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Jeremiah Gardner Show Notes Jeremiah Gardner helps organizations create value. He is an international keynote speaker, the author of the bestselling book, The Lean Brand, and Principal at Moves The Needle where he has advised companies like GE, ING, eBay, Intuit, and Cisco in building their Innovation Transformation practice. He has been featured in several media outlets including Forbes, The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur Magazine, Lifehacker, and The Guardian. Jeremiah tweets @JeremiahGardner and http://jeremiahgardner.com (blogs). Most passionate about today I’m in California in the United States and I’m the Principal at a company called, Moves The Needle, working to bring entrepreneurial spirit into large enterprises. I’m really excited about this work because we are seeing these large organizations transform with hard work and time and effort to really practice some of the things that we see working for startups or entrepreneurship. But ultimately what drives me and where I’m in, is when I’m teaching, speaking, and writing; so I really try to organize my life around that. That’s where I think my future will continue to head and I’m happy to be there and happy to be working with so many amazing entrepreneurs trying to drive behavioral change in the way that we are building new value for our customers. ‘Brand’ in general is a very misunderstood, especially for startups, but overall, it’s a really tough concept to wrap your mind around, so it’s important for us to have the conversation about it. Your company We focus on changing three core behaviors. If you think about it, there is a degree of uncertainty that we face. On one side, you have the execute side, all the thing that we know how to deliver value to our customers. On the other side, there is the search side, the things that we don’t know; the unknown about how do we create new value and continually evolve our organization forward to meet the needs of our customers and other customers. When we talk about the search, we think there are three behaviors that, whether you are just getting started or you are an established company, have to have in place in order to practice in the search: Empathy – sometimes called, ‘design-thinking’ or ‘customers’ empathy’, the principle comes back down to understanding, deeply, the needs of our customers. It means trying to put yourself in the shoes of the customers and understanding deeply their pains and their passions and who they are. It’s wrong to ask customers questions that start with “If”, because it will lead to hypothetical answers and untruthful results. You should ask questions that start with “When was the last time you…?” ask historical questions. And the most important is in-person one-to-one with your customers or potential customers. Experimentation Evidence – how do we make this based on evidence. Who your customers are? With my company, we focus on large enterprises, but the customer is not the company or the headquarters building, but the people in the company that have pains and problems that they experience in their day to day practice. They are our customers with Moves The Needle. For me personally, in my book or advisory, what I’m passionate about are people that are chasing to create value. Whether it’s a large organization or small business or two people in a startup; those who are serious about pursuing that change, pursuing creating value, the people that are willing to put in the work to do the uncomfortable things to create the value to the customer. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are unwilling to stand in front of their customer and hear things that they don’t want to hear. They’re falling in love with their solution before they ever talked to a customer. Typically, that’s where startups really exist. For me, the founders that are willing to talk with people, to understand them deeply, those who are putting themselves out there and...