Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. All right, so what happens
Speaker 1: when you tap into advances in neuro and cognitive sciences.
Speaker 1: Our next guest writes about it, saying, that's how we
Speaker 1: get to our best innovative ideas. Colombie Business School Professor
Speaker 1: of Business in the Management Department, Shena Yangar is out
Speaker 1: with a new book. It's called Think Bigger, How to Innovate.
Speaker 1: She is with us on zoom from Columbia Business School
Speaker 1: uptown at one hundred and thirtieth Street. Full disclosure on
Speaker 1: the cover quote from Michael R. Bloomberg he is the
Speaker 1: founder of Bloomberg ALP and Blueberg Philanthropies, and that quote
Speaker 1: talking about she's impact. Shena, really nice to have you
Speaker 1: here on Bloomberg Business Week. Yeah, tell us about your
Speaker 1: book specifically and what you set out to share with
Speaker 1: the world with it. My book is meant to be
Speaker 1: a very practical book. Think of Think Bigger as a
Speaker 1: six step process that anybody can follow to come up
Speaker 1: with their most creative ideas? Is it that easy? Can
Speaker 1: Maddie and I do it? Anybody can do it. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say it's easy, okay. I mean, you know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like learning a new skill. It's like learning
Speaker 1: Python or learning how to do collodes. When you go
Speaker 1: to the gym, you know, you do have to learn
Speaker 1: the steps, and you do have to practice practice, practice,
Speaker 1: and with each iteration you get better and better and
Speaker 1: better at it. Well. I love you talk in the
Speaker 1: book about and obviously we think a lot about CEOs
Speaker 1: and entrepreneurs here at Bloomberg, and you talk about how
Speaker 1: when you became director of the Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia's
Speaker 1: Business School, you noticed that there was a lot on
Speaker 1: how to implement new ideas, but not a lot on
Speaker 1: how to come up with them in the first place.
Speaker 1: I wonder, what is the You have a lot of
Speaker 1: amazing tools in the book about how to come up
Speaker 1: with those ideas, But what would you say, Let's say
Speaker 1: you're at a dinner party and you have, you know,
Speaker 1: an elevator pitch moment for someone who's looking for some inspiration.
Speaker 1: What is the biggest tool that you wish that entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: knew about to come up with good ideas. I have
Speaker 1: a problem. It's easy for me to figure out how
Speaker 1: people have already been solving this problem in my industry.
Speaker 1: What other industry, either in the present or in the past,
Speaker 1: has had an analogous problem and what did they do
Speaker 1: that worked? That's what you're on the hunt for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fascinating. It also just talks about this whole idea
Speaker 1: of like looking without your second it's a different kind
Speaker 1: of networking, a different well. And it's interesting because I
Speaker 1: always think it's like, you know, you throw a bunch
Speaker 1: of people together from various backgrounds and you're going to
Speaker 1: get a better outcome, whether it's on an idea, a situation,
Speaker 1: a topic, or maybe a discovery. So having said that,
Speaker 1: when you look at the innovative and disruptive space that
Speaker 1: has certainly been our world in the last decade, whether
Speaker 1: it's something like an uber or you know, I think
Speaker 1: about you know, Amazon or Netflix or what have you,
Speaker 1: I'm curious how you think about that and what you
Speaker 1: come up with in this book. Maybe who were some
Speaker 1: of the entrepreneurs who really applied these kinds of principles. Well,
Speaker 1: let's take Netflix, right, So Blockbuster was the leading I
Speaker 1: guess competitor, although he you know, he killed them. And
Speaker 1: let's think about how read Hasting came up with that idea.
Speaker 1: He said, well, I want to watch movies at home
Speaker 1: in a much more convenient fashion. I hate these late
Speaker 1: fees and I hate moving my butt, even if it
Speaker 1: is just a block to go return the movie. And
Speaker 1: so what did he do? He learned from Jim memberships
Speaker 1: a new way to charge people. And he learned from
Speaker 1: at that time a very new company called Amazon that
Speaker 1: you didn't have to have a shop on every block.
Speaker 1: You could actually do it as a mail order. And
Speaker 1: remember it started with DVDs. So notice how what read
Speaker 1: Hasting is doing is he's learning from totally unrelated industries
Speaker 1: like ship. That's so smart and such a good lesson
Speaker 1: to us. You've also written a book called the Art
Speaker 1: of Choosing, and in this current book you talk about
Speaker 1: some of the challenges with deciding which problems to attack.
Speaker 1: So as you're talking about like the Netflix example, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different problems that an entrepreneur can
Speaker 1: choose to tackle. What is your advice, Sheena on determining
Speaker 1: which one to start with. You really have to think carefully,
Speaker 1: what's that problem I want to solve, and you want
Speaker 1: to define it in a way that is solvable, and
Speaker 1: if you were to solve it, you could scale. And
Speaker 1: I think Amazon is a brilliant example of that. You
Speaker 1: know that Bezos didn't just sit down and said, let
Speaker 1: me just start selling books. He actually contemplated multiple alternatives
Speaker 1: before he got to that. He thought about doing the
Speaker 1: sort of precursor of what ultimately became each trade, and
Speaker 1: he thought a bit of of other ideas which ultimately
Speaker 1: did become real ideas. But he started with books because
Speaker 1: at some level he understood, Hey, if I make it
Speaker 1: work with books, I can scale from there. So I
Speaker 1: gotta say, you know, Shena, in teeing up for you
Speaker 1: to come join us, I've been teasing big time that
Speaker 1: it's about, you know, advances in neuro and cognitive sciences
Speaker 1: to ultimately get our biggest and best ideas and maybe
Speaker 1: most innovative. What specifically do you mean what are we
Speaker 1: tapping into when it comes to neuro and cognitive Well,
Speaker 1: from cognitive science, we know all the biases we can make,
Speaker 1: that's a long list, right, all the mistakes we can make.
Speaker 1: From neuroscience, we know how learning and memory works. So
Speaker 1: imagine if I were to say, like if I ask
Speaker 1: you when do you get your best ideas? What were
Speaker 1: you doing? Probably you'd say you took a show, worry
Speaker 1: round a job, something like that in net, something right,
Speaker 1: something where your mind was just allowed to wander. We
Speaker 1: call that mind wandering, but you're waiting for it to
Speaker 1: happen almost uncontrollably, organically, spontaneously. Imagine if I could tell
Speaker 1: you that actually we know enough about the way your
Speaker 1: mind works when it's wandering that I can actually show
Speaker 1: you how to do that the more deliberatively, and by
Speaker 1: doing it more deliberatively, you can actually generate more ideas
Speaker 1: and higher quality ideas. It's definitely that's essentially what I'm
Speaker 1: showing people how to do. It's really on a whole
Speaker 1: other plane. Like you really kind of have to think.
Speaker 1: It's really fascinating. We've run out of time, but I mean,
Speaker 1: i'd like to you know, among your thinking is you
Speaker 1: know how non experts and outsiders, as you said, can
Speaker 1: learn just about enough about a field to create an
Speaker 1: innovation for it. As you said, even Maddie and I
Speaker 1: could probably figure this out, you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: using your steps, and you're thinking and relevant as we
Speaker 1: think increasingly about how to continue to innovate and disrupt
Speaker 1: in our world at large. Shena, thank you for finding
Speaker 1: some time for a Shena A. Yanger. She's a professor
Speaker 1: of business in the Management Department at the Columbia Business School,
Speaker 1: joining us via Zoom from the Business School in Uptown,
Speaker 1: New York City. Her new book, Think Bigger, How to
Speaker 1: Innovate It is out and you can check it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, You've just got to kind of open up
Speaker 1: your mind on Yeah. And I mean, Carol, you were
Speaker 1: telling me earlier you came up with an idea. I
Speaker 1: think in one of those like wandering mind things. I
Speaker 1: come up with all of my ideas when I'm like
Speaker 1: on a walk or whatever. So it's it's real. I
Speaker 1: know it's gonna keep a yellow sticky in a pen nearby. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, you're listening and watching Bloomberg Business Week