Brant Cooper On The Evolution Of Entrepreneurship & Succeeding In Contemporary Markets

Brant Cooper is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur and CEO of Moves the Needle.

With over two decades of expertise helping companies bring innovative products to market, he blends agile, design thinking, and lean methodologies to ignite entrepreneurial action within large organizations. Brant has a unique take on disrupting our current way of thinking in order to be closer to customers, move faster, and act bolder. He has experienced monumental milestones such as IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and crushing failure.

He serves as a global keynote speaker, mentor to entrepreneurs, and trusted advisor to corporate executives. His mission is to teach leaders how to find personal and economic growth through creating new value for fellow humans.

Brant discusses Adopting Agile Business Practices to create value offerings, and mistakes made by social entrepreneurs attempting to increase their impact.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off Brant, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to your passion in entrepreneurship?

[Brant Cooper] - I always like to ask how far back am I going! I lived through the ‘.com’ boom and bust up in Silicon Valley in the late nineties and early two thousand. That's really where I got my first taste of start-ups.

People ask me why I went off on my own and why did I go start my own business? Typically, I say it's because I was a bad employee! Basically, that means that I just wanted to do things my way, and the old school command and control style of leadership that dominated my twenties made it that you had to do what your boss said instead of doing it your way.

Instead, my way was to go out on my own, so that's what I eventually did. That started me down that path, and I was fortunate enough to write a couple of books, I'm placed at the right end now and I get to share that knowledge of how to actually go do your own thing and figure out your path.

That's a very expansive journey Brant, and over that period of time, you would have seen a lot of different approaches to business. You were just talking about that older approach to business when you were an employee becoming an entrepreneur. What key differences have you observed between the older approach to business, as opposed to the contemporary businesses we are seeing today?

The very structure of a business’s management style, and this is actually an education in government and non-profits as well as businesses, is based upon an extension of the assembly line and the industrial age. If you imagine Henry Ford's assembly line, he's got the car moving along the conveyor belt and the workers stand in their cells, then they do something very specific like put the tire on and that's all they do. Then the car keeps moving, it doesn't ever stop, and it goes on to the next cell.

The rest of the business is actually organised that way too, it's just divided into different parts like marketing, sales, operation, supply chains and whatever it takes to get the product from ideation out to the customer, an extension of the assembly line.

That's really the structure, and business was formed around that. Business management really was around optimising the execution of each one of those cells. The way we measured people's work was by saying, "you do this specific task, and you do that as many times as you can within this timeframe, and that's what's going to get you your bonus." We were managing the execution of known quantities inside of that structure. But if you fast forward to today, where we're all running around with computers in our pockets, we're not in the industrial age anymore, we're in the digital age.

It means decision-making processes are fundamentally different because of the power of the information and knowledge that we have at our fingertips and the speed of all communications. The fact that software is in absolutely everything means that the world is really moving fast.

That old command and control assembly line style of business just doesn't work anymore. The way those companies are organised, they're not close to their customers, most of them aren't. If you're a salesperson or in customer support, you're the only ones that are allowed to talk to customers. In order to make any changes to products, processes, or how you market and sell, you have to navigate up and down this hierarchy and across all of these silos in order to get anything done, and it's too slow. You've lost the deal if you have to take all the time to navigate through the whole organisation to get anything changed. Fundamentally, the shift that we're seeing is that the power of decision-making is being pushed to the edge. In other words, teams that are on the ground interact with customers, learn what those customers’ needs are and can run experiments to try to figure out if they've got the right idea to solve them, but everything out at the edge, these teams are empowered to make decisions because they're the ones that have all of the information.

They're the ones that have the knowledge, it isn't stuck inside that hierarchy. A whole new organisational structure is emerging that pushes these agile teams out to the edge, gives them the accountability, resources and the decision-making authority to go solve problems.

It turns out really that's what human beings love to do, and it's what they're really good at. If you give smart people the authority to solve a problem, they will solve that problem! They don't need all of the permission. That's the fundamental change that we're going through right now, and within a couple of decades, I really think all of government, education and business is going to be completely reorganised.

Very interesting point of view there, Brant, and a very big prediction for the next few decades in business. Brant, you're the CEO of Moves The Needle, an enterprise utilising practical workshops to show entrepreneurs how to elevate their own impact. Where do you see from this experience impact-driven individuals most commonly miss the mark in generating a positive social change?

They focus too much on the technology to be honest. I think with people it's something that's in their control, so they focus on their product and making the product the best it can be. That could be a service, or it could be any sort of impact that you're trying to make, but they were focused on the idea side of things. Historically, that was okay, because the technical side of products was really where the risk was, but we're so far into the digital age that technology is not really where the risk is.

The risk is do you have the right product or service for the particular market segment that you're going after? The biggest risk is around the market, not around the product, and yet entrepreneurs, social impact individuals and big corporations focus on technology. What they really need to be doing is getting out and understanding their customers as deeply as possible.

That's your intellectual capital, that's actually what's going to make you win. If you can score insights into your customers that nobody else has, that's your competitive advantage.

Brant, in your book, The Lean Entrepreneur, you discussed the ability of new age visionaries to shape their environment and succeed in the marketplace. What characteristics and traits do you believe are vital to these leaders of today, the ones that you just talked about there?

The book describes how to apply those techniques that I was just talking about, and so what it requires is people to be self-aware. They actually have to admit what they don't know. Back in the day, you used to have to write a business plan in order to get funding by say investors and maybe even banks. You would have to write this 20 or 30-page document that lists out everything that you believe to be true, and you presented that to the investor as if it were fact, when in fact it's not fact, they're all just assumptions.

Today this is maybe a nine slide PowerPoint that does the same thing, but the fundamental truth remains the same, that what you put in your plan is likely full of assumptions, not facts.

It takes a certain level of self-awareness to know maybe nobody wants the product that I have envisioned. I'm going to go out and learn from my customers and validate that before I spend the time, money, resources, creativity, and opportunity cost building something that nobody wants.

One of the fundamental aspects of leaders in today's world is to admit what you don't know, and to go into it learning or exploring in order to figure out what you don't know, spending the least amount of time, money, and resources. That's really what The Lean Entrepreneur is about, running experiments, talking to customers, and moving all of those items that are in that uncertainty realm, that are in the unknown to the known bucket. Then, I can start the execution work, but too many people want to start with the execution as if what they believe is true. We have got to learn how to cut through our biases and to test our assumptions.

Because really, again, it's not whoever is moving fastest that wins, it's whoever's moving fastest in the right direction. We have to figure out that right direction and then we have to execute. That's how we win.

Fantastic point Brant.

If you could give one piece of advice to a budding entrepreneur to succeed, what would that piece of advice be?

Go talk to your customer. I've talked to so many entrepreneurs where they say, "I can't talk to my customer until after my product is finished," and by then you've already spent a lot of money if you're waiting for that! Instead, read up on design thinking, lean innovation and lean entrepreneurs. There's tons of resources out there now around design thinking and to teach you how you can engage with customers in a way to learn first.

You're not pitching, you're learning if this market segment is the right one? Do they have the need or the problem that I think that they do? What is the priority that they have of that need? Are they going to be paying for it? How do I run an experiment that proves that they be willing to pay?

That's the work that you do upfront, and people are afraid that it's going to take longer that way, but it's not. It actually takes a shorter amount of time, because once you have validated your product, then you know that you can build and move fast. Of course, we are in the pandemic and people say, "how do I go talk to my customers?" On the one hand that's tough, because it's harder [in the way that] you can't just go and have coffee with them. But on the other hand, the positive is that everybody's getting used to all of these video tools. Go on LinkedIn, get some warm introductions to people that you think are in your customer or market segment.

Do a video call with them and just chat with them about their needs, problems, priorities and what keeps them up at night to try and validate if this is somebody that you think will be an early adopter.

These are the people in the world that are going to be standing outside your proverbial retail store, waiting in line, spending a quarter to be the first one to get through the door to grab your product. That's who your early adopter is, and you have to go and validate it first.

Brant, such a succinct piece of advice. I have to say as well from that perspective, so many entrepreneurs say that it's about connecting to those customers, so it's a really valid point you're making there. Now Brant, to the next question, you work with a lot of different entrepreneurs through your position as CEO of Moves The Needle. What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?

I've been so focused on my next book, and it really is about this transfer from the industrial age into the digital age. I think that there's a lot of turmoil and uncertainty in the world, and I really think it's because of this change, right? I mean, there's so much uncertainty and volatility that it makes people feel anxious, and I think that we just need people to rally around the idea that change is what's hard and we just need to be able to take the bull by the horns. We have to make it work for us, we have to ensure that we keep entrepreneurship and small businesses strong, and that we focus on creating value for humans. That's what makes a business successful.

If we try to create wealth and wealth only, then that wealth only goes to a few people. But if we focus on entrepreneurs, businesspeople and social impact entrepreneurs on creating value for humans, then value flows to everyone.

That includes some amount of wealth too if you're successful, so that's the benefit for creating value for other people. Not only does it make you feel good and it make the world less dangerous and uncertain, you also will reap the rewards for it. So, I hate to answer your question with my own project, but I tell you it is the biggest impact that we can have is to empower people, to be responsible for their own economy. There's so much freedom in that, and so I really want to encourage people to go and figure out how they can create value for other humans and then how in turn that will benefit them.

To finish off , as a writer, I'm assuming you read quite a lot and you've interacted with a lot of resources. If you were to recommend any of these books or resources to our listeners, what would they be?

I've read so many books just in the last four or five months now that I've been writing. There's one book in particular that I like quite a bit, which is General McChrystal's Team of Teams. It's a really good illustration of this pushing agile teams to the edge mentality that I was talking about. Not surprisingly, it's the U.S. military that runs into the new world before anybody else does, because they're just out there on the cutting edge. Team of Teams is McChrystal's story of the U.S. going into Iraq, and the long and short of it is that using conventional warfare, they were able to go and dispose of Saddam Hussein pretty easily. But then they got bogged down in this slog against the insurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and it was because the enemy basically was like the new digital networked world. They weren't fighting a conventional battle, and so the old school command and control style was running into the new school ad hoc network-based force. That's really why the U.S. struggled, and McChrystal basically reinvented how the U.S. was conducting their operations and they went to what I would describe as being this agile structure. That's when they were able to turn the tides.

I always find it interesting you can see these parallels that are happening in different areas of the world or different areas of society, but that the response is really similar, and business now faces the same issue of they're using the old school command and control hierarchy management style in a world that's networked, ad hoc and moving too fast for that old structure.

That's General McChrystal's Team of Teams.

Thank you very much Brant, that brings us to the end of the interview. Thank you so much for sharing your generous insights and your time.

Thank you so much for having me, I encourage people to reach out [to me]. They can find me on brantcooper.com or just Brant Cooper on all the social media platforms. I hope to hear from people, I respond to everything, thank you.