I recently presented a half-day workshop for leadership and top sales people from Blue Cross Blue Shield. I was asked the same question I get asked quite often. “Why did you get out of advertising and into being a keynote speaker?” My honest answer is quite short and quite simple: “To help other people.” When I wrote my first book, The Brand Who Cried Wolf, I drew on a philosophy that I had long advocated in my presentations, keynote speeches, corporate training programs, and consulting arrangements with major corporations, small businesses, and nonprofit groups around the world. I had developed that philosophy from my earliest days as an advertising and marketing professional, and it was based on a core value my parents taught me: respect for humanity. From that core value emerged related values about honesty and integrity. That core value also helped me to realize my purpose, which is to help people be successful in any endeavor by focusing on what matters most to them and what matters most to those they serve. That’s how my career’s trajectory moved in the direction of public speaking, where I could connect simultaneously with hundreds and sometimes thousands of individuals. To this day, nothing gets me more amped up than to engage a room or an auditorium full of people and show them the process for business success. One of the reasons I love business—why I love what it stands for—is that it’s a way for people to express their values. I love that someone can have an idea and use passion and smarts and hard work to make a go of it. I’ve run my own business, sat on boards, and started an international organization with three other partners. Over the course of my career, I’ve helped take three companies to IPOs. The reason I’ve developed my business consulting services is because I believe in business, commerce, and capitalism. And I believe I have the right formula not only for helping new businesses get off the ground but also for helping people create lasting, meaningful organizations. I have always had a strong sense of purpose in life, and I have tried to pursue it with the core values I have consciously lived for decades. I believe that today, more than ever, individuals and companies have the power to truly affect change, but too many of them are focused on policies and procedures instead of values and purpose. And without values and purpose, that power and that ability to influence too often goes to waste or even becomes destructive. If I can help individuals and entire organizations to work with purpose and passion, I am a happy man. The advertising business was a wonderful career, but it fell short in allowing me to truly engage and help those around me. And that is the reason why, as a keynote speaker, I Do What I Do.

What exactly does “innovate” mean? And, how do we go about innovating? What’s the formula? Many books and articles are devoted to innovation. There are people throughout history who seem to have a knack for innovation—Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs, to name a few. They seem to hit the market at precisely the correct time with their new idea or invention. They are the creative ones who have all the great ideas, the dynamic speakers who can express how their ideas will change lives. But, is it really perfect timing and creativity, or did these innovators understand their business, the market, the customer, and the needs of humanity more than the average person? What are the common characteristics of innovators? Innovators, similar to dynamic speakers, are willing to take risks. Far too often when we have a great idea, we are not willing to implement it. We’re frozen in place by the thought of it not going exactly as planned. We’re afraid of ridicule, or we’re fearful that there may be a tremendous downside. Therefore, we stay the course. Innovators are willing to fail. When we think of a plan or an idea failing, we think of ourselves as failures. That could not be further from the truth. An innovator is an insightful, dynamic speaker who shares the truth: innovation is trial and error, testing, missing, missing some more, and then doing it again. Without failing and falling, we cannot get closer to the solution. Without failing, we cannot reach the pinnacle of success. Innovators are patient. Innovation is a journey of ideas, research, study, trials, errors, fails, and successes. Meaningful and relevant innovations do not happen overnight. They happen because much thought, time, and patience went into the innovation process. Innovation happens because the innovator understands, empirically, the market, the customer, and the need for a new solution. Innovators know “invention” is not innovation. The creative process alone is not innovation. Engineering something new to work, without human relevance, is not innovation. Timing or market research alone, or even coupled with creativity and dynamic speaking skills, is still not innovation. Not until an idea becomes something relevant does it become an innovation. A product, service, or invention does not become an innovation until it becomes something that enhances or transforms another person’s life, such as the work of a dynamic speaker. So, how do we innovate? Look at your business and position as evolving and growing. As a constant journey of learning and understanding with one single objective—to create innovative solutions for your customers that they never thought of but wonder how they ever did without. Have the courage to take risks. Don’t risk losing your job or a client, but don’t be afraid to bring a new idea to the team, especially if it’s something that could change the life of a customer. Don’t be afraid to fail or be ridiculed. No innovator has ever created a new ANYTHING on the first try. Many life-changing innovations were initially scoffed. The innovator said, “So what. I know I’ve got something special here.” You cannot and will not bring meaningful solutions to the table without a bit of trial and error. Be patient and hold your course until the solution is found. That means don’t quit. To be innovative, you need endurance and patience. Understand your ideas are not innovations until they enhance and transform another person’s life. Make it your daily mission to enhance the lives of those around you. When you’re at work, make it your mission to enhance and transform the lives of those your serve—the customer. When courting John Sculley to become Apple’s new CEO, Steve Jobs, as a dynamic speaker, asked him a very pointed question: “Do you want to put a dent in the universe?” Ask yourself that same question, every time you are working on a new project, program, customer service plan, or any idea at all. “Do I want to put a dent in the universe?” Do you want to make a difference in the lives of those you love and those you serve? If the answer is yes, work on your innovation skills.

My most requested keynote presentation is Emotional Branding. During this program, I discuss the importance of using emotion to communicate and connect with those around us. I prove, through research and case studies, how using emotion in a business and sales situation garners greater results than merely using features, benefits, price and policy. However, I do not promote the idea that all we need to do is to strike emotional cords to win the communication battle. In my book, “Powered by Pupose,” I write in length about the importance of critical thinking when navigating through the business and personal world of decision making. Emotional branding is useless without critical thinking. Understanding your values and working with purpose is extremely difficult without critical thinking. Here’s an excerpt from my book Powered by Purpose, which discusses the importance of critical thinking when using values to support your purpose. From Chapter 5: You know how important it is to identify and develop your values. But just what is your purpose? And how do you know that your values will support it? Two words: critical thinking. You will need some serious critical thinking skills to hone in on your purpose, to articulate it to others, and to plan how you will achieve it. Okay, but what is critical thinking? “Critical” does not mean negative; we’re not talking about telling someone what they’ve done wrong. The word can be traced back to Greek origins, and it’s useful to follow this trail for a little bit. Related to the meaning of “critical” are verbs such as “separate,” “discern,” “distinguish,” “pick out,” “choose,” “decide,” “judge,” “estimate,” “bring to trial,” and “accuse,” and nouns such as “judgment,” “standard,” “criterion,” and “tribunal.” You can see a number of judicial associations with the term. Less obvious, but just as significant, are medical associations that emphasize a crisis, turning point, or decisive moment. So thinking critically encompasses the urgency of crisis; the rule of a standard or criterion; the analytical processes of discerning, distinguishing, separating, and choosing; and the conclusiveness of judgment. Most of us don’t believe we need any training to be good critical thinkers. After all, we’ve been thinking and deciding all our lives. True enough. But how often have you taken a mental step back and asked yourself to reflect on that thinking? How often have you consciously observed your thinking, let alone your process of reasoning toward a decision? It’s probably far less frequent than you believe. We are so intimately connected with our own thinking that it’s easy to believe we are already really good thinkers. It’s actually quite difficult to become an observer to your own thinking since observing is a form of thinking! But there are techniques you and the people in your organization can use to support, develop, and hone your existing skills. To support your purpose, you and everyone in your organization have to be willing to hear each other out. This can happen only if you, as the leader, empower and excite people to speak their mind. Once they have that feeling of freedom, they also need to listen to each other. Not everyone is going to arrive at the same conclusion, but welcoming—and expecting—inquiry is part of supporting the critical thinking process. Here are some basic steps to support that. We’ll go into these in more detail in Chapter 9. Listen. When someone comes to you with an idea, take the time to really pay attention to what that person is saying without moving in to steer the conversation in the direction you want to go. Rephrase. Once a pitch has been made, rephrase it to make sure you understand it. Ask for confirmation or correction to make sure you’ve got the idea right. Ask for help uncovering unstated assumptions. Examine how thoroughly the idea has been presented and ask, for example, where the idea was generated or what got the person thinking about the idea in the first place. Solicit counter-examples to see what reasoning works and, arguably more importantly, what doesn’t. Develop You and your team are experts at what you do. It took time to develop that expertise! There was not only the time on the job but the years of education that provided you with some of the basic skills required to navigate through your daily life. No matter how talented you are, you can’t become excellent at anything without training. Consider how long it takes someone to develop a musical or sports skill. A ballet dancer doesn’t enter the world with strong muscles or practiced technique any more than a talented mathematician starts out knowing how to solve esoteric formulas. Developing critical thinking skills also takes time, despite the fact that each one of us is a thinker already. But just as an athlete must work hard to develop raw talent into skilled artistry, so, too, the thinker must develop rational processes. One of the best ways to do that efficiently is to focus on what you do best and apply critical thinking concepts to those areas. Hone Once you have a sense of essential critical thinking skills, you need to refine them, beginning with consciously applying them to your daily interactions with others. Seeking out texts—including this book—that speak directly to questions you have and exploring answers to those questions will also help lead you to new insights. The next chapter is devoted to honing your critical thinking skills, which will help your emotional branding. Special thanks to Gaby Av for the image.

Yesterday, I was in a meeting with a consulting client. As a brand consultant, we were planning an upcoming event for their customers. The marketing director began the discussion with a question. “How do we get people interested?” After some light conversation about typical marketing methods as a brand consultant, I shared my idea of creating intrigue. “Intrigue?” That was the immediate response. “Yes” – I said – “However,” I cautioned, “the intriguing message must be genuine and absolutely must deliver the goods.” What do I mean by this? Turn on your television or radio. Read the paper or a magazine. Look at the online ads. You see clever campaigns, goofy hooks, and wild promises on a regular basis from companies of all sizes in all industries. They are trying to create intrigue, but they usually leave the customer short on delivery. Why? The intrigue that captures a person’s attention can’t be better than the product, service, or story that it’s wrapped around. The substance has to follow for the intrigue to make sense. And the substance of what you deliver should be intimately connected to your values. When I ran my own agency, I knew that intrigue was crucial to getting a potential client involved, but if I failed to deliver something of substance, I’d never had secured those clients, or I’d have soon lost them. And the key to delivering substance was research. Every time we pitched a company, we made bold claims, but they were always backed up by facts. The formula was simple enough: Ask the right question about the organization, provide an answer, and then provide a solution. Let me explain. Okidata was a company we wanted badly because we knew they were in a great position. They had a great product and great engineering. They were one of the pioneers of color-printing technology but then sold that technology to other printing companies like Lexmark and HP, because they were focused at the time on black-and-white and dot-matrix/impact printing. However, armed with the new technology, Okidata’s competitors were taking off. Okidata soon recognized that they were missing a very good opportunity—one they had helped create. In short, Okidata had everything going for them, except they weren’t making a dent in the market that they helped give birth to! By doing extensive research with the help of a brand consultant, we’d identified a problem, and then we came up with a solution. The intrigue we created was simply designed to get them to the table to talk with us about how we could help. We built a box that looked sort of like a Rubik’s cube, but every time you moved a part of it, a message would appear. The first message was a question: Who helped create color-printing technology? The second message was an answer: Okidata. The third message was another question: Who owns the color-printing market? The fourth message was another answer: Not Okidata! The fifth message was yet another question: Would you like to be a REAL player in the color-printing market? Then, the final message revealed the payoff: WE CAN HELP! We sent the box with a letter to Okidata’s vice president of sales and marketing. Not fifteen minutes after she opened the package, she called our director. “How do you know this?” She asked. Then she added, “And how fast can you get here?” We went with a brand consultant team to pitch vertical marketing and convinced them that we could turn their business around, not just in color, but also in improving their black-and-white printing sales. And we did. The healthcare market alone, which we managed, tripled Okidata’s black-and-white printing sales in less than a year. What’s key here and in all of our pitches was that we were not just making bold claims. We also backed them up with information that provided solid answers to questions we knew a business either wasn’t asking but should have been, or had asked but had not answered successfully. As a reputable brand consultant, it is important to never make empty promises when approaching potential clients, and that’s why we landed—and kept—organizations like The Scotts Company, Carrier, and Benjamin Moore Paints. Intrigue got us a foot in the door, and when we walked through it, we had answers. Intrigue “Intrigue,” as a noun or a verb, involves mystery, curiosity, and fascination. When someone or something is intriguing, they are mysterious, curious, and fascinating. Intrigue can be superficial, the sort of glint on a shiny metal object that is, by itself, not terribly interesting. But intrigue can also be profound enough to be textured by nuance and layered with meaning. In those instances, intrigue is not a mere hook but a hint of something significant yet to come. Superficial intrigue is nothing more than sleight of hand used to mask a lack of depth. That’s the sort of meaning people have in mind when they think of the negative definition of the word. In other words, intrigue created around something that is more interesting than the object, idea, or action itself merely leads to a letdown. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of businesses do when they turn to marketing their service or product and focus more on the message—the intrigue—than on their brand and their purpose, which is the expertise of a brand consultant. These days, lots of stuff gets your attention, but it doesn’t make you care. As a result, it’s not sustainable. Part of sustainable success involves sustainable intrigue. As we’ve noted, making a visceral, emotional, personal connection is how you get and keep people involved. Heck, even the word, “visceral” hits you like a punch in the gut! But it’s the broader issue—the impact of well-researched sustainable intrigue that makes a real connection—that as a brand consultant, I want you to keep in mind as you promote your own product, service, project, event, or whatever it is you’re attempting to sell. Remember, whatever you’re promoting or selling when creating your campaign—the payoff must be greater than the promise.

It takes a pretty confident person to create an organization where ideas, input, and even counter points are free-flowing amongst leaders. The more confident you are about what you believe—and this is not the same as having an enormous ego—the easier it is to surround yourself with people who will challenge you to do your best work and share your purpose. You, in turn, will do the same for them. Confidence is also the result of careful critical thinking about what you believe is important and how to live in accordance with your values. This is arguably the heart of what makes great and true leaders and speakers. That said, you’ve got to be comfortable with the fact that you don’t always have to be the smartest person in the room. In fact, you’re a better and more effective leader if you surround yourself with people who are better than you are in significant ways. Success is not about your ego and making your employees suppress their own ideas so that you can look good! You don’t want employees who are going to work harder at making an idea seem like it comes from you than at coming up with a stellar thought that benefits the entire organization. Someone who is comfortable in their own skin is going to be comfortable around people who outshine them in various ways. What happens if you are among the leaders who let their egos get in the way? First, it’s likely you won’t hire people who challenge that ego, because you won’t want the competition. And you won’t surround yourself with people who are smart and sophisticated enough to see the gaps in your thinking, or they’ll be too cowed to say anything. The end result is that without true leadership, your company will suffer. A still-relevant 2002 FORTUNE Magazine cover story, “Why Companies Fail,” focused on the top ten reasons why businesses go under. These included prolonged periods of success that led to complacency and a “fearing the boss more than the competition” attitude among employees. Supporting that conclusion, Daniel Goldman’s Primal Leadership contains the results of studies that show how a subordinate’s fear of a boss can stifle the sorts of interactions and free flow of ideas that are essential for good decision-making, confident speakers, and leadership that inspires. The FORTUNE article also found fault with “listening to Wall Street more than to employees.” (And, I’d add, listening to Wall Street more than customers!) No one knows a business like its employees. Ignoring them, as Lucent CEO Rich McGinn did in the late 1990s, had dire consequences: Lucent’s scientists were interested in pursuing new optical technologies and its salespeople were concerned about the unrealistic growth targets McGinn had set. But the CEO’s attention was on Wall Street and its love of his growth goals. After a short-term spike, the long-term result was an 80 percent stock plummet, and McGinn was out of a job. Perhaps the two most profound observations in that FORTUNE article are that companies fail because their leaders are not self-reflective enough, and that failure itself is not merely a matter of going belly-up. The story’s subtitle spells it out: “CEOs offer every excuse but the right one: their own errors.”

Recent surveys indicate almost half of all employees who have left their job within a year of starting did so due to lack of training. Every business needs well-trained employees. The best way to do that is to utilize active company training programs created by someone with experience and a proven track record record and someone who knows what they are doing and genuinely wants to help. There are several reasons why you need to have a training program in place. Why Train Employees? Employees who receive company training programs perform their jobs better with less supervision. With less time spent on redoing projects, the company’s overall bottom line sees a boost, allowing employees to undertake a greater variety of work than before. An effective training program instills company loyalty. By offering employees on the job training seminars or workshops, the company is showing it cares about its personnel’s development and career growth. Additionally, cross-training employees in multiple facets of the business allows employees to transfer within the company. It also allows managers to fill absences easier. Training programs allow companies to hire from a larger talent pool. Vacancies aren’t empty for long, causing less stress on managers and other employees. Businesses that are willing to train new hires for specific positions are liable to find someone who is a better fit for the team. Employees trained at regular intervals with company training programs can help the company stay competitive. Technology and business needs are fluid. Companies whose employees do not keep up with these changes will not stay afloat. Creating the Training Program Creating business training programs requires managers to determine what skills need focus. If the program focuses on the wrong skill set, training is ineffective and frustrating for employees. Each area should have a set of core skills necessary for success mapped out. In addition to solving issues, training needs team development and building objectives. It should also include coaching for employees that will help them grow in their specific job roles. Leadership development needs to be fostered during these seminars. When it comes to the training class, it is important to keep the class engaged. Using workbooks and participation exercises allow participants to interact and learn skills faster.