROI, where people get ideas that they can go use. And part of the reason we do that is so they see that this is not purely theoretical. It's based on theory, but it's about pragmatic uses of these things, right? That you can use them in the real world. So my recommendation to your listeners, if anybody's thinking of hiring a creativity training firm, if they say, "Yeah, we're going to work on a thousand uses for a brick," unless you're in the construction industry, run away. Because that to me says they're just being totally theoretical and not how to apply this stuff to real world challenges.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay, good to know. So next time somebody tries to sell me training on bricks, noted, I do not do that. Okay, cool.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Unless you're in the construction business, then it's okay.
SKOT WALDRON:
Right, unless you're in the construction visiting. Right, right. I just got that email this morning, I'll get rid of that. So good. Okay so, now that you've piqued my interest about these exercises that you run people through, I got to ask, is there one that you can share with us? Is there one that we can walk through... Can we use these in a daily basis or a weekly basis, as business owners or employees or whatever, to unlock our processes that we go through every day? Is there something, without giving away your secrets, something we can do?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Well, first of all, we do give away all our secrets. I mean, my book Idea Stormers, there're probably 20 or 25 different ideation techniques in that book. And I'm very explicit about how you use them. I wrote that book so smaller and medium-sized companies could have the advantage of the large guys who are paying us bigger fees and maybe these guys can't afford us. So that was part of the motivation for writing that book. And also the book 21 Days to a Big Idea, that book was for aspiring entrepreneurs.
So the net of it is we give this stuff away all the time, and we do that because it's kind of fun and it forces us to create new stuff. So that's one thing, we give it away the time. The contribution of ideas towards that book is that, because I've personally facilitated over a thousand ideation sessions and my firm has done 1,500 and we've done 200 successful innovation projects and on and on and on, we've learned which techniques work against different kinds of challenges.
And so that's a unique contribution to the field we've made. Because besides inventing good ones, like patents prompts is a new technique we invented, et cetera, et cetera, triggered brainwalking, et cetera, et cetera. So we're constantly inventing new techniques against specific challenges, right? But it's really our expertise in knowing which techniques can solve different kinds of challenges, have a greater likelihood, right?
So if it's a strategy challenge, we would use questioning assumptions, problem redefinition, and 20 questions. If it's a new product assignment, we would use semantic intuition and probably a triggered brainwalk and customer wishing and probably trend triggers, too. So the point is now beyond brainstorming, there are dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of different techniques that can help people break through to new ideas.
If your listeners have a particularly... if there's an HR challenge for instance, or they're trying to staff a project, but they feel like they're in an impossible situation, which we've worked with the City of New York for 20 years and the State of New York teaching auditors how to be more creative, which is really fun.
SKOT WALDRON:
Wow, I didn't know that was possible. Is that possible?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah, this is the [inaudible 00:16:34]. It's fantastic. And by the way-
SKOT WALDRON:
[crosstalk 00:16:35] my auditor friends out there.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
They're great. Actually in those cases, we had them role-play famous people, and if those famous people were going to invent new audits, who would they, and what would they, be auditing? So it was really cool. But I think maybe two all purpose techniques, one, if you're really stuck, if you're in an impossible situation, the most powerful one is probably questioning assumptions. So you list 20 assumptions about the thing that you're stuck with and when you begin to question those... in government, it's, "I don't have the budget, I don't have the people, and are going to get it done by next Thursday." You get in these impossible boxes, right? When you question those assumptions, you assuming you're you had to do it right? You assuming you can't have the money be donated by a corporation in New York City and et cetera, et cetera.
So that would be one questioning assumptions. And a second one, which is a lot of fun... Because these techniques by the way, work on different parts of the brain. So we have four categories of techniques I've identified. One is, if you will, questioning techniques, which is questioning assumptions, et cetera. Another is metaphorical techniques, which is how great inventors throughout history, who I've studied in great depth, literally hundreds of inventors, their preferred modality when making new inventions is metaphors, principle transfer. The third class of techniques we've identified is visual techniques, so for picture prompts, et cetera, collaging, those are great for insight work. And the last is sort of a catchall, but those are kind of fantasy ones and those are really far out ones. When you want to involve the imaginative part of your brain. So a fantastic, if you will, fantasy technique... I like that a fantastic fantasy technique-
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, well played. Good job.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Thank you. Is Worst Idea. And that's really fun and so you just... or when we did work for the ASPCA on how we could get New Yorkers to invent extra [inaudible 00:18:47] pit bulls... I'm not kidding that was a real assignment. We used in that case a silly technique. A silly technique, which I created just for them. But the Worst Idea is you come up with not good ideas, but bad ideas. And I was giving a talk to 150 bankers with the Bank Marketing Association and so we did Worst Idea technique and they loved it. "Oh, we could close the banks at 1:00, not 2:00. We could double the fees. We could take all the change," all this kind of... And it was great.
I guess the bigger point here is that with these different techniques, people who have defined themselves as not creative discover, "O my gosh, I am unbelievably creative." And by the way, I'll just say, don't tell anyone, but these techniques are not rocket science. They're easy. They're simple. And so my mission in this lifetime has been to get people to use some of these things. Because they're not hard to learn and they're unbelievably effective at the end of the day.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay, I got to know the end of like, what is this... So the banking technique, the bad idea, what is that supposed to do for them? What happens as a result of that?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Well, in this case it was inventing new products. I mean, I'm giving a speech up there dying to 150 bankers and so I pull up the next exercise with them with this worst idea. And so one of the worst ideas was, "Let's just take their... we'll take the change. If their account is $2,945.23, let's take the $0.23 because they'll never notice it." I mean, that's a bad idea, right? We're going to steal from our customers. By the way, if you want I can tell you a story about a new multimillion dollar service that came out of this technique for Dun & Bradstreet.
But anyway, so what's the idea there for the bankers? The idea is maybe we create a savings account where people put their change in that savings account so it's always rounded down, right? We take the money that's $0.45 and just put that in a savings account. And as you probably know, Bank of America at one point actually did this. I mean, my purpose was just to get out of their alive, to have them like some of these techniques. But that's a viable idea.
SKOT WALDRON:
That is. So you're saying that... because I I've been there, sitting around brainstorming about how we're going to market this product or build a brand strategy for this company of... everybody's throwing ideas out there and that phrase of there are no bad ideas, let's build confidence in people, sharing, right? But sometimes people say things and everybody will laugh... I'm sure you've been here, everybody'll laugh and, "Oh, that's ridiculous," and then somebody goes, "Wait a second. What if we twisted that and did this?" So that's kind of what you're talking about, right?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
It is. I mean, there's a famous example from the history of advertising, where they're sitting around and they're going, "Yeah, we got these these grapes. Let's have them dance to Heard It Through a Grapevine." And of course, the California Raisin thing... grapes, raisins, whatever. And there're dozens of these examples, right? Even if you look at the Aaron Sorkin masterclass, he says, "Okay guys, writing screenplays, forget it, it's hard. Come up with some bad ideas," as a way to break people through their thought patterns. And it's incredibly effective because it takes all the pressure off. I can't come up with good ideas, but I can come up with bad ideas. And then all of a sudden you find yourself...And by the way you do it, you list 20 bad ideas and then you either look for the opposite, or you say, "As bad as this idea is, can I turn it into a good idea?" So that's a very simple technique.
In the case of the ASPCA, we did silly idea because I didn't want them to say, "Yeah, we'll kill the dogs," and all this kind of stuff. So a silly idea was a virtual adoption and then they fall in love with them, or you dress them up for the Halloween Day parade, or the Halloween parade. And that led to actually the national campaign, which is about making these animals personal, championing their personalities as a way to get people to adopt them.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's really smart. I like that idea. It's reverse psychology a little bit, right?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
It just flips it on its head.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
By the way, if anybody wants the full stories, because I'm jumping around here, maybe a new ice cream for Ben and Jerry's or selling more life insurance to Catholics, or we did a project for one of the large auto makers on how to invent the new sales forecasting system. Oh my gosh, this is not easy. All of these are on my TEDx Talk, that 17 minute talk. It's Solving Impossible Challenges.
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh, very cool. Yeah, we're going to put a link here in the show notes to get people to that as well as some of your other resources. Fantastic. Yeah, people go watch that stuff. So, so good. Because I mean, we always kind of, we're always fascinated, like when we look at logos and like the hidden gems inside of logos and go, "Oh, I never saw that before," or the little hidden, behind the scenes. We're all fascinated by the behind the scenes stuff. And so if I can sit there and look at, especially something as unique as Ben and Jerry's ice cream names, and sit there and think, "How did they come up with that? And why would they be calling that one, that one?" So I think that's really, really fascinating, really smart.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yep. I remember early on in my career, and I've been able to interview and meet some great people in history, David Ogilvy, et cetera, et cetera. But Paul Rand, who had been the IBM logo, as you know, I asked him, "Well, what's with that?" And he said, "Well, I had the letters and I did that cross hatching, so it would begin to integrate it, so you move beyond the letters to an identity." Which is something you know about a lot more than I do, but I've been fascinating with, we'll call them, origin stories of great ideas through history.
When I had dinner one time for a friend with David Ogilvy, I was seated next to him. So I'm like grilling him for like an hour, and I haven't... I was asking him all these really weird questions. And I said, "Well, have you ever gotten an idea for an ad campaign from a dream?" Because I'm just asking him all these absurd questions. And he said, yeah, it happened one time in the Pepperidge Farm Remembers campaign. I don't know if you remember that old bread truck. Anyway, it was a great campaign, it ran for a long time. But he got that one in a dream, for instance. Which does happen. My father, who was in advertising, came up with the line, "Say, 'Pepsi, please.'" He got that into a dream and that was to combat, "Give me a Coke." And it was actually a radio contest, is how they launched that. But [crosstalk 00:26:09]-
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh, that's funny. That's funny. Yeah, I don't know if David Ogilvy has been asked that question too often, about, "[inaudible 00:26:17] and idea in a dream?" It's like, who is this guy?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Exactly. Yeah, he was stuck, he couldn't get away. He was sitting next to me.
SKOT WALDRON:
There you go, that's the best way, right?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Right.
SKOT WALDRON:
Make sure you're stuck next to David Ogilvy at a dinner. That's awesome. I don't know how many of us have interacted with these ideation sessions, or somebody to come in and facilitate these sessions for us in the past, but let's talk about what's a service that people would be surprised to even know that you even provide?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah. Oh, and by the way, I just need to say one thing, that that expression, there are no bad ideas, just so people... and that's about withholding judgment., that's what that means. But if you take that literally, people need to know that most of the ideas are bad. I mean about only 10% or maybe 15%, when we do a session, are any good. So people have to understand, this is about a third, which you can get with an all-star baseball hitter, right? It's a numbers game. So people just have to understand that. Because they say, "God, we got 50 ideas, and there are only two good ones in here." Well, oh my gosh, that's fantastic, right? [crosstalk 00:27:30]-
SKOT WALDRON:
That's brilliant. Well done.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah, exactly. In terms of a service that people might be surprised that we offer, one of them is we've actually done a fair amount of vision, mission, and values work. And it turns out that that lends itself to a creative process. And of course, vision and mission are the purview, and important for senior management to do. We did this for a famous talent placement company before they were sold, and so we were working with their CEO and all the senior leaders to redefine their vision and mission because they were about to be sold.
But the critical thing is the values side of this. And so what we do then is we will do creative values work. And there are two components to that. Number one, you want all employees to contribute to the values, right? Because they're the ones that have to embody this. And Zappos, for instance, you probably know, they spent a year working on getting the values right. And they're 10 of them, which I think is too many, but it's brilliant. And that was the key that Tony Hsieh said was the key to their success in ultimately to being sold to Amazon for 1.2 billion.
So values is something where the people... every employee should participate and once they're established, then we will do sessions with employees where they figure out how to translate those values into behaviors in their daily lives. And that is a really wonderful thing. If one of our values is be a pioneer and you're the elevator operator or you're helping bring boxes into the warehouse, well how does that translate? And so you need to be creative about how you translate those values to your everyday job. And I think that probably surprises the audience.
And this has, by the way, just been tremendously rewarding work for us, psychically rewarding, because people then really feel a part of the culture and they are contributing in unique and wonderful ways. And my experience is that people love to contribute in those kind of ways. It's a sense of purpose and mission and it makes it easier to go to work every day, frankly.
SKOT WALDRON:
That is interesting. I did not expect you to say that. Vision, mission [crosstalk 00:30:01]-
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Good, good. [crosstalk 00:30:01].
SKOT WALDRON:
It worked. It worked. I was not expecting that. Because I'll do a lot of that, I did a lot of that in the brand strategy work that I did. But now for external communication, now for internal communication where I'm working mostly with teams and organizations and leaders on effectively communicating inside the organization, having a strong core vision/mission/values, that's not just the poster on the wall of an eagle flying into the sunset in your break room, but that it's legit, that feels real and authentic, is core to having a strong company culture and being able to have buy-in and loyalty, building loyalty inside that organization. Worked for years on building external loyalty with customers and clients and now I do that internally with organizations, and that's so key. So I'm glad that you said that.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Well, it's important work. And of course, I think the talent wars, when COVID subsides a bit, will come back and it's that war for talent. And I do think that this is absolutely critical work to attract, and even sometimes more importantly, to retain talent when they have that sense of mission and purpose and contribution. One trick, we worked with a medium-sized real estate firm on the mission/vision/values thing, and one of the things they did is they take a different value each month and champion that value throughout the organization. So they'll provide articles and books and maybe they'll have lunch, book meetings. Or also another technique is called the whiteboard technique where people put ideas down on a whiteboard and everybody... when people get back together physically, can build on those ideas, et cetera. So there are all these creative ways to activate the change in behaviors you're looking for.
SKOT WALDRON:
Very cool. Yeah, so I'm curious, what's your recommended number of values that a company should have? I have mine as well, but I'm curious about yours.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah, I think five or six is probably good. Zappos, I understand why they did the 10, and three of them are sort of around creativity, but God bless them. One of them is be a little weird or something. I mean, that's pretty cool. Tony Hsieh, before he passed away tragically in a fire in Connecticut, I think he had, as I remember, he had a tattoo on his head or something. It's like, oh my gosh. And I actually did quite a bit of customer experience research and one of those was best practices with Zappos and I got these unbelievable stories when I called them, even with a woman who said, "Yeah, other people have better stories than I did," and then she proceeded to tell me this story that I was literally crying after she told me. So the values man, are so, so important. And this is the softer side of things, but boy, at the end of the day, it leads to hard numbers and hard results.
SKOT WALDRON:
I love it. Zappos has always been a good example of the company values. And I always say it too, I'm always like, there's too many, I feel, but it worked for them. They're awesome. They do a great job of thinking about values differently. It's different than, "Let's be innovative," or "Customer service," or... Right? You get to that point where you're like, "Okay, now we're not going to rubber stamp our values that everybody else is using, let's try something." Zappos did it. I mean, they really did it well, so that's really cool.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yep. And just one last thing on the values and missions. If you're a leader and you can take that and you showed it to somebody and said, "What company is this?" And they say, "Well, this could be 100 different companies," you've got more work to do. Maybe not necessarily on the content or substance, but certainly on the language you use to frame that value.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. I say the same thing, so well-played. I think that that's super important. What can people do to get in touch with you? I mean, I've got some links in here and stuff, but if people are just listening, what's the main point of contact for you and what I can get from you?
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Yeah. So our website is growth-engine.com. My email is bmattimore, B as in Bryan, bmattimore, M-A-T-T-I-M-O-R-E, @growth-engine.com. Just send me an email and I'll actually get back to you, assuming it doesn't get lost in the spam folder. Frankly, with your listeners, if somebody is thinking of trying this, some of these ideation techniques, and just want a few minutes of counsel on that and maybe even support, and to tell them what might or might not work, give me an email, give me a call, I'm happy to get on the phone with you. And then the quid pro quo here is though, you have to tell me how the session went, and quote how successful it was. So I'm happy to do that. And this is not just ideation, I mean, obviously there's strategic challenges, how do you approach them? Creativity training, what do we do? Et cetera, et cetera. Any of these areas we've talked about, I'm happy to provide some input.
SKOT WALDRON:
Very cool. Thanks, Bryan. I've been intrigued this whole time. This is super interesting to me.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Cool.
SKOT WALDRON:
I don't know if I'm by myself because I think I come from the same pot of awesome brew as you do, but I think this has been super fascinating.
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Well, thank you. I think the two people behind you got something out of it, because they're visages are really funky. So I think they're with us.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, that's right, [crosstalk 00:35:54].
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
So we've got a team of three here, that's great.
SKOT WALDRON:
We're going to have a party. All right, Bryan, thanks for having [inaudible 00:35:58]. Thanks for [crosstalk 00:35:58]-
BRYAN MATTIMORE:
Hey, thanks for having me. This was really fun.
SKOT WALDRON:
This interview had some practicalities in it, right? Some of the other interviews that we've done here have really helped stir up ideas and what we've been talking about with unlocking people and society and all these different things. Well, this one had some utility in it that... some actual, practical ideas of what we can do to implement things in ourselves. I love this 20 bad ideas process, I guess you could call it right, process or exercise. I'm I think I'm going to try to start using that with myself, with maybe some of my clients. It just sounds super interesting and a way to think about things a little bit differently. So Idea Stormers sounds like a book that I would super be interested in, as far as these exercises and putting them into practical use.
So Bryan has a lot of experience with generating ideas and creativity. We all have the ability to be creative in the way we think, and the way we operate in and bring out those ideas. Don't limit yourself. Get out the soundtrack in your mind that you're not creative or that you don't have good ideas. We all have good ideas, we all have bad ideas. It's part of the process. What we need to do is share them because in the midst of all of those thousands of ideas, there's going to be those nuggets of gold that are going to unlock so much in you and in others and I hope that you will tap into that.
If you want to find out more about me, you can go to skotwaldron.com. You can find more interviews on there, find out a little bit more what I offer. YouTube, go there, check out my channel, like, subscribe, comment, find some educational information on there. I offer a lot of free teaching on there as well. And I would love to connect with you in any way, shape, or form on LinkedIn, so hook up with me there. All right, thanks everybody for being here. We'll see you on another episode of Unlocked.
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