Why Innovation Demands a Mindshift with Brian Solis

0:00There is a scenario of the future that exists across the spectrum, bad and wonderful. What separates them is the evidence that shows how likely each one is. What brings one to light is what we're going to do about it. So the book at the end talks about how do you create a movement in the direction of the future you want to see. And that's the part, to be honest, that's the hardest because people want to complain. People want to wish and dream. But to manifest it is where the magic happens. Hello, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. And I'm having a remarkable bout of hay fever right now.

0:50So I might mute myself during this interview. And so I just wanted to give you a warning here. Today, we have a very remarkable guest. His name is Brian Solis. And we go way, way back. I mean, it's scary how far back we go. Don't say it out loud. Brian is this world-renowned digital analyst, anthropologist, futurist speaker, best-selling author. Yeah, he's kind of like the Deion Sanders of digital. And right now, he's the head of global innovation at ServiceNow. I spoke to ServiceNow recently, and I love that company. So listen, Brian advises businesses, he advises technology leaders, and he is an expert in a topic that we have all come to love, and that's called Mind Shifts.

1:44So Brian Solis, welcome to Remarkable People. Guy, what a privilege. we've done a lot together we've hung out together but i don't think i've been on this side of a conversation with you so thank you yeah my pleasure my pleasure so let's just start off with something easy so what in the world is a mind shift aside from being a best-selling book it is get that plug in there it is something that i hear often my whole team we hear it often in boardrooms and in c-suites it's this this notion of we need a mindset shift it's something we hear all the time which is implying that we need to see things differently we need to ask different questions we need to explore with more curiosity and imagination and so mindset shift like we do in Silicon Valley.

2:39It's just too many words and letters. And so we shrunk it to mind shift, but we kept the vowels. So basically you're telling me that you are the combination of Carol Dweck and Brian Solis. Well, that is a remarkable person. And to be in the same sentence is a dream. Her growth mindset is something that I do analyze and build on in the book. And it's something that I actually practice. So the idea is then how do you take that? And instead of just addressing opportunities in the moment with a growth mindset and a more open mindset, how do you then shift it to start looking at emerging opportunities and signals to start applying that mindset towards the future today so that we're not reacting to these things that we're proactively shaping our future?

3:34So basically, you're saying that a mind shift, you could make the case, is a mindset. Because if you have the mind shift mindset, you are looking at the future. You're not just willing to be flexible and learn. You are also looking forward, not just reacting. Yeah, that's a wonderful way to put it. And the idea of a mindset is how do you receive signals? How do you receive information? What is your state? Because oftentimes we're just so busy and caught up with everything from emails to meetings to headlines to chaos that we are perpetually just trying to be our best selves in the moment to do the best we can with what we have.

4:22But if you think about, let's go to COVID in 2020 or the election cycles or chat GPT in 2022 or whatever's next, these things, there is foresight to some of them. And if there isn't certainty, there's at least scenario planning to be ready for these types of occasions. And the more that we can prepare ahead, that means the more that we're ready to deal with today differently. And so that's the idea. Yes, it's a mindset. And then the shift is to look more forward, to not just anticipate the future, but shape it. Using names of companies or people that we would be familiar with, who is in the Brian Solis Hall of Fame for mind shifting?

5:09I got to tell you, there are stories that I tell in the book that look forward and don't look forward. But I think one of my favorite stories in the book, and I think you'll appreciate it of anyone, is Apple under Steve Jobs was very much looking towards the future to shape it. But one of the stories I tell, and it was a real interesting one for me, was that Steve Jobs had to be convinced that the iPhone should be the iPhone. And that was a story of surprise that even the most forward looking leaders sometimes need help. And so the book was written for not just the Steve Jobs of the world, but the people who don't know to think that way.

5:57and also the people who surround today's leaders, that we all have an opportunity to influence forward, whether it's upward, downward, sideways, that a mindset shift benefits everyone, including someone like a Steve Jobs. Yeah. So would you say that Elon Musk is a mind shifter? I mean, you could say he individually caused the mind shift to electric cars. there's a part in the book where we look at just the whole infrastructure of tesla i believe were we at the same menlo park tesla grand opening when the first dealership opened there is an old dealership it became a tesla dealership as a grand opening and it was an example of what happens when you don't just launch an electric car but you launch an entire ecosystem to support it including the charging stations nationwide so yes there was a mind shift to see forward well brian when that tesla dealer opened on el camino in menlo park i was already over the hill and you were just rising so that's why you got invited and i didn't i i wouldn't get invited now i i was probably at stacks eating lunch when this was happening and i had no idea so i miss stacks.

7:22I found out there's a stacks in Campbell. There's a stacks in Menlo Park and there's a stacks in Redwood city. Yeah. That's the one I know is the one in Redwood city slash Woodside. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But now author to author, I got to say that when I was reading your book and you praise Elon Musk as a mind shifter and all that, I said, Oh my God, I'm reading this book in 2025 and like that and i'd say ah poor brian he put that nazi in the book like what's he gonna do now and i gotta tell you i feel that pain any one of us hey brian disappeared what happened any one of us we could have used bill gates as an example we could use there's a lot of people in the epstein files that are in a lot of business books that are held up as heroes right One of the things that I'm guilty of is being a hopeless optimist.

8:19And for better or worse, I've always tried to see the good in people. And that was one example of it. I genuinely admired someone who walked away with a big payout from PayPal, regardless of the backstories that we all know or heard or saw. This was someone who took those proceeds and went into SpaceX and went into Tesla and went into the idea of what X could ultimately become in terms of a super app back in the day. And that was noteworthy. That was very much when Silicon Valley was about bold ambition, make it happen, do or die, fail forward. And you can't predict what's happening behind closed doors when you want to see the best in people.

9:01Yeah. You know, there's a handful of people right now, They could walk off into the sunset saying, I changed the world. I would make the case that Elon Musk has changed the world more than Steve Jobs, because Steve Jobs just did computers and phones and pads. But Elon, he did cars and space and tunnels and neural chips. And he was all over the map. I could make the case he has caused more mind shifts than Steve Jobs. And he could have sailed into the sunset as the richest man in the world. who's the most creative and innovative, but no, he, that's okay. Let's not get into this. I don't want to get you fired from service now.

9:43Well, he keeps Kara Swisher busy. Where would Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway be? But, you know, you're right. And look, to be fair, I have a young family at home. If I changed the world like that, I would spend time with them, just to be honest. Yeah. I want to make that clear. So if you were a trillionaire, you wouldn't be working anymore. You would just be spending time with your family. I probably would have stopped that millionaire and be happy with spending time with the family. I can relate to that, Brian, because I told myself that I was going to stop when my net worth was$999 ,999 ,999 because I don't want to get billionaire's disease.

10:29Luckily, I'm not even close to that. I mean, Canva has been good to me. Don't get me wrong, but not that good. So anyway. I do remember you've always been on the cutting edge of what was next. And Canva, when you worked with Canva, I thought, man, this is guy being guy. Always ahead of the curve. And so I should have followed in your footsteps in that one. Brian, in a rare moment of transparency and honesty, let me tell you, I've been working with Canva for about 11 years now. And if 11 years ago you had said to me, Canva is going to be, I don't know, whatever their recent valuation was, was$40 billion.

11:14I would have said, I don't think so. So I would attribute my work with Canva as extremely good fortune. I listened to a woman named Peg Fitzpatrick who was helping me with social media. She told me to help Canva. That was my entire due diligence. And this is called Guy's Golden Touch, which is not whatever I touch turns to gold. Guy's Golden Touch is whatever is gold guy touches. I touch Canva and Macintosh. And between those two, I touched a lot of lead and tin and, you know, whatever. May we all stumble into that good fortune. Listen, we're all from Silicon Valley, right? So when people say, guy, who have you worked for?

11:57What have you done? I said, oh, that's chief evangelist of Apple, chief evangelist of Canva. Maybe you heard of those two things. I don't tell them about the 28 companies between those two things. I know we go back. I won't put dates to it, but I remember when you were launching garage.com. And that was a big deal back in the day. We thought it would be a big deal as opposed to being a big deal.

12:28you're listening to remarkable people with guy kawasaki okay so enough of my checkered past i don't want you to get political too much but i would say no matter where you are on the political spectrum it seems to me it requires a different kind of mindset and mind shift to think about the future it is a very different world right so now what is required to have a mind shift today seeing all these kind of divergent forces opposing forces some would say bad forces some would say good forces what do i tell my kids about five years what will america be i have two young daughters at home and i think about this all the time and there is a scenario of the future that exists across the spectrum, right?

13:22Bad and wonderful. And what separates them is the evidence that shows how likely each one is. What brings one to light is what we're going to do about it. So the book at the end talks about how do you create a movement in the direction of the future you want to see? And that's the part, to be honest, that's the hardest. I dedicate three or four chapters to it because people want to complain. People want to wish and dream, but to manifest it is where the magic happens. And that has been my entire career. Not everything has worked out the way that I envisioned, but I can always say that I put the work in to try to bring that future to life.

14:11And that's what I hope my children see is that if they want the future the way that they envision it, then they have to do something about it. The first part of the book is sharing why you're not in the right place to do that. Okay. Tell us why. For example, I think we all have some idea of where we are and some idea of where we want to go. But the detachment between that is, is that really where we want to be? And are we doing the things every day to make that happen? And that's an exploration I ventured through with the last book, which was called Life Scale. Like, where do you want to see your life and how are you scaling your way towards that?

14:47And the biggest thing I had learned was that when I broke out the day-to-day, the week-to-week, the month-to-month activities where I thought I was going versus where I was spending my time, I was completely focused on the swirl. All the stuff that keeps the day-to-day going. Oh, this distraction, this distraction, this emergency, this urgency. Oh, this priority. And so self-awareness, which is a big part of the beginning of the book, is a gift that most of us do not have. And we don't even know it. So there was an interesting study that talked about how 100 % of us believe that we're self-aware.

15:23But in fact, only 10 % of us are self-aware. And you could link self-awareness to things like empathy and curiosity. And that kind of goes to show you how susceptible we are to a society to be manipulated. Hence, the bigger conversation. And then as we get to later in the book, the gap between self-awareness and then what we're going to talk about in the last three chapters are how do you have a vision? How do you latch onto that vision to know it's important? How do you know that it's not just important, but it's beneficial to you and the people or things or companies you care about? And then the science, as we get to the last three chapters, shows how movements are created, how revolutions are started.

16:05And then it really gets down into something I think you'd appreciate is the, it's a word that we use or misuse, I should say, quite often, but it gets into the art and science of actual storytelling. Going back to Socrates, but really landing at home with Pixar and the idea of the story spine and how this was a big learning for me. I brought in a guy by the name of Nicholas Sung, who is a former Pixar storyboard artist. and Silicon Valley might know him because he's the one who helped transform Airbnb with the famous storyboards that they have in their lobby. And what he had taught me about storyboarding was that the mistake most storytellers make is that they see themselves or the product or the company as the hero of the story.

16:52And therefore, as they tell the story, it's very much self-centered and hence the self-awareness challenge. he said the actual hero of the story are the people you're trying to help and the outcome that they don't know they can achieve without you and also how they play a part in bringing that future to life and this is why pixar movies disney movies or the good ones are really thoughtful where you have an emotional journey throughout that arc and the last three chapters break down how you make people, your teams, your boss, your customers, whoever it is, your constituents, if we're talking about politics, how you get them to believe they are part of the solution.

17:36And in the process of getting there, you're taking out things like unknowns and uncertainty and anxiety, and you're making it more tangible and actionable and measurable so that people see themselves in the outcome. Brian, can a mind shift be a negative thing? Obviously, people have done evil things and somebody had a mind shift and says, let's just have a fascist society or something like that. What happens if you have a negative mind shift or you're saying mind shifts are always positive and the high road and stuff like that? The hopeless optimist in me wants to believe that every mind shift is for the good of change.

18:14Change is hard, change is difficult, but self-awareness becomes a thing where once you taste something so profound, say power, say money, say influence, say all of those things, you're no longer mind shifting. your mind is being shifted for you and people don't push or fight back because the short-term accolades benefits rewards bank accounts whatever it is airplanes jets these things now become symbolic of validation cycle for better or worse right a therapist would say you are easing the pain of doing this at least initially by the rewards you are receiving and over time it becomes a new norm and it just becomes part of your life and if you take anybody pick a name they probably said some very bad things about becoming a fascist society back years ago and now you see what they're saying today it's not an accident i swear brian the The only explanation I can have for how some people that I thought on you are behaving now is that we are living in a simulation.

19:32That is the only explanation I can get. And God truly has a sense of humor because you cannot make this shit up, Brian. I swear to God. If you take the F out of the book title, I think you have what we're talking about.

19:53All right. So now I have a chicken and egg question. Do you believe that external factors and changes forces a mind shift? Or does a mind shift create the change? Which comes first? That's a great question. I've never been asked that, by the way. So I'm going. That's why I am Guy Kawasaki. That's right. That's right. for those who are listening i was just giving guy the praise emoji in real life i think if we look at chad gpt that was a mind shift sort of opportunity for people to react if you think about the famous mit study that came out last year about how businesses were and weren't using generative AI to their success, ROI, however you measure success.

20:51It's been found that 95 % of enterprises weren't realizing ROI from their generative AI investments. And so the reason why, if you break it down, I read the whole report, and this is actually something I see in day-to-day meetings, is that because we're trying to take something so profoundly different and And apply it to the box of business as usual to use this new technology to do yesterday better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently tomorrow. Nothing wrong with that. We've been doing that very well for hundreds of years. But to answer your question, the egg in the chicken moment is a mind shift is actually to say, I didn't see this coming.

21:31I know how I would normally react to it, which is, oh, let's increase profitability, scalability, all those things. where the mind shift comes in is the framework in the book that says, what am I not asking? What is the desired outcome that I could not achieve without this before? And so what you now start to do is you break out a framework of improving the past and unlocking an entirely different tomorrow and making the unknown possible. So that's the egg reaction. The chicken part is how do you keep doing that perpetually so that the next chat GPT is already on your horizon? A famous author created a very good dichotomy with two different words.

22:18And the two different words is when it comes to AI, it's automation versus augmentation, which when I read in your book, I decided to immediately rip off because, you know, I was going to say, I know this author. So basically you're saying like the initial reaction to many people for AI is to automate old stuff. But the real mind shift is to augment. It is to do what couldn't be done before as opposed to do what could be done before, but better. Exactly. In fact, my boss, his name is Dave Wright. He's the chief innovation officer at ServiceNow. We came out with a paper late last year. we called it the AI mindset.

23:05And what it does is it says you need both. You need automation and augmentation because one unlocks linear growth and the other unlocks exponential growth. And so we had this diagram where strategic automation with the right questions being asked and answered gives you this sort of linear progress. And then asking entirely different questions and exploring and investing in those opportunities unlocks this delta. And the gap between the two lines is positive disruption. And the idea of positive disruption is you're not waiting for something or someone to disrupt you. You are investing in the things that are disrupting yourself.

23:45And that is where true innovation actually is born. And so we came up with a list. And if anybody wants this, you could email me at brian at briansoulis.com or on social, and I'll send you this report because we include all of the questions you need to ask on the automation linear line and on the augmentation exponential line. So Brian, someday you're going to be watching me speak and you're going to hear me discuss automation versus augmentation. And then you're going to hear me say, yeah, it's the difference between linear growth and logarithmic growth. And you're going to say that freaking guy, He stole my two great metaphors, that asshole.

24:29And now he's put it in his speech. And again, Brian, this is what's called Guy's Golden Touch, which is augmentation versus automation and linear versus logarithmic. Those are really good concepts to steal from you. Hey, it would be an honor to have it stolen from you. It would be the first time. I wrote a book called WTF, What's the Future? And I won't name names, but you could see all the people who borrowed that afterwards.

25:02Okay, so now how do I know if I'm hallucinating or delusional versus I'm mind shifting? Because, you know, it's kind of a fine line there. The idea of mind shifting, if we even go back to Carol and Carol Dweck's growth mindset, there is a framework to follow. and so hopefully it's not a similar effect as if you had been out with having a great glass of wine or several glasses of wine and you come back knowing you've had several glasses of wine i guess maybe not knowing is the right sign that you've had several but it's a gift you give yourself it's a discipline it's a practice and so i think the most interesting thing i don't think i even explored this in the book but i could tell you from experience that it's like getting into the zone.

25:49Czezak Mihai once said, you know you're in flow state because you don't know you're in flow state. You just don't even know it. But you see the outcome. Yeah. So, wait. So, are you referring to the guy in Canada and his name starts with C and for the life of me, I cannot. It's like Szczeseminski or something. I'm talking about Czezak Mihai who is regarded as the creator of flow. I feel sorry for the person who's going to be transcribing this podcast because she's going to say, who the hell are they referring to? Did we even get it right? My goodness. And I feel bad if I didn't. But here's a funny story because I talk about flow state and life scale.

26:32And when I was reading the audio book, I think that was the one place where I had to take multiple takes. you know how much more famous that guy would be if his name was like dweck or chaldini or ocker or drucker or kawasaki or kawasaki yeah i know it starts with a c and there's a z in there someplace and that's all i can tell you right after we annex canada and becomes the 51st state We can change his name or something. Is that before or after Greenland? I forgot the order of things. Up next on Remarkable People. Sometimes the story has to be part of, I don't know what this means. I don't know what augmentation looks like.

27:20I don't know how to be innovative. My whole experience has taught me how to do yesterday better and I've been successful at it. Everything I learned about how to have those conversations have come from venture capitalists.

27:39Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. Okay, so now, real world, what happens if you're living in an organization and they are anti-changing minds and mind shifts. What do you do in that case? I'll just answer from experience. I have been in many of those companies and I've advised many of those companies. I'm sure you have as well. And there is... When I see that, I just run the other way. Look, the hopeless optimist in me has created all of these frameworks because if anything was ever easy and people said, yeah, for sure, go do it, I wouldn't need the frameworks.

28:32I would just be doing this stuff. Rather than inventing how to change people's minds or open people's minds. I can tell you with certainty that even in the most difficult and trying of situations, I have seen that it's possible. I have also made decisions where I weighed possibility versus the, what's the nice way to say it, versus wellness, mental wellness and mental health, where the prize was not worth the cost of my own mental health. So I have walked away, even knowing that the possibility was there, and I've advised people to also do the same. but the frameworks were born from being in those most difficult situations because change is always possible and this is why the pixar or the storytelling or the socrates things come out as people can see themselves in the outcome that you believe is important for them then you have a shot oh okay so brian i'm gonna pay you back right now i'm gonna give you two p words that you can use You can rip me off, okay?

29:49I'm going to write this down. Yeah, the way you explain that is possibility versus perpetuation. How's that? Okay, that's great. It's almost as good as logarithmic versus linear. I'm not Brian Solis, so that's the best I can do. This is why I come on your show, so I can learn. All right, okay, so I asked the question, what if you work for a place that is perpetuation as opposed to possibility? Now, a different question is, because I have a highly qualified, competent listenership, let's say you are the person who has or now is going to embrace mind shifts, but you have people who work for you who do not embrace or support or even understand mind shifts.

30:38So how do you empower people who work for you to create and embrace mind shifts? And there's an assumption here that we weren't in charge of hiring the people that are on our teams, because I would look for that open mindedness and optimism, curiosity, imagination. And by the way, it's not just me. And it's not just a mind shift. These are, they call them soft skills. I call them critical skills for AI. This is the augmentation side of things. And I'll get back to a more direct answer, but I have this personal framework that I use. It's a hashtag WWAID, which is, as I'm thinking about augmentation, I ask, what would AI do in this moment?