Ed Oakley
Two Concepts that Revolutionized
Business Management

Bob Serling: This is 15-Minute Innovation, and my guest today is Ed Oakley, who's the CEO and Founder of Enlightened Leadership. Many of you may know Ed from his highly popular business book, "Enlightened Leadership", which is now in its thirty-first printing on Simon and Schuster and has become a business classic. Ed, I'd like to welcome you!

Ed Oakley: Thanks, Bob, it's a delight to be here.

Bob: Great. My first question for you, Ed, is what's the biggest business-building idea that you're known for?

Ed: Well, you already mentioned it, Bob. It's writing a book that is targeted to our specific business audience in a way that built tremendous credibility. It was that first book, "Enlightened Leadership", that has sold over 200,000 copies now.

To put this in perspective, the kind of impact it can have, I remember shortly after it was published. By the way, it was self-published originally...

Bob: Ed, I want to interject something just for a second. For most people who don't know, if a business book sells 20,000 copies, it's considered a best seller, so for everyone listening to this, you should know that Ed's book sold ten times what a best seller normally sells.

Ed: Yes, thanks. In fact, anything over 5,000 copies is considered a very successful business book.

Bob: Yes.

Ed: Okay, shortly after it was self-published, Bob, I remember getting calls from a major west-coast airline manufacturer. They had bought the book at an east-coast conference and read it on the way home.

They got back home and they called us and said, "Hey, we're very impressed with your book. Any chance you're going to be in the Seattle area in the near future?"

Well, it just so happened we were going to be there in about two weeks, and we made the airline reservations.

And when I got there, an interesting thing happened. We had a meeting in the afternoon to prepare for the meeting the next morning, which was the big meeting. And in that first meeting, we were sitting having a casual conversation in the conference room, and I remember feeling a little uncomfortable, and I couldn't figure out what it was.

Well, I went to the hotel that night, and in the middle of the night I woke up with a sudden realization of what the discomfort was. They were treating me like a celebrity!

Bob: Ah, and all because of the book.

Ed: Yes.

Bob: Very interesting.

Ed: And that instantly told me the kind of credibility that had been established. It also gave me a new level of responsibility to live what I'm preaching.

Bob: Well, let me back up about a half step and ask you a question because this book has developed such a strong following. What was the main distinguishing concept of "Enlightened Leadership" that's given it such traction for so many years now?

Ed: There were really two fundamental concepts. One of them is the importance of staying forward focused as much as possible — not getting wrapped up so much in the problems of the day, but keeping your eye on the ball and continuing to move forward. That was a key piece.

The second key piece, Bob, was the idea that leadership does not have to have all the answers. In fact, they're a lot smarter, even if they think they have the answers, to go to people who have the answers. To do that, they've got to ask the right questions. And we call those "effective questions", and that's really the key to the book.

Bob: Great. So those two concepts — how did you come up with those ideas? Because many people come up with the idea of, "Well, I'll publish a book" and, of course, that's an important thing to do, but the concepts that drive the book — how did you come up with the ideas for those?

Ed: You know, those were concepts that evolved over a long period of time. I had some mentors, frankly, that were involved in that.

I actually spent one year in a consulting business that I had also been a client of when I was at Hewlett-Packard, a business run by a guy named Curt Wright, and some of the fundamental concepts came from that work. They really impacted my life, and so I adapted them to what we did.

Bob: Great. So you basically took an idea or a methodology that existed and improved it and expanded and added more value to it.

Ed: That's exactly right.

Bob: That's really important, and I don't want to digress too much, but so many people think of innovation as having to be something very disruptive, totally new, revolutionary, when oftentimes true innovation comes in the form of improving something, adding value to it, and in that sense making it new and much more effective. And that's the process you used, at least here.

Ed: I totally agree, and we all need to get over the fact that we'll never come up with anything that's totally original. It just doesn't exist.

Bob: Well, for the most part that's true. You look at YouTube and some of those things involving new media and they're very interesting, and new at least in the application of that media. But you're right, for the most part the real value to almost any company is in what I call "incremental innovation" instead of developing something totally new, different and never heard of before.

Then let's just shift gears a second to the next step in the process. When you need to come up with a big idea, either say to solve a problem or achieve an important goal, is there a process that you rely on for doing that?

Ed: Well, there is, Bob, and it's my own process that I've evolved over the last 19 years working with our clients, and it's a process that our new book, "Leadership Made Simple — Practical Solutions to Your Greatest Management Challenges" is totally based on. It's a five-step framework for problem solving or innovation, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. That's what I use. I could take you through a real brief version of that.

Bob: That's great. A brief guided tour would be terrific.

Ed: Great. Well, first of all I'd like to say if there are other stakeholders involved in the issue, absolutely get them involved in this process, and then make it a facilitated process, not just something you go off by yourself and do on your own.

So the process goes something like this: Given the situation, what is already working? What successes are you having, and what is contributing to those particular aspects of the situation being successful or effective?

Now, that's a real energy-generating kind of a question. It also is very honoring of the people involved. It values the work that's already been done toward what you're trying to accomplish.

And that puts people in the right frame of mind and opens up their minds to the creativity that you want to get to, and that's the first step.

Bob: Okay, great.

Ed: Next, what are we trying to accomplish? What's our vision of success in this situation?

Now this, of course, clarifies the goal or target, and I must say, Bob, that often that's where the issue is. Often there is not a distinct clarity and a shared clarity of where you're really trying to go.

Bob: I couldn't agree with you more, from my own experience as a consultant and in product development. I can't tell you how many times I run into that and the clients don't see this because they're too close to the problem.

Ed: Yes, indeed.

Now think about what we've done so far. We've identified our successes and we've clarified our goal. So what we've done is simply create a gap between where we are and where we want to be.

Now notice how different that is than the traditional approach of throwing the problem out on the conference room table and dealing with the problem. If you throw the problem out there, instantly everybody's going to move into a defensive posture because they don't want to be blamed for the problem. Nobody wants to be part of the problem.

But when you look at it this way, that we're simply wanting to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be, that's the solution side. Everybody wants to be part of the solution.

So the next step is to ask, "What can we do more, better or different to start moving toward that goal or move closer to that goal?

And again, everybody wants to contribute to that, and that's where the creativity comes out. You've built up the energy and the openness to the creativity and innovation in the earlier steps, and now you're taking advantage of it.

Bob: Excellent.

Ed: That's the basic process.

Bob: Terrific. Can you give me an example, either in your own company or with a client — and you don't have to name that client — of how you've applied the process and the type of results you get from it?

Ed: Sure. In fact, let's stick with business growth and let's just stay with my own company.

About ten years ago my company had plateaued to about a million and a half dollars a year in business, and we needed to create a strategy for getting growth going again. So we brought the whole team together, and I would say at that time there were probably about six to eight people involved in it, and we went through the process.

Boy, we went through that first step where we were sharing the successes we'd already had and what caused the successes, and it was incredibly energizing, and very, very validating for what we were already doing.

When we got to the step of clarifying the objective, we got a new perspective on that. We realized, Bob, we wanted to make our work available to a lot more people, and that kind of changed the direction a little bit that we'd been going in.

When we got to the action plan then, with the clarity on the new objective, what we came up with quite unexpectedly — what came out of the group — was the idea that we should do public seminars. Because public seminars we could use every single month to actually impact a lot of different companies and a lot of different people. And that, of course, would open up the possibility of working inside those same companies.

So based on that one meeting, we launched a public seminar called, "Making Managers Into Leaders", that we did in from six to 12 cities a month for over seven years, Bob. Tremendously successful in its own right, it got us into numerous companies and organizations in very significant ways. And there are companies we've done as much as a million dollars or more in.

Bob: Amazing! So that one solution that grew out of this process was worth tens of millions of dollars to your company.

Ed: It was indeed.

Bob: That's excellent. So the combination of that process and your book and its popularity as a lead generator, working together in a complementary fashion, must have been just fantastic.

Ed: Well, it was, and we're enjoying just getting into the new book now and very excited about the prospects of that taking on its own life as well.

Bob: Sure. So I take it from what we've discussed so far, that your primary innovation style is working with a team. But do you ever run that process that you spoke about individually?

Ed: You know, I do. In fact, I prefer the combination of doing my own homework, using that process to generate my own ideas, but I've learned over time that no matter how wonderful my ideas are, Bob, that if I'll get the right people together and we'll go through this kind of a process, the ideas that come out of it will be absolutely better than I could possibly have done on my own.

Bob: Yes, so many people reflect that opinion. Occasionally some of the folks I've interviewed for this series and some of the folks I've spoken to over the years who are well-known innovators will say that they prefer to work by their lonesome, locked away in a cave somewhere, but for the most part everybody agrees that sounding-board effect of a team really accelerates progress and accelerates the quality of the ideas that come out.

Ed: And facilitates the implementation because you've already got buy in from the people who are going to implement it.

Bob: Excellent point, and I should have known that I'd get that from somebody who excels at teaching leadership (laughs).

Well, great. Ed, it's been a truly terrific 15 minutes. My final question for you is how do people find out more about you and your company and your new book?

Ed: Oh, great. We've got two websites. The primary website is www.enleadership.com, but the one that might be more interesting for the folks is the one that's www.leadershipmadesimple.com, because if they will go to www.leadershipmadesimple.com/freebook.html, they can get the electronic version of the best-selling book we've been talking about, "Enlightened Leadership", as well as sign up for our free periodic journal of practical leadership tips.

Bob: Now that electronic version — is that free or is there a charge?

Ed: Yes, it's free.

Bob: Wow, that's fantastic!

Ed: That's a decision we just decided to do. We've sold over 200,000 copies of that book, so we figure it's time to start giving it away and make it additional value.

Bob: Well, that's excellent and another innovative idea.

Ed, we're about at the end of our time. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today, and it's really been a terrific 15 minutes.

Ed: It's been fun, Bob. Take care.