The School of Greatness - 903 Build From the Ground Up

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

Entrepreneurs need vision.If you could interview 200 of the top entrepreneurs in the country, do you think you’d find some similarities?Amy Wilkinson guessed that she would.And she did.Over 5 years of research later, she wrote a book that examines the top 6 traits that very successful entrepreneurs share.Amy is a brilliant woman who has worked at the White House and co-founded a company in Silicon Valley (as well as taught at Ivy League universities).In our conversation, we discuss these top traits and Amy gives awesome (real life) examples to illustrate each one. I took a clip from the original episode when Amy was on the show in which she shares examples of how to bridge the gap between your competition and build your vision from the ground up on 5 Minute Friday in Episode 903.If you enjoyed this episode, show notes and more at http://www.lewishowes.com/903 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes

This is 5-Minute Friday! We've got Amy Wilkinson on, who is a strategic advisor, entrepreneur, lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and global fellow at the Wilson Center. She frequently addresses corporate, associate, and university audiences on entrepreneurial leadership. She also advises startups and large corporations on innovation and business strategy. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and PayPal and SolarCity and a bunch of companies, he basically builds from the ground up. So just as an architect would build a building from the ground up, entrepreneurs like this, they look for open spaces. They look for unaddressed needs. They look for friction points or things, irritations, right? And then they build

piece by piece. It's reasoning by first principles. And that's a very physics way to approach things. Elon is a physicist by training. And he, for example, with SpaceX decided he could just build a rocket a different way. And he started doing that in Hawthorne, California, and they are now resupplying the International Space Station at one-tenth the cost that NASA did. It's extraordinary. So he has built it a different way. And that's an example of an architect. You can see things and then just reason by first principles. And then a third way of finding a gap would be like the Chipotle founder does. So Steve Ells is a classically trained chef and he was from Denver, Colorado, but living in San Francisco and working at one of the really elite restaurants in San Fran and loving burritos. He was like hanging out in the Mission District and eating Mexican food and burrito stuff

and deciding that you could make fast food, not just hamburger patties that were frozen and reheated. You could make it fast casual, like a casual restaurant. So he integrated two ideas, this restaurant concept with fast food. You put that together and you get fast casual, you get Chipotle. It's cooking for the line. So people are cooking right in front of you. As the line gets longer, they cook more. As the line gets shorter, they cook less.

But it's seeing a gap in the marketplace by smashing, mashing and smashing two things together and creating something new. So that's the first skill. Okay. And the second one is drive for daylight. What does that mean? So driving for daylight is how a race car driver can manage speed. So you, if you're, you know, driving really, really fast, you're not looking at the lines on the pavement or the competitors next to you. You're always looking for the light on the horizon. So you're driving towards the light. And I actually tested this. I heard a lot of entrepreneurs talking about this kind of race car driver thing. And I signed up for NASCAR driving school. I drove road Atlanta and drove

a car like 155 miles an hour, just see if it will work. And sure enough, you're not looking in the rear view mirror. You're not, I mean, you have to be focused forward. And that's the basic concept here is that if you are in a fast-moving marketplace, a business marketplace, that you have to be looking ahead. So are you saying essentially not to worry about what your competitors are doing or more see what they're doing but focus on your game first? Yeah, I think it's focus on your game first. I mean you have to be aware. You can't be completely tunnel visioned, right? You have to be alert and aware. But Kevin Plank, so back to the Under Armour story, he'll say if Under Armour falls down, it's not because of the competition. And this is an athletics thing. It's because of how you play your own game. It's how

you think about your own future. It's where you're going to drive the ball, what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, and how the team's going to come together to move forward. So a point in this chapter is really that you have to avoid nostalgia. You can't be emotional and you can't be looking back. And so Kevin, using Under Armour as an example, when they launched the women's business, their first women's business as a football player. He just did shrink it and pink it. It's a great story because they, all of their size smalls were selling out and he couldn't figure out why. So women were buying size small. That's hilarious. And yeah. And so he was

like, okay, great. I'm just going to shrink it and pink it. I'm going to make the same stuff small and in pink. And then it totally didn't work. And he had to scrap all of it. He took a really big loss. He sent it all to the incinerator, right? He just did away with it. He had to hire in a women's team from Reebok and Nike and a bunch of other places. And he wasn't nostalgic about it. He's like, well, we made a big mistake there. That was big.

But we'll just move it forward. Same thing with the idea that he made the anti-cotton. Under Armour was the anti-cotton company. They hated cotton. It was all synthetic fabrics and how athletes would perform better with synthetic gear. But then six years into his company, he looked in the closet of consumers and found that if they had 30 shirts, the 24 of them were still cotton. Right. So he's missing a big opportunity. Yeah, huge. And so again, he wasn't nostalgic about that. They now have a cotton t-shirt. They do all kinds of cotton products, but it's charged cotton. So this is the idea that you

can't look back and say, oh, I was defined as the anti-cotton company. No, you can't be nostalgic about it. It's only forward. So at any moment in time, you just keep moving forward. you