[0:04]In 1995, a graphic design teacher named Linda Weiman, and also an aspiring entrepreneur, decided to get the website linda.com. She did so because she needed a sandbox to play in with the new graphic design tools, the digital tools that were being developed at that time Photoshop, Illustrator, and many more. And she needed a place to put her students' work so all could see it. Well, she put that website together, and the business began to grow. And in 2002, she discovered it could be much, much more. So she moved all of her teaching online. Later, the business was sold to LinkedIn, who renamed it LinkedIn Learning, sold for 1.5 billion U.S. dollars. Linda is the poster child for what I call the counter conventional mindsets of entrepreneurs. So I want to tell you about these mindsets today, and here we go. So, number one, why do I call them counter conventional? Well, first, these six mindsets run counter to the best practices, as we call them, that are done in big companies today. They fly in the face of much of what we teach at London Business School and other business schools about strategy, about marketing, about risk, and about much more. Now, you might say, John, what do you mean by mindset? A mindset of course is up here, right? It it's those things attitudes, habits, thoughts, mental inclination, which when something comes our way, predetermines the response we make to that something that comes our way. And those somethings as we entrepreneurs call them are opportunities. So I want to tell you about these six mindsets, and the first one I call, yes, we can. Now, B-School strategy 101 says the following: What we're supposed to do in a company is stick to our knitting. We've got to figure out what we're really good at, we call them core competencies, and we've got to build on them, invest in them, nurture them. Make them more robust. And if somebody comes along and says, can you do something different that's outside of that, what are we supposed to say? No, I'm sorry, we don't do that around here. Well, a Brazilian entrepreneur named Arnaldo Correia built a wonderful business that today is called Atmo Digital, by disregarding those rules. He had already reinvented his business twice to become a major provider of event management and production services. When one of his customers said to him, you know, I have 260 stores scattered all around Brazil, and Brazil's a big country. And I'd like to be able to broadcast a training and motivational events to the stores in real time. So, Arnold, could we put televisions in the training room of all my stores, and could we build a satellite uplink so we can send all this wonderful stuff to the stores. So, what did he say? He said, yes, we can do that, even though he knew nothing about satellite technology, had never operated outside Sao Paulo, but he got it done. Then several years later, some of his other customers, one of them in particular, Walmart, said, well, you know, it's nice that we have all of these uh, these television screens in the back room of the store, but wouldn't it be cool if we had them on the sales floor? Because then we could run advertising, so when the customer walks down the aisle for detergent, perhaps there's an ad for Procter & Gamble's detergent in that aisle. And what did Arnold say to that request? Yes, we can do that. Over a period of years, Arnold reinvented his business fundamentally four different times by saying when a customer wanted something new that lay outside his core competencies. Yes, we can. The second one I want to tell you about, I call problem first, not product first logic. So in big companies today, it's all about the products. So, when I'm in the U.S., my family and I have used Tide for many years to wash our clothes. And uh we get a chuckle every now and then, because we can tell a new brand manager has come along, because what happens, they change the product, right? They take the blue speckles out of it and turn them green. And they call it new improved. Is this innovation, guys? I'm not so sure. Coca-Cola, what what is there? There was classic coke, and then there was new coke. That didn't work out too well. Then there was diet coke, and Coke Zero, and vanilla coke, and cherry coke, lots of cokes. I don't think this is what innovation is all about. But for entrepreneurs, we don't focus on products, we focus on problems. So a guy named Jonathan Thorn developed a technology that did something very useful. This instrument you see in front of you is called a surgical forceps. It's the tool that almost every surgeon in any kind of medical discipline uses to do his or her work. But there's a problem with these surgical forceps, they stick to human tissue. So imagine you're having a facelift, and the plastic surgeon is doing the final touches, but the tissue sticks to the forceps. Maybe it's not going to look quite as good as it was supposed to look. And maybe the plastic surgeons going to get a little frustrated, and it's going to take longer to do the work. And John said, you know, that's a problem I think I can solve with a new silver nickel alloy that he had developed.
[6:26]Well, it turned out the business didn't grow very fast focusing on plastic surgeons. So he said, I wonder if there's another surgical specialty that has an even bigger problem that I could solve, and he discovered one, and it's neurosurgeons. And neurosurgeons work in two places on our bodies in our spines and in our brain.
