Dare to Dream, Dare to Act: The Competitive Advantage of an Innovative Business | Terry Rich

Terry Rich is a successful CEO and President of 25 years of global speaker and an author with a fascinating and varied background, Terry joined me to talk about how to create an innovative environment. listen in to hear his engaging stories and advice that you haven't heard before. I'm glad you're here.

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Terry Rich, thank you for being with me today on the Courage of a Leader podcast.

It's a pleasure.

We are going to talk about how to create an innovative environment. No matter where you're sitting in an organization. How can you create that environment where people are innovative, and feel safe and secure to try new things.

A creative session should be a session that you set rules that you say, look, any and every ideas is a great idea. No judgment. And so you try to write all of those down. We want 100 quick ideas. Let's take 15 minutes every and each idea is good so that the accountants and the lawyers who've been kind of dying to say well, why haven't we tried this can then give the idea without endorsing anything. No judgment, no endorsement, we just want those ideas and build upon each when somebody says we need to paint the wall purple, someone else's, we need to put let's put some dots around that purple. And so your write those ideas down and separating the ideas into a two step process one coming up with the ideas, then putting them aside walking out and then come back. And then the judgment begins a step two, where the lawyers can say, hey, that you're gonna get sued on that one. And the account says God costs too much. But when everybody's together on that step two, and you prioritize what the top three ideas are, you then have a team communicating and coming up with a new creative idea for the first time. Love

it. Terry, I think we often hear no judgement. I think that's no endorsement, what you said is important as well, because it does bring in some judgment, right? Oh, yeah. Plus one to what he said, or she said, right, then you are bringing judgment. I like that idea better than some other ideas we've already heard.

That's right. And by saying, you know, don't react, and we don't want you to say yeah, the great idea, not a good idea, we just want you to build upon the ideas, it really does encourage people to come up with with all sorts, let me give you an example. One of the things that we found that is effective, you know, that's a brainstorming with a group, the other thing is we came up with was something called COT. And that stands for Consider Or Throw away. So when we did emails, you know, I would come in when I first came in to as a state employee, and that, you know, the all the employees almost melted down because they weren't used to trying to get all these ideas together. And they came in, they said, We can't handle it, I said, Oh, I didn't expect you to do at all, I just wanted you to think about an idea. And so we came up with when I communicate to you, it doesn't mean that it's your job, if I give you an idea, if I say C O T consider or throw away, if I send an email and you put C O T at the end, that means you can just delete it if you want to, you don't have to, I just need to get it off my chest because you send emails, if you put action required, they understand that needs to be done. If you put for your information, we use that a lot, you know, then you should know about it. But consider or throw away, file it away. Look at it once a while and see if you can build upon it as we talked about to get those ideas. And all of a sudden the frontline receptionist say that they have just a great idea of what people are thinking as they walk in the door the plusses and minuses of your company. And maybe they saw a chair that's about to break. But what they did in the old days was write it down and put it in the suggestion box. Well, what happened maybe two weeks later, somebody took it out the suggestion box, somebody took it to account it took two years away. But it took three or four weeks and in the meantime, that receptionist said you know management asked us for ideas but they never got back to me. They don't they don't care, though by using consider throwaway. They can send the email to anybody they want and it's a bin and think about Out of that, like a bushel basket, when you go when you drink wine and they go to in California, they don't just pull all of the grapes off one vine and win an award. They go all over the valley, different minerals, different temperatures, and they find the one for that year, that is going to be the award winner so that they have this barrel with 100 Different varieties, diversity. That's why when you brainstorm you don't just have everybody look like you and your given ideas, you want as diverse a population around the table giving ideas as possible, because our whole audience now is diverse, we can we can now serve the world, do you want to just serve your little community, that's fine, but you're gonna make a lot more money. If you can, you can find a new product that serves the world. So that consider or throw away as another way that individuals day in day out, can give ideas when you go to bed at night, make sure you write down an idea if you wake up, get it down on a piece of paper and bring that in and add that to that bushel bushel basket.

I like this, Terry, it's it's allowing the ideas to free flow, right and leaders, it gives you a way to frame it so that team members don't feel like they have to run and do with everything that you sent. And I'm here we can also encourage everyone to be sending COT emails, right? Like, oh, here's something I ran across, like I thought your your group might be interested in this, like, consider it or throw it away. Right. But here's something I can pass along. And then it's creating more of this culture of whites have ideas, and let's share them. And let's consider whether we want to consider that.

And just as our discussion goes. Now, you mentioned endorsement is almost the same. If you hear an idea and you say consider a thriller, you don't want them to say right away, oh, that's a great idea. Because sometimes you feel like they're kind of sucking up to the boss if you're the boss. But on the other hand, you know, you just want to say thank you, you know, I got the idea. Thanks. And here's another idea, you know, I might have or whatever, you just want that free flow to go. But when you get them, it's all written down. So then in a week, in a month, whenever once a quarter, you take all those ideas, and everybody prioritizes what they think the top four or five are. And you'll be surprised how all of a sudden, now you've got a group think tank together, that you're choosing from 100 ideas, rather than someone just coming in and says I've got that million dollar idea, the one idea that I know is going to work, and then you try it and it fails. Nobody says, Hey, that idea went bad. You know, I'm not gonna give a night I'm not gonna look that stupid, but you do it as a group, then you get team buy in. And

that's also keeping the evaluation of the ideas separate from the initial share of the ideas, because you

want the lawyers to have input. Once you get to the decision, you know, dare to dream, and then you dare to act. So you do that first idea generation. And then you want the lawyer say, you know, these are the ones I don't want high priority, because they problems are the accountants and the salespeople thinking that, hey, these are the ones we can sell the most of this might be tougher to sell. You'll be surprised how fast the good ones really rise to the top. Excellent, and how exciting it is to do.

Yes, I also want to make sure we don't step over another great point that you made Terry around diversity. Right? So maybe you interact regularly with some folks, maybe you know, we're not getting this perspective from marketing or customer service, or the lab all of the time.

Absolutely. You want a diverse group of employees, a diverse group talking with different backgrounds and and techniques. So it, it is a very important point of view what you want to do. Yeah,

so leaders make sure you're having those touch points with different stakeholders with different groups. Maybe even sometimes the groups that don't seem related to what you're up to, right. They just might so most fun a different way than

me yo, there's there's a simple way to do it that one. That's why you want to set rules. When you bring people in to brainstorm or talk about it. You set the rules about no judgment. You can have somebody watch in case somebody goes, Oh, yeah, we tried that or reaction or whatever. You say, Wait a minute. No, no, no, let's get that down. That's an idea. Okay, good. But you really want to bring those people all through out that together to create as many of those ideas and have the have the rules laid out at that point.

Excellent. Terry, let me pause our conversation here for just a moment so I can tell listeners more about you. Terry's got a fascinating background. Terry Rich is the successful CEO and President of 25 years who loves to engage and entertain audiences across the globe. Under his leadership, state lottery, sales and profits increased by 50%. He also led the Blank Park Zoo from a $600,000 deficit to profitability, while positioning it as the second largest attended attraction in the state. His national inside a business banking, gaming, TV production, marketing and PR led him to success in his professional career, and put him in a position to give away over $1 billion. He's a disruptive innovator and entrepreneur with a drive for integrity and honesty. He's worked in the trenches, survived new business trends, and had success with generational changes. Terry is a global speaker and has authored two books, the $80 Billion Dollar Gamble, and Dare to Dream, Dare to Act. Thank you for being on the podcast, Terry,

My cheeks are red, you're embarrassing. You know, the best part, you know, we can talk about success and having success and trying new things. But I also learned something and that is failure is the first step to success. You know, my dad always said, Hey, work hard for someone when you go to work, you know, do a good job. And people asked me What are you as a new person just getting into business? What are the two things you do to tell people to be successful, I said, the first thing is, raise your hand if I think it's important not to start a business immediately to go into a business and learn the good and bad things about management and supervision and all that. But first thing you do is raise your hand toilets, dirty janitors gone, who wants to do it, you raise your hand, you're going to be noticed. So volunteer for anything and everything that you don't know how to do in some ways, because you want to learn that. And when you have failure, reward within management is to encourage people to do an insanely thanks, I don't know if you know this, but the three guys that went to the to the moon, you know, you think project managers, okay, we're going to go on this date, everything's set we got there, all the screws are tightened, everything's ready to go 10 987654321 blast off, we'll see in two weeks, you know, it's gonna work, they had to course correct over 90% of the time. So if you take that, and again, as we talk this, putting these ideas together in the bushel basket, and know that some of them are going to fail. And I like to tell entrepreneurs, you know, you don't blow all your money at once you save 10%. And you make that you're gambling money, which is research and development, trying new ideas. So you're always growing within an organization. So you try to try to spend not all your money, but some of it all the time. Because businesses change who ever thought we'd have taxis in New York. And that was the only way you could you could travel, then Uber came along. Seems like that would never happen. I mean, there's a in my business, it was cable television, I started in cable television, the broadcaster's laughed, no one's ever gonna pay $6 for more TV in this country, right? I paid 120 For no, YouTube and all the other TVs. Yeah,

I like where we're going, Terry. And I also think that the title to one of your books, Dare to Dream, Dare to Act is really wise. Because I think there's a different kind of daring to share our ideas, and a different kind of daring required to act in our world right now. It can feel risky, to take a big swing, and not be successful. So how do we dare to act? I'm hearing, normalize that some of these endeavors are going to fail. Let's just know that I'm hearing regular investment in r&d. What else would you offer for leaders? Every

failure you can learn by that so many people get all excited about that one idea that they think will work and they try it and it doesn't work. That's why companies you know, sometimes with the r&d need to reward failure to push the envelope because innovation is what what, what keeps you going. My first failure came out of college, I was doing some on camera TV, and I noticed I didn't have a five o'clock shadow. So I decided to sit down and write check and tell them how much I loved their track to raise your I sent off the letter figure in two weeks, I'd get a call I'd be on national television. Well, during that two weeks, I started getting very excited and thinking about what if what if I could go national television, all the things with it. I got the letter two weeks to the day. Here's what it said, Dear Mr. Rich, expressing your complete satisfaction with your ship track to razor. Unfortunately, we can't help you. You wrote the wrong company. I fail. But I got motivated during those two weeks that I wanted to do on camera Television. And by the time a year or two later, I kept working on that goal. And I've been on every major network, every major cable network across the globe, and was on the Johnny Carson Show as part of that all because I failed in the beginning. So I think he lessons and learning lessons and I'll give you a million dollar idea that I'm still working on like it's been failing, but you've executed but I'll give you that at the end of the show. Just to show you an example of how that is is important. And that's why having all the ideas and having You backup ideas. When you have the top four ideas, you, you everybody goes after the first one I've done work yet the second, and you take a small amount of money to do that and not met the whole deal. I also

heard in your personal story there, Terry, that when we dare to dream, and we sit with that, right, and we're thinking, and we're feeling what that would be like, you know, if I'm on national television, right, it's this, it's this, then you had a commitment that was larger than any fear of failure, right? I'm going to take additional actions and make this happen. So the dreaming, got you committed enough to act?

That's right. And I think working with other people, if you're starting your own company, you want to have an advisory board, you want to pay him because you want to have the money, but you want an advisory board, because you need expertise around let's go back to that lawyer, or the accountant in that spring storm you. They're so important, because they will help you not fail as big or actually help you succeed. Because they'll get excited about as a group, let's make this thing work to find ways around it. But if you're if so it is important to have, you know, checks and balances along the way as you go. That will help you make your ideas successful. Yeah,

well, then I'm also hearing you're not the leader standing alone. You're a team, we're gonna charge in this direction, like, No, we've gotten input, we've gotten Advisory Board, right, they've taken a look at it. And okay, now I'm gonna feel more secure.

But I'll give you one more example. This is kind of funny. When I went to the zoo was losing a lot of money. They couldn't spend any money on a new exhibit. And we were trying to do this brainstorming and we came up different ideas. And I said, Well, what is it we have that's free that we could do that would bring people in? What's something we have every day we can use? And someone said poop every animal poops, you know, so we decided to do an exhibit called scoop on poop. So the kids would come in and they'd see this and they'd giggle Oh, that's what Tiger poop looks like. That's what you're and lo and behold, they're out telling their friends at school, and we cashflow the thing just like that. In fact, we also have hands that

are coming and looking at different piles of poo. Yep, yep, that's from the gorillas that's from and it

cost us zero. And one of the keeper said, Well, you know, deer are eating all my flowers and another zookeeper said, Well, you know, tigers are predators and deer are prey. Why don't we sell the deer or the tiger poop? And see if it works to to push the deer away? Long behold it did. We sold $20,000 IN TIGER poop and gallon buckets that summer for people to use to keep whitetail deer away. Might you see how

they were going to fertilizer?

We Yeah, we did go down the drain here real fast. But anyway, that kind of shows you that once I came, I started an idea or an employee starts an idea. Then the employees came up the other way around with with other ideas. And then they got excited. And we all laughed and giggled, and we did it together. And when you're brainstorming, for the first time with a lot of group, there is a little exercise that I like to do is not talk about your business, let's not brainstorm ideas for the business, come up with something like there's going to be a party Saturday night, and we're going to have give everybody a cell phone and we're going to have 10 things that we want them to do. And let's get some crazy things that they have to do. And let's see how many people can check the box. For example, I might say, somebody asked to go into McDonald's and put on a McDonald's hat, take a picture. And so and they have to have a french fry out there and somebody else's, and ketchup on their nose. And all of a sudden, it's fun to do. And you'd say now, let's do the same thing with our business problem. But don't judge because you didn't judge when we did this as an example where it didn't affect your job directly. Because you're thinking how is that going to affect me if we're going to try to put ketchup on somebody's nose type thing. So that's a fun exercise to do to kind of teach the no judgment deal as you're trying to do the brainstorming. For all the ideas during the dream.

I'm also hearing get playful. We're warming ourselves up. Creativity

is playful. There's there's no doubt about that.

Yeah. So I want to recap all the things that we talked about under dare to act, know that some will fail, have a regular investment in research and development, learn from failure. And but use it not only learn from failure, reward failure,

which means you're putting money aside to say I've got $200 The for the best new idea. And we're going to have everybody created, what do you think let's put them all together. And it was a really great person, we're going to go with this. Here's an extra $100 for coming up with what the team thought was the best idea. That's insanity for everybody to come up with new ideas

and pursue more than one idea at a time, right, knowing some are going to fail. So if one

fails, you can't just quit and you've lost three months of work.

I really think that our r&d departments, scientists, when you literally are working in a lab, and you know that some protocols are not going to work, right and you'd be and you TAS it's like okay, it's not those parameters. It's this. These parameters, that kind of mindset, knowing some things are going to fail. Like, I want to, like extract that from the scientists and the lab workers and put it into the rest of us. That's right. Absolutely, yes. And advisory board. That was important, too. Yeah,

you want to you want a board at some point, but you will be entrepreneurs are really, really good at coming up with new ideas are really, really poor at operations and finance and that sort of thing. So you think of the things that you're not really good at, you know, the scientist is great with the idea of what might happen, but putting together a, you know, Subchapter S chapter business or an LLC, or what should I do, somebody else can do that. And so you don't want to go out and have to learn that you want to bring in expertise. And then you don't have to reward them right away. You can give them stock for down the road, or just being a part of a new entrepreneurial company is really fun for those like me, who've done it a couple times and to give advice and try to work on up shots in the backend. Yes,

Terry, I've put together an advisory board for myself, around business development, there's so many different ways that we can market and pursue opportunities. And I'm always like, I need help prioritizing, like what ideas are going to have the best likelihood of leading to sales, new connections that are the first step

to understand there may be failure, and you look for ways to solve that. That's how you learn. That's part of the failure process. You're doing the right thing.

Darren, you said, at the zoo, you all asked yourself the question. Well, because you were in a financial deficit situation, what do we have that we can use for free? Are there any other questions like that, that tend to generate great thinking?

I think just everybody will come up with an idea during the day and then they'll forget about it, sleeping at night. And ideas and and success isn't measured just in revenue. Ideas. success can be measured in expenses, I went to quarter lane, Idaho for a conference, and I went in the bathroom and there was a bar soap in a box. Actually, it was just a box with a hole in the middle and it said waste reducing exfoliating cleanser, and I looked down what the heck is it. And then I realized those darn accountants somebody knew that that normal sized box of soap when you take a shower, and you're only there one or two nights, you take about that much off the outside, right? So they cut out the middle and put that on the sink and put the rest of the bar in the shower. And now they only needed one bar soap versus two and they just reduced their operating expense for soap by 50%. So, everywhere you look, there's there's a better way to do something then and an opportunity to make money by by finding and working on that.

Yes. Ah, okay. So like in the course of our day to day sometimes I say, Terry, that a post it note can be transformational. Right? If we had that posted note on our computer or on our desk, like what's a better way? Right? What would what would make it cost less less hassle, right? feel easier for me feel easier for you? And just constantly thinking? What could those ideas be?

Well, cool. COVID you know, really get people in a in a tizzy. I'm oblique I'm I'm superstitious. I don't know why. But I have certain things I had big success on one project. And I bought a cinnamon roll hashbrown medium Diet Coke from McDonald's before I went into that meeting. And so anytime I go to a different meeting that I want success, guess what I have, right before the meeting cinnamon roll hashbrown and Diet Coke at McDonald's. Because it puts my mind it doesn't help any it's not gonna be good luck. But it puts my mind. Same thing with what I wear. And when I'm either on TV or doing a speech or whatever, I have certain things I do more for getting me in the mental attitude because I really have fun and I feel so I want everything to be happy today. That's what I want you to know. Okay.

Yes. Oh, I mean, that's great self awareness. What puts you in your most confident, composed, competent mindset?

Absolutely.

Terry, you have shared so much great information with us. Thank you for the stories and making this real.

You host a great podcast and I appreciate and what success you've had with that. Can I give him a million dollar idea? I worked for the lottery. So we merged Powerball and mega million groups together and they said, Hey, can you come up with some ideas to promote Mega Millions and so brainstorming a little bit but then driving home and writing down ideas. I look up in the moon and I saw it as a crescent. So you know, you could just see a little stripe on the right side. Yeah. Oh my god, if I could get a spotlight or a laser to project the jackpot amount on the moon, I can own the moon as a billboard. So I immediately called the scientist at my university, they hung up on me they had some Cuca you know, what's this guy talking about? But I got a hold of an astrophysicist at another university. He said, Well, it's going to break up as it goes through the, through the clouds, so you're gonna need something different, you're gonna have to project it from outside the atmosphere. So I need someone who knows Elon Musk. We're gonna get something on a satellite, and we're gonna own the moon as a billboard. How's that familiar? All right.

If you can help, Terry with that. Please reach out. Yes. How often do we all look at the moon?

That's right. It's been there forever. No one knew how to take advantage of it. At

least a million dollar idea. Thank you, Terry. Thank you for sharing your time and passion and expertise with us today.

I enjoyed it. You're a great host.

Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Courage of a Leader podcast. If you'd like to further explore this episode's topic, please reach out to me through the courage of a leader website at www.courageofaleader.com. I'd love to hear from you. Please take the time to leave a review on iTunes. That helps us expand our reach and get more people fully stepping into their leadership potential. Until next time, be bold and be brave because you've got the Courage of a Leader.