Unlocking The Power Of Positive Thinking – Exclusive Interview With Mike Maddock

Mike Maddock is an entrepreneur, a keynote speaker, a best-selling author, and a CEO Coach. He is the founder of Flourish Forums; virtual CEO peer groups, McGuffin Creative Group and Innovation Consultancy Maddock Douglas. Mike co-chairs the Gathering of Titans Entrepreneurial Conclave at MIT and is past president of Entrepreneurs' Organization Chicago and Young Presidents' Organization Chicago Chapter.

Mike has been using words and pictures to create smiles and build ideas his entire life. He is the author of four bestselling books: Brand New, Free the Idea Monkey, Flirting With the Uninterested and finally, Plan D––his latest book about business Disruptors.

Mike Maddock

Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.

I am an entrepreneur, author, speaker and CEO Coach. My purpose is to inspire and empower curiosity, which means I want to make people believe that can change the world and then help them do it through ideas, wisdom and new connections. All the businesses that I have founded center around branding, innovation and thought leadership. These businesses include Maddock Douglas, McGuffin Creative Group and Flourish Forums. Maddock Douglas is an innovation consultancy that has worked with twenty-five percent of the Fortune 500 companies, helping them research, conceive and launch new products and services. McGuffin is a marketing firm focused on financial services and healthcare. Finally, Flourish Forums are virtual, advisory boards engineered to contain six types of thinkers. These highly curated forums are designed to provide members with expert perspectives about their most difficult and confidential challenges. My latest of four books is Plan D. The book focuses on business Disruptors and the unique ways they see and approach challenges. I wrote it to help leaders accelerate their own innovation abilities.

Can you tell us about your approach to innovation and how it has evolved over the years?

At the start of my career, I believed that a big idea, cleverly presented was what success looked like. Eventually, I came to believe that advertising and marketing are taxes you pay for bad ideas. I’ve come to learn that the most innovative companies are better at generating insights than ideas. Once they have a proven process for identifying and prioritizing insights, the ideas that follow generate greater impact and profit.

In your book "Free the Idea Monkey," you emphasize the importance of fostering a culture of innovation within organizations. What are some practical steps that leaders can take to encourage and support innovation among their teams?

1. Teach your team to start with insights, rank them and then (and only then) generate ideas to solve them.
   

2. Create a 1-3-1 culture; Instead of pointing out problems or complaints, encourage your team to bring you 1: Frame the issue 3: Suggest 3 potential solutions for the issue 1: Recommend the solution you think is best to solve the problem
   

3. For C-Suite leaders Understand the expertise trap. You can’t read the label when you are sitting inside the jar. The longer you have been working on a challenge the greater your “expertise”; you know what works; you know what is legal; you know what you can afford; you know what you have tried in the past; you know what your customer really needs…you know, you know, you know…and this expertise keeps you from seeing possibility when it is right in front of you

One solution is to create a balanced advisory board or join an engineered forum so peers can help you see what you may be missing. There is an axiom in design thinking that if you keep trying to solve the same problem but can’t, you are probably working on the wrong problem. A balanced forum will help you see problems differently which accelerates your ability to pivot and grow.

Collaboration is often a key ingredient for successful innovation. Could you share some insights on how teams and individuals can effectively collaborate to generate and develop innovative ideas?

I the book Free the Idea Monkey, to Focus on What Matters Most to highlight the tension between different types of thinkers. In the book, I focus mostly on the Visionary and Operator demonstrating who leaders like Walt and Roy Disney used their different talents and perspectives to change the world. Ten years after writing the book, I have expanded the concept to identify six types of leaders: The Operator, The Strategist, The Rainmaker, The Visionary, The Tech Futurist and the Orchestrator. I use the Kolbe indicator to help determine which seat leaders run to and retreat to when in flow or under pressure. When an advisory board or Flourish Forum contains an excellent leader in each of these seats AND they respect and value each other’s input, great things happen.

As a successful entrepreneur and innovation expert, what are some common challenges or roadblocks that individuals or organizations face when trying to innovate, and how can they overcome them?

There are at least three innovation roadblocks that occur in every company:

1. Fear of failure. The first book that I wrote was titled Brand New, Solving the Innovation Paradox. The pardox is this: the harder teams try to innovate, the worse we are at innovating. We did quite a bit of research to demonstrate the truth of this statement and at the center of all of it was fear. A simple way to get ahead of this is by leaders in an organization literally celebrating their failures as learning events and sharing what they had learned with their teams. F.A.I.L. should mean ‘first attempt in learning’.

2. Starting with Ideas. Ideas are easy. Insights are hard. If you teach a team how to create, quantify and prioritize insights and then (and only then) have ideas, your team will win. Every. Single. Time.

3. Use an innovation portfolio strategy. I wrote about this in Plan D. There are 4 types of innovation: evolutionary, differentiated, revolutionary and fast-fail. Great companies teach their teams what each of these quadrants mean and then intentionally invest a portion of their time and treasure in each. A balanced innovation portfolio makes sure you are taking the right amount of risks.

For more information, please visist: https://www.mike-maddock.com/