918: How to Think and Innovate Like a Genius with Paul Sloane

Pete Mockaitis
Paul, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Paul Sloane
Peter, I’m delighted to be on the show.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m delighted to be chatting and I am excited to hear about some of your wisdom you’ve collected over a whole career with 17 books, talking lateral thinking, being more brilliant. So much good stuff. But first, can you tell us the tale of how you met Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney?

Paul Sloane
Well, no great tale to tell, really. I took my granddaughter to school one day, to primary school, and it was a private primary school in Sussex in England. And as I was walking through the carpark, a man said hello to me, and I said hello back to Sir Paul McCartney, whose daughter went to that same school as well. So, that was good.

And then a friend of mine, he sponsored The Rolling Stones. He worked as a managing director of a big mobile phone company, T-Mobile, and they sponsored The Rolling Stones on some of their major concerts. And we got to meet them, and I shook hands with Mick Jagger. He’s really quite tiny and frail. I thought he’ll never last the concert. And then he came out and he performed, and he was just brilliant. I’ve seen Paul McCartney perform, too. And they’re two of my great heroes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. All right. Just right place, right time.

Paul Sloane
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, now I’m intrigued here. You share some of your best thinking and about thinking. Have you made any particularly striking, surprising discoveries about us humans and how we do our thinking and problem-solving over the course of researching this in your career?

Paul Sloane
Well, I wouldn’t claim anything innovative or profound, actually, but I think that the most important thing I’ve found is that people think in very predictable ways, and they think in grooves, and they tend to use the same kind of thinking, the thinking that has served them well up till then. And I think it’s like a tennis player who’s got a very good forehand but they don’t have a very good backhand or they don’t volley very well. But if they play every shot with a forehand, they can be competitive.

And we’re a bit like that. We might use critical thinking, or we might use logical thinking, but not use creative thinking, or lateral thinking, or emotional thinking. But because we go through life making decisions based on the thinking style which has suited us, we get through it. It’s competent. But if you want to be outstanding, if you want to be an outstanding tennis player, you have to develop drop shots, you have to develop your backhand, you have to go to the net, you have to volley, you have to smash. And you need every shot in the book.

And to be a great thinker, to be a great, really, effective person at work, you need a variety of styles which suit different situations and different challenges. And that’s what I address in my book How to be a Brilliant Thinker. And what I’m really saying is you need to develop your skill at visual thinking, at mathematical thinking, at logical thinking, at creative thinking, at lateral thinking. A whole range of different thinking styles will make you much more competent and effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us, perhaps, any interesting studies or data or cases you’ve seen, inspiring tales of folks who have upgraded, transformed their thinking capabilities and seen cool results from it?

Paul Sloane
Well, I’ve got some personal experiences of my own where I’ve changed style, and I deliberately try to enhance that. So, I worked for IBM, I went through IBM’s sales training and management training, and had a successful career in sales and management. And then I got headhunted and joined a software company as marketing director, and I was in charge of a team of bright, enthusiastic, young people but they were chaotic. They were charging all over the place, doing all sorts of undisciplined things. And I thought it was my job to manage that and to bring IBM discipline to the place.

And one day, on a car journey, a managing director who was a very experienced guy, said to me, he said, “Paul, you’re too tough on your people.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you’re telling them what to do all the time.” And I said, “Isn’t that my job?” And he said, “No.” And he was right, and I was being too prescriptive in my approach, and not really empowering people and challenging them to come up with their own solutions.

Whenever somebody came to me with a problem, I’d say, I’d come up with my idea, which was often a good idea, I’d say, “Try this. Do it this way,” and telling them how to do their jobs and, in a sense, micromanaging them, and it wasn’t a good style. You don’t develop people with that sort of leadership management style. And I’d like to think that I changed, and it was like St. Paul on the road to Damascus moment for me, that I realized that I was being too prescriptive, and I needed to be more empowering and trust people.

And if somebody comes to you with a problem, instead of saying, “Here’s what you should do,” the right way to handle it, I think, is to say, “What ideas have you got?” and challenge them to come up with ideas first, and prompt them to think about different approaches and explore possibilities with them. And maybe, eventually, they’ll go with your approach, maybe they’ll come up with a better approach themselves, but that will help develop them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And in sort of the language that you’re using with different styles of thinking, how would you articulate what was your previous thinking approach in those exchanges versus your new approach?

Paul Sloane
I’d say my previous thinking approach was command and control as a style, which is a management style which is effective if you’re running a junior team, an inexperienced team, an ineffective team, people weren’t doing very well, command and control is sometimes necessary. But I think, what I would call lateral leadership is where you don’t lead from the from the front, you lead from the side as a collegial leader, and as a colleague, you empower people and trust them. And if you trust people to succeed, you have to trust them to fail as well, and you have to let go. And that’s a different thinking style and a different management style.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us then what’s the big idea, the core thesis, behind your book How to be a Brilliant Thinker?

Paul Sloane
It’s about that. It’s about adopting different styles, deliberately developing different styles of thinking, and choosing a style which is appropriate for you and for the moment. And to be really successful at work, to get promoted, you need to be good at managing people. And if you’re a very good data analyst, or a very good programmer, you might be using a lot of logical skills, a lot of rational skills, but you’re not using emotional skills to relate to people, and understand them, and persuade them, and motivate them.

And you’ll never get promoted unless you learn those emotional-thinking skills, emotional intelligence, as well as logical intelligence. And if you want to be a successful marketer, you have to use creative intelligence and lateral thinking, to be able to think of innovative radical ideas. So, you need this whole range of skills to develop your thinking, and that’s the basis of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you lay out for us this menu? You’ve used a number of different categories or types of thinking: the emotional, the lateral, the creative, the logical. Can you lay out what are the different types of thinking in your typology? And how do you define them? And how do you improve them?

Paul Sloane
So, just to read some of the titles of the chapters, “Consider the opposite,” “Confront assumptions,” “Analyze problems.” So, I built quite a bit of problem analysis, and formal problem analysis, critical thinking, asking questions, thinking in combinations, parallel thinking such as de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, so parallel thinking technique.

Thinking creatively, thinking laterally, how to think what nobody else thinks, how to evaluate ideas, how to make difficult decisions, how to develop your verbal thinking so you can express yourself clearly, how to develop your mathematical thinking so that you can actually use mathematics as a tool, gets with probability, think visually, develop your emotional intelligence, how to be a brilliant conversationalist is one of the chapters in the book, how to win arguments, how to ponder, how to maximize your memory, how to improve your memory, how to tell stories, how to think humorously.

So, these are some of the chapters in the book I talk about common thinking errors and ways to boost your brain, and games to help you think better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us perhaps what are the most common and destructive errors in thinking that you see professionals make? And how could we go about preventing that from occurring?

Paul Sloane
Well, there are a lot of errors or a lot of cognitive biases and errors, but I think one of the big things that hold us back is making assumptions. And the lateral thinker challenges assumptions all the time, and the command-and-control leader, the conventional leader, the conventional person makes a lot of assumptions. And the older you are, the more experienced you are, maybe the more intelligent you are, the more assumptions you make every day. And we see it time and time again of people being taken.

Literally, thousands of people lost billions of dollars to Bernie Madoff because they assumed he was a genius, and they assumed that he could give higher than average returns to investors year after year after year, and they made the wrong assumption. People assumed that Elizabeth Holmes was telling the truth when she said at Theranos that she’s got a much better method of analyzing blood, and it was a fraud.

Collin Powell, and the USA, and lots of other countries assumed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but he didn’t. Wrong assumptions lead us down wrong paths all the time. And lateral thinkers, creative thinkers, endlessly curious and always prepared to ask a question, and to analyze the evidence, and they believe in evidence, they believe in experiments, they believe in real-world data.

They don’t believe in conspiracy theories. They don’t believe in models. They believe in experiments and finding out and challenging assumptions by asking fundamental questions, basic questions, is one of the central tenets of lateral thinking and of my books.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Could you share with us perhaps a professional example in the workplace where you think this is happening all the time, folks failing to challenge assumptions, and some assumptions that might well need to get challenged?

Paul Sloane
Well, you see it all the time with, and it’s so easy to see in hindsight but when you’re involved in a business meeting, there are all sorts of assumptions going on, and those assumptions frame the whole view of what’s possible and what’s not possible. I want you to imagine that you work for Encyclopedia Britannica and it’s 1990, and you’re in a meeting, and they’re talking about how they can increase sales.

And you said, “Just a minute, let’s look at the assumptions we’re making here. We’re assuming that people want to buy books, and that these books contain curated knowledge, which is provided by experts and edited by experts, teams and teams of experts, and that they’re expensive, and that we go out and sell those books. And we assume that that’s the best model.”

“What if we could create a model which is completely different where we didn’t pay experts at all. We got people to contribute to the encyclopedia themselves, and we got volunteers to edit it, and we gave it away virtually for free?” And if you’d made that suggestion, it would’ve been a career-ending suggestion, I think, with the company because people would’ve been horrified that you even thought that because it challenged all the basic assumptions on which the business was built.

And yet Wikipedia is that model. They don’t use paid experts. They use volunteers to write the articles, and edit, and manage, and curate all of that knowledge and expand it all the time. And it works, and they give it away for free. And that model, a completely different business model, totally destroyed Encyclopedia Britannica’s previously highly successful business model.

If you were working for a taxi company, and thinking, “How can we do things better?” you would never have thought of what Travis Kalanick thought when he said, “Let’s create a taxi company without a single taxi.” It’s an app. And it all does is it puts people together, those who want a taxi ride and those who are prepared to give somebody a ride in their personal car for a small fee. He created Uber which became worth $60 billion, and it’s a taxi company without a single taxi, and it challenged all of the assumptions that taxi companies are based on.

Same with Airbnb. They’re a hotel company that doesn’t own a single hotel room. So, lateral thinkers, creative thinkers, are prepared to challenge the basic assumptions that everyone else in the room takes for granted and assumes is a given and must be obeyed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. In each of these examples, we had an established entrenched player, or system, and then there was an external disruptive force that operated without those fundamental assumptions. And I guess I’m curious, in terms of cognitive biases or whatever the word is at play here, in each of those instances, the folks at the hotel chain, a taxi company, at the Encyclopedia Britannica, have a deeply invested interest in continuing to do things the way they are, “Hey, I have a fleet of taxis,” “I’ve got a beautiful set of many large, expensive, gorgeous hotel buildings,” “I’ve got decades of sales that I’m beholding in my Encyclopedia Britannica.”

And so, in some ways, if they disrupted themselves, maybe they would be in a better position and sort of leading the charge. But how do you recommend when we are entrenched in our ways? And it’s almost like, I think, in many ways, we believe what we want to believe, and we want to believe, at Encyclopedia Britannica, if we’re there at that time, that we can continue doing the cool thing we’ve been doing and keep this gravy train rolling and growing.

And so, how do you think about that, that notion of we tend to believe what we want to believe as opposed to what is true?

Paul Sloane
Well, you’re actually right. We tend to believe what we want to believe, but it’s more insidious than that because the customers mislead you. One of my favorite books is by Clayton Christensen, it’s called The Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know if you’re read it, but in there, he says, “What stymies great companies is that they make the mistake of listening to their customers,” and I nearly fell off my chair when I read that because I was always taught that you have to listen to customers, and you have to please customers, and that’s your purpose in business is to find solutions that customers like.

But he gives countless examples, particularly from computer disk drives where the leader at each generation was misled by customers who said, “We like your product. Give us more of what you’re doing, only better, faster, cheaper in green, or in German,” or whatever. Customers always want incremental innovations because they don’t understand radical innovations. A customer will never indicate a radical solution to you.

And if somebody else who comes along with a radical solution, and, initially, the customers rebuff it, and the next time they rebuff it, and then they rebuff it, and then, eventually, they all move over to it. There are some early adopters and then the late majority, and then everyone moves over. And the previous incumbent gets wiped out. But they were doing a single right thing, they were listening to their customers, they were following their customers.

An example I give is this. Say, you were making spectacles in the 1950s, and you said to your customers, “How can we make our service better to you?” They might’ve said, “Well, a scratch-proof lens would be good,” or, “A plastic frame would be good,” or, “A flexible frame,” “A different type of glass,” “A shaded glass.” What would they not have asked for? Not one customer in 10,000 would’ve said, “I want you to create a piece of glass that I stick on my eyeball every morning.” Contact lenses.

Not one customer in 10,000 would’ve said, “I want you to cut through my eyeball with laser beams to change the geometry of my eyeball.” Laser eye surgery. And because you’re thinking spectacles, you’re thinking physical things. The companies that are selling spectacles weren’t selling spectacles, they were selling better sight. And another way of getting better sight is with contact lenses or with laser eye surgery. But no spectacle manufacturer would ever have conceived of those ideas, and no customer would’ve indicated that.

And so, it’s very difficult, and very often it’s the outsider who comes up with a radical innovation. And I’ve written about this many times in my blogs and books that it’s the outsider that tells that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that says a lot in terms of, it’s sort of backing up, zooming out, and getting to the fundamentals can help open up a lot of this stuff. In the Encyclopedia, it’s like, “What are we really trying to do here? We’re trying to give people a broad set of knowledge about a broad set of things. Okay. Well, there’s a lot of ways we can pull that off.” Or, “We’re trying to get people from point A to point B.”

Paul Sloane
As you say, you’ve got this inventory, you’ve got all this stock, you’ve got this history, you’ve got momentum, and the question they should ask is, “What is the problem that we are solving for customers? What is the customer problem that we solve? And is there a better way to solve that problem?”

The taxi driver, they’re providing a journey for the customer. That’s what they’re providing. The hotel chain Marriott is providing accommodation for a night. And Encyclopedia Britannica was selling access to knowledge. And in each case, if they thought about that in terms of “What is the fundamental product or service we’re providing? What’s the problem we’re solving for customers?” they might’ve stood a chance, though still unlikely, of conceiving an entirely different way of solving that problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. All right. So, a common thing we got to do is challenge assumptions. One way to do that is to ask big questions about the fundamentals that we’re delivering. What’s another major thinking error that is rampant in professional environments that we should tackle next?

Paul Sloane
Well, another big problem is confirmation bias where we look for evidence that supports our hypothesis, what we believe, and we discount evidence which contradicts what we believe. And we see this time and time again. We saw it with COVID, we saw it with the people who believed in vaccines and don’t believe in vaccines, and the people who believed in lockdowns and don’t believe in lockdowns, and they would find selective evidence that supported their viewpoint.

Occasionally, the people that didn’t believe in vaccines would say, “I heard about a chap, and he took the vaccines, and then he fell very ill, and that shows they’re not suitable.” And it’s one example out of thousands and thousands. So, confirmation bias where we look for evidence that confirms our beliefs, and we don’t allow our beliefs to be challenged. The question I often ask people is, “When was the last time you changed your mind on a really serious issue?” And most people don’t change their minds ever.

They might change their mind as they say, “What meal are we going to have tonight?” but they don’t change their mind on a big issue, “Are we supporting the Democrats or the Republicans?” They’re tribal. And once you get into one of those groups, then they go to websites and media sources which support a certain viewpoint, and they don’t absorb information from other websites or media sources, which would challenge their viewpoint. And that is a great enemy of thinking, and of diversity, and of innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, confirmation bias is all over the place, it’s problematic. How do you recommend we combat it?

Paul Sloane
By asking questions, by deliberately being open minded, and force yourself to be open minded. I gave a TEDx Talk on “Are You Open Minded?” And if you go on YouTube and search for Paul Sloane TEDx, you can see it. It’s only 13, 14 minutes but it’s had a tremendous number of views. And in it I talk about this whole concept of everyone thinks they’re open minded but most people aren’t. Nearly every one of us has blinkers, to some extent. And I talk about ways to tackle it.

And one way to tackle it is to deliberately go to the opposite end of the spectrum. If you normally watch CNN, watch Al Jazeera instead. If you normally take The Times in England, take The Guardian. So, deliberately go to channels and speak to people who will give you a different perspective. So, that’s one of the approaches.

And another is to just do something different every day to deliberately break the routine, whatever routine you’re in, whether it’s the way you go to work, or where you sit, or whatever you do, deliberately do something different. Introduce the random deliberately into your life. If you go on Wikipedia, and you look on the left, there’s a random article of the day. If you go there, you’ll learn something new that you didn’t know, and it will give you a slightly different view of the world.

So, there are these techniques that you can use in terms of deliberately displacing yourself. You tend to mix with people who are like you. I said to my wife the other day, I said, “I met an interesting new chap at the golf club.” And she said, “Let me guess, is he white?” “Yes.” “Is he your age?” “Yes.” “Is he a golfer?” “Yes.” “Is he middle class?” “Yes.” “He’s not new. He’s exactly like you.”

And she’s right. I’m mixing with people who are like me. And you’ve got to deliberately step outside that comfort zone sometimes and mix with people who aren’t like you in order to understand their perspective of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. One of your chapters, you talk about thinking humorously. What’s the value in that? And how is it done other than just, well, laugh?

Paul Sloane
Well, humor breaks barriers, and humor is very useful. In my talks, I do a lot of serious talks, but I very often start with a joke or I put some humor into the talk in order to leaven it, in order to lighten it, in order to have some light and shade. Because if you just concentrate on the heavy serious stuff all the time, it’s oppressive for the audience. And if you can mix in a little bit of humor, it makes you relatable.

And as a person in the office, it makes you more popular. As a manager, if you use humor, but not sarcasm, not cynicism, but if you use gentle humor, it makes you more interesting and approachable, and I think humor is a very useful thing in life, and it can diffuse tension in a lot of situations as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any pro tips on how we go about thinking more humorously?

Paul Sloane
Some people say, “I can’t tell a joke.” But everyone can tell a joke, and everyone can learn some funny things, and everyone can read humorous articles and humorous writers, and learn some of the techniques that they use in order to just put a little bit in there. And the people you follow on Twitter or Facebook, there are some people who are witty and write funny things, and some people who don’t and write very dull things.

So, focus on the people who are interesting and witty, and sometimes repeat some of the things they say, but give acknowledgements, say, “I read this today, and so and so said this,” and then repeat a witty from someone else. You don’t have to be original. You don’t have to come up with all the jokes yourself in order to be a funny person.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And one of the ways you mentioned thinking was visually? How is that done?

Paul Sloane
Well, some people are visual thinkers. They think in terms of pictures. And one of the exercises I do in my workshops where I run a brainstorm is the random word. And you have a challenge, whatever the challenge is, “How can we improve productivity? How can we cut the project lead times? How can we save costs in terms of our recruitment?” whatever it is, and then you take a word at random from the dictionary, and then you get some associations of the word. And then you try and force an idea based on the word which would solve the problem.

And you’ll come up with a stupid idea, a stupid idea, a stupid idea, and then, occasionally, you come up with a really creative idea. And people don’t believe that until they see it and it works. And I demonstrate it in my TEDx Talks, so that’s another reason to watch that on YouTube. But you take the dictionary, you open it at random, and you just take that random noun, and off you go. And if the one word doesn’t work, you just go on and find another one, and you’ll never run out of words in the dictionary.

Now, that method works but sometimes I do it with pictures instead. I take random pictures: a picture of a cathedral, a picture of a candle, a picture of a dog, a picture of a polar bear, a picture of an iceberg, a picture of fun fare, anything, and I got a whole range of random pictures. And then you put the random picture up, and you say, “Right. What ideas does that picture give you in terms of this challenge?” And some of it works much better with a picture than with a word. Some people work verbally and some people work visually.

And I think if you choose those different styles, and you try thinking in pictures, thinking in cartoons, thinking in storyboard in terms of something written, it can sometimes be much more powerful and a much better way. If you’re trying to communicate ideas, then words are fine and PowerPoint is fine, but images can be so much more powerful. And images, people like video, they like image, and it can be a much more effective way of getting a message across. So, if you’re not using visuals at the moment, visual thinking, then you’re missing a trick.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s clever and I like the random prompt, like a dictionary word or previously the Wikipedia random article. I’m thinking about if you want images, I guess you could go to Google and I’m Feeling Lucky, and then images, and you’ll get any number of things.

Paul Sloane
Exactly right. You will.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, you’ve got one of your final chapters, Games for Brilliant Thinkers. I like games. What do you recommend?

Paul Sloane
Oh, I love all sorts of games, and some games are very logical. I play chess very seriously. I like chess, that’s very analytical and logical but I like lateral thinking games. There’s a game called Codenames where you have to find connections between words to suggest links to your partner in that game. That’s very good.

I like Sudoku. I like Monopoly. I like Cluedo. I like all of those, but a whole range of games. Poker is a great game too, though it’s a dangerous game because you can lose a lot of money at it. But all of those things are great, I think. Let me see, what did I say in terms of games for thinkers? I said Chess, Scrabble, Monopoly, Bridge, Cluedo, Backgammon, Poker, Dingbats, or Rebuses, as they’re called. Riddles are visual word puzzles. Articulate!, Trivial Pursuit, all of these are good. Pictionary, Charades is a lateral thinking game. We have to think of strange connections to get your message across.

And, of course, lateral thinking puzzles of which I’ve written several books, of lateral thinking puzzles, and they are things where you get strange situations, and then you have to ask questions, and you get yes or no answers from somebody who knows the answer. And that forces you to think laterally because, typically, you get stuck and, typically, you make the wrong assumptions. And it’s those wrong assumptions that hold you back so you have to test all your assumptions with the questions you ask in a lateral thinking puzzle.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you also have a chapter called Maximize Your Memory. Tell us, how is memory still important nowadays with all of our technology, and resources, and AI, and Google Searches, and Wikipedias?

Paul Sloane
Well, you’ve got access to all those things but when you meet somebody, an employee at work, you need to remember their name, and you need to remember their wife’s name, if they work for you, or their partner’s name, and maybe their children’s names, and some issues, things that are important to them, and you can’t just go to your phone and look it up. So, remembering people’s names, have you read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie?

Pete Mockaitis
Yup.

Paul Sloane
It’s a classic book in 1930s. And one of the things he said is, “Use people’s names.” And what I would recommend to you, Peter, is that you use people’s names, and people like to hear their name. And that’s an example of something memory is really important, and you need to work on memory. There’s lots of minor things you can write down but there’s some important things you have to remember, and the techniques,

You’re driving along, suddenly you think of something, an urgent job you’ve got to do when you get to the office, you need a way of remembering those, and that’s one of the techniques I teach in my memory course, which I do, where you make a huge visual story about the things you’re trying to remember, and you exaggerate them, and you make them very vivid and very colorful and very dramatic. And then you can remember that story when you get home, and you can remember to do those things, which would otherwise just go straight out of your mind.

So, memory is important and everyone wants a better memory, and people always complain, as they get older, their memory is going and all the rest, but we can all memorize a lot more and remember a lot more things, and I show people different ways to do this with memory pegging and the virtual journey. So, when I give a talk, I’ll stand up and speak for 40 minutes at a conference without notes but I’m doing it with a virtual journey where I go through a particular route.

And in each place on the route, I’ve posted a picture, or a person, or an image of something which I want then to talk about. And I take that journey and I remember the items. The virtual journey is one of the techniques which I describe in the book and on my workshops.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Paul, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Paul Sloane
Well, there’s a couple piece of advice I would give to people, to your listeners, and a powerful piece of advice which I wish I’d known sooner. Here’s one, and this is a phrase which you can use to get people to like you, and it works. It works with any person at any level in the organization. You’ll get your boss to like you, you’ll get your coworkers to like you, you’ll get your kids to like you, you get your partner to like you. And this is the magic phrase. Are you ready?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Paul Sloane
What you say is, “What I really like about you is…” Now, even if there’s 10 things you don’t like about your boss, there’s something about him or her that you like. You have to admit they’re really good at this. So, you say, “What I really like about you, Peter, is you’re always clear and to the point,” or whatever it is.

People like to be praised, and you can always find something good about anybody. So, if you say that, it’s demonstrated that people’s opinion of you goes up. They like you more. They’re softened to you. They’re warm to you. So, the next time you’re with somebody and you want to just improve your relationship, say honestly, and you can always do this sincerely because there’s always something about somebody, no matter how strange or odd they are, there’s always something about them that they’re good at.

And say, “What I really like about you is X.” So, that’s one tip I would give you. Another tip I would give, if you’re a manager, and this is so powerful, it’s wonderful, I was taught this on at one stage and it made a big difference, and it works for a manager, in particular, but it will also work for anybody. If you’re manager, you take your staff one by one, and you sit down with them, and you say, “I’m going to ask you two questions and I want you to give me honest answers here.” And they say, “Yes, fine. I’ll do that, boss.”

And you say, “Here’s the first question. What am I good at?” And, typically, they’ll tell you what you’re good at, “You’re very clear and you’re very decisive, and so, and so, and so.” And then the follow-up question, which is the key question, you say, “Where could I improve?” and then you shut up and listen. And you can’t disagree with them. You can’t say, “No, you’re wrong.” You could say, “Give me an example. Give me a for instance,” but you listen and you say thank you.

And because you’ve asked them the first question, what you’re good at, then it enables to answer the second question. If you start with the second question, it doesn’t work because they’re inhibited from giving you any criticism. People don’t like criticism. But because you’ve asked the first, they can balance it by saying, “Well, an area you could improve is X, Y, Z.” If you it with all your people and they come up with similar areas you can improve, you’ve learned something very, very valuable because you’ve seen something about yourself that, otherwise, you would never see.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Paul Sloane
Peter Drucker said this, and I sometimes open my talks with this. He said, “Every organization must prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.” And he said this way back in the 1960s or ‘70s, and he didn’t say every organization has to improve or have to change a bit. He said, “Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does.” And that is so powerful, I think, and so challenging for many people to take that on board, that I think that’s a very, very powerful quote.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Paul Sloane
Well, I would say Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and the research he did there is very powerful, which shows how leading companies miss innovation because they are so committed to their existing methods and their existing customers. And he brings forth a lot of evidence to support that in his book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Paul Sloane
I would say de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is one of my favorite management tools because it forces you to consider a proposition from several different perspectives, six different perspectives, it’s with the six hats. And it overcomes the big problem we have in meetings, which is “I like my idea. I don’t like your idea,” and the “I am right, you are wrong” thinking.

And with de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats,” everyone is forced to look at the thing, the proposition, from six different perspectives, including the yellow hat where everyone has to say what’s good about the idea. Even if you think it’s a lousy idea and it comes from your worst enemy in the whole organization, you have to say, “Well, it would do this. I have to admit, this is a benefit we’d get from it.”

And then the black hat, where even if it’s your idea and you love it, and you think it’s a great idea, you have to find fault with it, and you say, “Well, one drawback or one danger would be this,” and everyone has to wear the same hat at the same time. And as a thinking tool and a management tool, and a tool for improving decisions in meetings, it’s immensely powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with readers and listeners, they quote it back to you often?

Paul Sloane
One of my favorites is “Implementing best practice is copying yesterday. Innovation is inventing tomorrow.” That’s one of mine. “Beware of successes. It’s a terrible teacher” is another one. I would say, “Ideas are the lifeblood of the organization. Don’t be the clot who blocks the flow of ideas.” And there are many people who block ideas and say no to ideas very quickly because most really clever original ideas sound crazy when they’re first articulated. So, there you are, three.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Paul Sloane
Well, I’m on Twitter @PaulSloane. I’m on LinkedIn, you can find me, Paul Sloane. My website is DestinationInnovation.com. And if you just type in DestinationInnovation.com or Paul Sloane TEDx, you’ll see my TEDx Talk, and I’m on Amazon as well, of course, so you can find my books on Amazon.com or any other Amazon.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Paul Sloane
Well, I would share with you the best piece of leadership advice I ever got, and this is so powerful. This is worth the price of admission on its own. This is just seven words and it’s really, really important for leaders but it also applies at other levels of the organization but particularly for leaders. And it goes like this, “Only do what only you can do.”

There are certain things that only the leader can do. Only the leader can praise people in the group, only the leader can hire new people, only the leader can work on strategy and direction. And there’s lots of other things which, as a leader, I was spending time on – firefighting and fixing problems, and things I should’ve delegated, and things I should’ve just ignored, and focus on the leadership tasks only.

And if you focus on the things that only you can do, then they’re the most important things that you should be focused on. So, only do what only you can do. And that applies whether you’re an artist, a musician, a creator, anything else, but particularly if you’re a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paul, thank you for this. I wish you much fun and brilliant thoughts.

Paul Sloane
Pete, I’ve enjoyed it, and we could go chatting forever but, yeah, I really enjoyed it.