Here is the transcription of my interview with Theo Androus on the “Voices of Experience” CD, which is sent to professional speakers around the world. Alternatively you can listen to the audio recording.
THEO ANDROUS: We kickoff this month’s edition of VoE with speaker, author, and innovation expert Steve Shapiro. Steve’s latest book is titled “Best Practices Are Stupid,” which has me questioning the title of this segment, and VoE, in general. Steve is an innovation evangelist, and has done some pretty innovative things with how he delivers his message and how he leverages his content. Join me now as Steve Shapiro shares with us how he does it.
STEPHEN SHAPIRO: I do my speaking a little different, even though I’m a keynoter, I’ve gamified my speeches, if I can call it that, so we actually play.
THEO: Steve, you can call it whatever you want. Be innovative. You’ve gamified your speaking. What does that mean?
STEPHEN: When I do a speech, instead of it being me up there talking and people sort of falling asleep in a dark room, we’ve created a game, in fact multiple games, multiple experiences, multiple things people do. One of them is called Personality Poker®, as an example. So imagine a room with a thousand people, everybody shows up and they get five poker cards. They look like regular poker cards.
THEO: Sounds like my kind of party.
STEPHEN: No betting, you can’t lose.
THEO: Oh, no.
STEPHEN: Well, you can lose if you don’t have a personality. What happens is on these poker cards, they’re specially designed, there are words that will describe particular behavioral traits, attributes, innovation styles, and we get people standing up, trading cards with the objective to get five cards where the words best describe how you see yourself. You can also gift cards to other people so they get to see how others perceive you. When you’re done with the trading, based on the five cards you have in your hand, the combination of the suits, the colors, and the numbers will tell you all about your personality. We spend the rest of the time having an interactive conversation about the difference styles, the different colors, the different numbers.
THEO: Audiences must love this.
STEPHEN: They do. Because we’re talking about them and it’s unlike most personality tests, if you want to call it that. You have to go take a test beforehand, or you go take the tests afterwards. Here, it is done real time, literally in five minutes every person has taken the test. And then the cool thing is it’s not just about the result but it’s about the process. So what we’ve found, especially with people afterwards, what they’ll do is they’ll take the cards and they’ll have conversations. “Hey, do you think I’m overly sensitive?” “Do you think I’m bossy?” “You know, I got five bossy cards when I played personality poker, is there something people should be telling me?” There’s just this great insight and epiphany that people have in a fun game.
THEO: What are the personality traits on the cards? How many of them are there?
STEPHEN: There’s 52 poker cards.
THEO: Are their 52 personality traits?
STEPHEN: It depends on how you slice it. So there’s four primary innovation styles which tie back to the four steps of the innovation process, which tie back to the four suits.
THEO: Okay.
STEPHEN: Within those, there are actually two different versions. So, for example, the clubs are all about getting things done. Two types of clubs though. There’s one set of clubs based on the numbers which are much more about planning and being organized and being methodical, where another set of clubs, the 10 through ace of clubs are all about the action, result, the bottom line. So they don’t care so much about how it gets done, as long as it gets done. So the suits have meaning, the numbers have meaning, and then also the colors have meaning. The black cards are a little more what people would refer to as left brained, whereas the red cards are more right brained. And we do some things. We actually give the whole room reconfigured where on one side of the room are all the people with black cards, all the red cards on the other side and it’s a fantastic snapshot of what the organization’s makeup is. Instantly, we can see it visually. It’s very cool.
THEO: You wrote a book called “Best Practices Are Stupid“.
STEPHEN: Yes.
THEO: Let’s talk about that because our audience is speakers, and we are always looking at what’s working for other speakers, but I gather from your title of your book that you don’t support that idea, that strategy.
STEPHEN: I’m not so much against best practices, but there are two issues that I do have with them.
THEO: Okay.
STEPHEN: The first one has to do with the fact that if you are replicating someone who, especially is a competitor, or is in a close enough space, and they’ve already done something, if you’re trying to do what they’re doing, by the time that you’ve implemented it, they’ve moved on to the next thing, so you’ll never catch up. It’s a game of catch up. But the bigger issue is that what works for one person may not work for another person, what works for one organization may not work for another organization.
You know, I want to run my business a very particular way. I listen to other speakers, and if I started to implement what they did, maybe I’d be successful, maybe I wouldn’t be but it might be a conflict with my personal values and beliefs in terms of how I want to run things. So it’s important to recognize that there’s not a one size fits all strategy. And I guess I’ll throw in the last point which is the breakthroughs. Breakthroughs are a fundamental game changer. The speaking industry needs some game changing right now. It’s been an incremental growth path and I think we can really do some massive change if we recognize the fact that these big innovations come from fundamentally different domains of expertise. Not from speakers, but could be entrepreneurs. I hang out with people in multi-level marketing. I hang out with people who are in real estate. I hang out with people who are in so many different disciplines because I learn more from them about how to improve my speaking business, than by hanging out with speakers.
THEO: What are the innovations that the speaking industry needs to adapt?
STEPHEN: Some of the obvious things, and I don’t have the answers, but one of the things I do think is happening right now is clearly there’s a technological shift, which we need to be aware of, and what’s the implication of that, on speaking? And I know we keep on coming back to we’re speakers, we’re speakers, we’re speakers, but the reality is, I think what’s happening more and more in the market place is that people want somebody with a domain of expertise that can then get delivered in a lot of different ways. For example, I always talk about multiple levels of innovation. Innovation as an event is the lowest level. Well guess what, as speakers we are about events. This is the lowest level of value we could possibly contribute. At the second level is innovation as a process. So every client I speak with, I say to them, let’s not view this event as the thing, like, we’re done, when it’s over, but instead, view this as the start of a process. The event kicks off something bigger.
We actually start to think through how we can get momentum and traction after the event that actually creates results that are measurable for the organization. It might be more speeches, it might be webinars, it might be articles, but it really is much more about creating sustainable value, and that’s I think what’s becoming extremely important for organizations.
THEO: So tell us about your business model.
STEPHEN: To tell you about my business model, I first have to tell you about me, just real briefly.
THEO: Okay, please.
STEPHEN: I’m not a person who aspires to make millions of dollars. I’m not a person who ever has any intention or desire to have a lot of employees, if any employees. For me, it is sort of a lifestyle. And I know some people say you need to treat it as a business, and I do treat parts of it as a business.
THEO: Well it may be a lifestyle business.
STEPHEN: It’s a lifestyle business, absolutely. For me, I love to travel, so I always want to be speaking, but I also want to find ways of creating revenue without having to be on the road. We tend to think about product which is one of the ways of creating passive income, as what I’ll call “tell me” types of products. Books, CD’s, DVD’s, even membership sets. These tell me what to do. I’m really looking at how do I create more enablement tools, things that people can actually use and embed in their daily work.
THEO: Such as what?
STEPHEN: Well Personality Poker is one of those things. They play the game at the speech, they only leave with five cards. They say “Uh, this is great, I want to do this with my team.” Guess what, they have to buy the decks, they have to buy the cards, they have to buy the book to understand it, and so there’s sort of that back end without ever having to sell it because people have had the experience and want more of it.
THEO: Well what’s fascinating about that, the personality poker, is that you get a hundred percent participation. If you sent out a test to take prior, your opt-in rates would not be very high, I would think.
STEPHEN: Typical is 20-30%.
THEO: 20-30% participation when they take the test on their own.
STEPHEN: Yes.
THEO: A hundred percent when you facilitate the test.
STEPHEN: Right. We’re in the process of building some of the technologies that are used after the event. You have five poker cards. One of the things we’re looking at is how do we real-time have people text in their five cards so that we can create a graphic to see who’s in the room, real time, as opposed to having people raising their hands. But also after they leave, they can enter them online and get a printed out report and that leads them through, again, more products, things they could be focused on.
THEO: Let’s go back and talk about your specific business system, and the reason why is let’s be mindful of our listeners and what will be valuable to them. Obviously the people listening at home are not going to go out and create their own deck of poker cards, I’m mean, that’s kind of your thing, but what you said a moment ago that I thought was very interesting is that you really almost have to start with where your, with what your values are.
STEPHEN: Yes.
THEO: And look at what kind of life do you want so that your business supports your life. You’re not giving up your life to support your business.
STEPHEN: Which is also why, for people who are speakers in businesses they would probably think of their business as a B to B business. That’s sort of the common vernacular. Business to business. I actually think of my business as a “b to b to b” business. What I mean by that is instead of my trying to sell speeches to businesses, I try to find people who have connections with those businesses. Now the simplest version obviously are the bureaus. They have those relationships. But I also look at my body of work. I don’t think of myself as a speaker, I think of myself as having a body of work around innovation and I’ve built partnerships with organizations who have distribution, which is fantastic, so you can take, for example, a training organization that I have a partnership with, they’re in every single Fortune 500 company. They have the distribution, they have the reach. They’re also developing the training modules on their own. They have instructional designers, so I don’t have to pay for that. And, they will deliver it. So we’ll do a train the trainer them, and then their people run off and do it. I have no employees, I don’t have any freelancers. It’s their business, they make the money, and I take a slice of their business.
THEO: So you’re the subject matter expert.
STEPHEN: Yes.
THEO: It’s around your content, but you’ve partnered with the training company, have their own instructional designers that create the T3, the trainer program, and what role do you play in that other than providing your content?
STEPHEN: I help in shaping the workshop. What we’re going to do very soon is, I’m going to go into a studio and record a series of five minute videos that will be used during the training, because one of the things when I’ve done this in the past that’s been extremely effective. First of all, it gets my face in front of people, which is great because then somebody in a training class says, “I want to hire this guy to do a keynote speech.” The other thing is it makes sure that the messages that I think are the most important that I know have to be delivered in a particular way, I can say them in my words and people can watch them and hear them exactly as I want them to be heard.
THEO: You almost anticipated my next question. One of the challenges with doing something like this is how do you control the quality of the delivery of your material. As you described, you do your videos that are inserted, but how do you control the quality of the trainers that are delivering the rest of the program?
STEPHEN: Part of it is who you chose as partners. This is the largest training company that I’m partnering with on this particular thing, and we’re doing the same thing with an online portal, an innovation portal that we’re creating. Same exact type of thing. So it’s about choosing the right partners who have their brand at stake. Here’s the thing, yes, I screw up, it affects my business and me. If they screw up, even if it affects my brand, it affects their business, and their businesses are bigger than mine businesses. They have more at stake than I do. So I just make sure I have the right partners whose brand is more important to them than my brand is even to me, necessarily.
THEO: Obviously having your content delivered by trainers is not something that everybody can do. What’s a good methodology or a good process someone they can go through to determine if their content lends itself to this model?
STEPHEN: I think the key thing that you have to have is, again, a body of work. Something which is a process or has content that will change the behaviors of people. And you have to be able to create chunks around it. My last book that I just did, “The Best Practices are Stupid” book, is intentionally designed around 40 discrete concepts. Each of them are a separate body of work on their own.
THEO: So each one of those 40 becomes a module? For training?
STEPHEN: Not all of them. We’ve selected certain ones that we thought were most important, we changed the order around, we combined a couple together, and we created, basically, five different sections of this training, and each of them have three or four different learning points, but everything came back from the book. So when you have this format of 40 tips, 70 tips, whatever it is, it makes it extremely easy to then create 40 videos, 40 tools, 40 whatever.
THEO: So did you write the book with the back end in mind?
STEPHEN: Yes, to some degree I did. Part of it was this book is a next generation of an earlier book that I’d written, which I had no concept of what I was doing. It was really sort of a stream of consciousness book that became really popular.
THEO: Which book was that?
STEPHEN: That was called The Little Book of Big Innovation Ideas. It was 82 tips of how to create a culture of innovation. 100 pages, self-published, customized for every single client, which was awesome. I sold tens of thousands of that thing, and then Penguin wanted the rights to that, so I had to stop doing that. So then I really stepped back and said what am I looking to do and create with this, and I started to think about the back end. And the down side, I will say, is working with a commercial publisher, in some respects hurts your back end because they have certain ownership rights that prevent me from taking, for example, what I wrote in that book and sticking it online into an interactive experience. So there are some downsides.
THEO: Well I think that’s a real important point to expand on, because I think when most speakers look at publishing a book, they’re looking, they’re focused only on the book, and when you partner with a big publisher, you’re probably not as mindful about what kind of box you’re putting yourself into. It sounds like if you had it to do over again, possibly, you would have retained some control of that content.
STEPHEN: Maybe, I went into this one consciously choosing to work with them because I really like Penguin and Portfolio, the imprint, is, I’ll say, probably one of the best publishers out there.
THEO: What do you like about them?
STEPHEN: First of all, Adrian Zackheim, the guy who runs the imprint, is probably the genius of geniuses. They’ve been one of the only successful business book publishing imprints of the publishers out there. You know, they do/did all of Seth Goden’s books, and so Seth’s methodology is built into the way they even think about things. They are very hands-on, very supportive, very active in the process. They have a good name, which has helped a lot. So the book has done very well and it’s helped really build my brand even further. You do commercial books not so much for the money, and maybe you’re giving up certain things, but the nice thing is there are ways that you can even license the content back from the publisher.
THEO: I was going to ask you is there a way that you can do that?
STEPHEN: Absolutely.
THEO: And I would imagine if you know going in that’s something you want to do, it’s probably easier to negotiate at the front end.
STEPHEN: I wish I had negotiated it at the front end, but we’re doing that now.
THEO: Okay.
STEPHEN: We’re having conversations about how do we license back the content to be re-purposed in particular places that would be non-competitive to the book itself, and might actually create more demand for the book. They’re really just concerned about anything that is going to hurt book sales.
THEO: Careful Steve, you might have just touched on a best practice that, uh.
STEPHEN: Somebody once told me that I tell people that a best practice is to not use best practices.
THEO: That is-,
STEPHEN: Kind of hurts the mind when you think about that.
THEO: Thank you Steve Shapiro, innovative, indeed. Maybe best practices aren’t so bad after all.