“Ask yourself what is it that I bring that no one else brings?”
I host a weekly radio show on SiriusXM 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton, called Work and Life. We publish edited versions of my conversations as free podcasts. I invite you to listen to the episode (embedded below) that is my conversation with Nilofer Merchant, a master at turning seemingly “wild” ideas into new realities and showing the rest of us how we can too. She has personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18B in sales, for companies ranging from Apple to Autodesk. Nilofer was awarded the Future Thinker Award from Thinkers50, which ranks the world’s leading business thinkers and which also named her the #1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice. She is the author of The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World.
We live in a time when new ideas can reach multitudes because of the advent of the digital age. How can you harness this power? Stew and Nilofer discuss her personal “onlyness” story and what her research of hundreds of innovators shows about how to unlock each person’s potential to spread the word about their distinctive ideas for making the world better. She tells compelling stories of real people who have, against the odds, made positive change. Nilofer’s strategy can be used by anyone to reduce the inhibiting forces of bias and to maximize the chances of their innovative thinking becoming a new reality.
Bonus 1: Listen to the end to learn from the story of one of the listeners who called in to the show. Bonus 2: Hereis the transcript of a conversation Stew and Nilofer had a while back, as “Onlyness” was germinating.