Today’s conversation with Dorie Clark taught me some essential lessons about how to build a following around one’s ideas - which is no surprise - Dorie has given several excellent TEDx talks on just this topic, and I’ll summarize my insights from our conversation in a moment.
I learned something more surprising during my conversation with Dorie - that she is living her principles, constantly. I also learned that she’s into musicals, big time. I wasn’t expecting to learn this about Dorie, but I followed the conversation, as you’ll see.
Dorie is the author of a trilogy of books all about reinvention.
Starting in 2013, Dorie wrote “Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future” which she followed up in 2015 with “Stand Out: How to Find your Breakthrough Idea and build a following around it” which was named Inc Magazine’s #1 Leadership book of that year. Most recently, in 2017, she penned “Entrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive.”
Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I often expect people who have this much time to write about their ideas to have less time to apply them. Dorie walks her talk, however. The opening quote is about Dorie’s dream to learn to write and produce musical theater...and how she’s going about it - slowly building skills, insights and networks, long before she plans to tap them. If you take nothing else away from this episode, that alone is a solid gold lesson.
This approach makes logical sense - you have to plant before you can reap - and networks are no different. What I loved learning about Dorie is that she’s not sitting still - she still has dreams of constant reinvention and she’s working to make those dreams possible, steadily.
In the last several years in hosting this podcast, I’ve come to see conversations in a new light - sometimes they can seem like a wave, building, cresting and receding. Dorie certainly treats her own musical reinvention in this way - like a conversational wave she needs to build. But I’ve also learned that conversations also have key sizes that act differently - small, medium and large conversations are all essential to master, as a leader or facilitator, and with reinvention, this is still true. Dorie takes me through three key conversational size “phase transitions” in building a following around a breakthrough idea. You don’t get to massive impact overnight.
Zero to one: Start talking about your idea. It may seem obvious, but many people just keep their ideas and their dreams in their heads. Getting it out of your head is like Peter Thiel’s Zero-to-One innovation and gets the ball rolling.
One to Many: Finding ways to get to talk to many people about your ideas at once, like writing for a publication or speaking to a group.
Many-to-Many: The goal, at the end of the day, is to develop a many-to-many conversation. You don’t want to be the only person talking about your idea. For me, the more people who see conversations as something worth designing, the better it is for me and for the world (at least, that’s how I see it) - which is why I keep making this show!
This episode is full of other insights, like how to write a great headline or choose a collaborator for a project. For the show notes and links to Dorie’s books and videos, click over to the Conversation Factory.com
Show Links
Dorie Clark on the Web
Dorie’s Trilogy:
Entrepreneurial You: https://amzn.to/2oYVQ0g
Reinventing You: https://amzn.to/VzNRkZ
Stand Out: https://amzn.to/1FVYNP9
How to Build a Following Around your Ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fQ92UVoXqc
Zero to One innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296
Full Transcription
Daniel: I will officially welcome you to the Conversation Factory. Dorie, thank you so much for making the time to talk about the things that we're going to talk about.
Dorie: Hey, I'm so glad to have the chance, Daniel. Thanks.
Daniel: Thank you. I was watching one of your many TEDx talks. This is the TEDxWPI Talk where you talked about how to build a following around your ideas. One of the things that really lit me up was this idea of the evolution from one to one conversations to one to many conversations, and from there to many-to-many conversations with. Really building momentum around a breakthrough idea. I want to just dive into each one of those individual conversations, because I think it's important that we all have an idea that's we're passionate about. The question is how do we get other people to take it up and become passionate about it as well?
Dorie: That is totally the question. You're right. Because there are so many good ideas that just languish and die because there's really only one person that cares about them. We have to change that equation.
Daniel: Right. You talked about this in Stand Out right there, and this is not surprising. There's so much noise in the world right now. I guess the first question is how do you in fact get your idea to stand out?
Dorie: Well, the very first criteria in for that, which it actually sounds self evident, but in practice, it is not self evident at all, is coming to understand that if you do not share your ideas publicly, no one will know what they are. That is step one. I think so often, people get frustrated and they start shaking their fists at the sky. Well, why aren't people paying attention? Why isn't this catching on? But the truth is they are only communicating to the small network of people immediately surrounding them.
Dorie: Unless those people happen to be literally exactly the right people or unless they happen themselves to be a coterie of powerful influencers, most likely there is not enough kindling there to get a spark going. You have to start sharing it, not just with the people around you who are within immediate earshot, you need to start sharing your ideas broadly, and that is because you need people to be able to discover them. You need to make yourself findable to the people that actually do care.
Daniel: Now, you are a great writer, and not everybody is. One thing I was looking through your giant list of Harvard Business Review articles, and I got to say, you know how to write a headline. I have a sticky note here that says, "Get Dorie to tell you how to write a good headline," because this seems like we've got a big idea and it's really important, and people will only learn about it if they can get past ... if they click on it, presumably, which means you've got to write a headline that makes people want to read at least the first paragraph of the article.
Dorie: Yeah, absolutely. Not to puncture your enthusiasm, but actually the HBR editors write the headlines-
Daniel: Oh, man.
Dorie: ... for the pieces. I know. I do still have some thoughts I'm happy to share, but the truth is the final responsibility ... Of course, you as the author give your piece a provisional headline just so the editor knows what it's about. But they're typically rewritten with impunity by the editors in a way that ... It's funny. It's like how for some reason your teeth are not considered part of your body when it comes to health insurance. It's like, "Oh yeah. Your health insurance, well, clearly that doesn't involve your dentist. That's separate."
Dorie: Similarly, you would think that your headline is a part of your article, but actually it is treated sometimes as though it were not, and so an editor would never dramatically rewrite your first few sentences without somehow telling you or getting your permission, but they do that with headlines a lot. All that being said, some thoughts about headlines, I mean, the biggest question that I think I try to ask myself is, would I read this article? Is the headline something that is compelling enough to me personally that I would say, "Oh wow, I need to stop and look at that?"
Dorie: If it's not, I want to keep trying to tweak it until somehow I'm hitting on something that is a perceived pain point for people such that they would actually stop to look at it. Because we're all barraged so much. I think that sometimes we can weirdly lower our standards and assume other ways to be a better leader. Clearly, people aren't going to read that, and some people will. But for most people who are familiar with whatever our genre is, we're way past that. We need something more compelling to get us to stop, and I want to keep pushing [inaudible 00:05:26] to that.
Daniel: It's so interesting that the conversation between you and the editor is not bidirectional, in a way. Just to go back to that point, that blows my mind that you write the article, and they're like, "Okay, and here's what it's called."
Dorie: Right, right. Exactly. The truth is, sometimes they may not quite pick up on the nuance that you want, but most of the time they do make it better. I mean, it is their job to focus in on that, and so oftentimes, they can tweak it in such a way that you're like, "Oh yeah, that is really interesting." For Harvard Business Review in particular ... and I have studied this really extensively having written for them for nine years now.
Dorie: I've done about 200 articles for them, and I even actually developed an online course specifically called Writing for High Profile Publications, because I did so much reverse engineering of this. But something that is somewhat unique to Harvard Business Review is that they are very interested in what I will call situational pieces, and so the frame that they like to set up is often what to do when X happens? A common formulation. Partly I think this is because of SEO, because of search engine optimization.
Dorie: But also it's interesting because if you truly capture this correctly, it is going to be a very, very specific tactical article, which is what they want. But, for instance, a colleague of mine wrote a piece about what to do when your employee tells you they have cancer. That's a perfect example, right? It's not something that happens every day, but whoa, when that happens, you really want guidance and it is a very useful tactical in the moment piece.
Daniel: Yeah. This goes to this idea of, you talked about the spark and the kindling, a real pain point. You're-
Dorie: Yes.
Daniel: ... helping somebody with a real pain point.
Dorie: Absolutely.
Daniel: I want to develop this idea a little bit because I imagine ... I'm wondering what that feeling was like for you when you wrote some of your articles that became the book. What does that pull feel like? That momentum from, "Oh, this is a thing, let's turn this into a larger thing? What does that feel like, in you, to notice that spark catch and begin to develop?
Dorie: Well, specifically, if we're talking about Reinventing You, which was my first book, and it did arise in this perfect progression in some ways, where it started out as a blog post, probably a seven or 800 word blog post, called How to Reinvent Your Personal Brand, and then got expanded into a magazine piece for Harvard Business Review, which is about 2,500 words, and then I had the opportunity to turn it into a book. Honestly, what I've come to appreciate in my professional life, it's not so much that I have amazing taste in terms of knowing what will be a great book. It more that I just try not to be dumb when opportunities present themselves.
Daniel: Wow.
Dorie: For me, starting in 2009, that was when I really got serious and I really, really wanted to publish a book. So I wrote two different book proposals and tried to pitch them, and we just met with utter lack of success. I had some people that may be maybe were interested, but the universal position was that I did not have enough of a platform, so to speak, that I was not famous enough, and so I was told that I needed to basically, "Come back when you're famous, kid."
Dorie: So I was like, "Ooh." It's not what I wanted to hear. So I went and started writing for the Harvard Business Review. I fought my way in there, and ultimately, this piece, this early blog posts that I wrote for them about reinventing your personal brand struck a chord, and they asked me would I expanded into a magazine piece, and I did. That's already one vote of confidence in the concept. Then when the magazine piece came out, I did not realize there's a lot of interesting behind the scenes things that until you're part of the club, you just don't know.
Dorie: For me, what I discovered was that, "Oh, interesting." Lots of literary agents, business focus literary agents, use the Harvard Business Review as a way of soliciting clients. So when my first piece came out in HBR, I had three different literary agents reach out to me and say, "Oh, Hey, have you thought about turning this into a book?"
Daniel: Sure.
Dorie: I had not. That was not the topic that I was interested in writing about, but I was like, "Look, I'm no dummy. Sure. I'll turn it into a book."
Daniel: Right.
Dorie: That was how that happened.
Daniel: Well, I mean, it's interesting. You make it seem like it was obvious, but I'm sure that they're still ... that people going through their own moments like this ... I'll just speak for myself. Writing a book is an agonizing experience, for me, especially towards the end. There's this question of, why do I have the right to say what I want to say? I'm wondering if you have any advice for people who are struggling with, I guess, what would be normally termed imposter syndrome?
Dorie: Yeah. I mean, the best advice...
Daniel: Not that you ever have this experience on ... Of course, I presume.
Dorie: Well, it's interesting. I feel bad talking about it sometimes because from everything that I understand, it sounds like imposter syndrome is literally the world's most common thing. The truth is, I don't actually have it because I have, for whatever reason, always had possible overabundance of confidence. That maybe has its own challenges, but this is not my particular cross to bear. However, that being said, I feel like something that is helpful to me and I hope is helpful to other people when it comes to feeling imposter syndrome is, "Okay, what's the advice?"
Dorie: Literally the advice is look around, because pretty much anyone, including someone in the throws of imposter syndrome, can look around and say, "Wow! Who are all these jackasses, and why were they allowed to write a book? Oh, okay. You know what? I can do better than that." I mean, it is true that simultaneously, when you're looking around, there are some people that are brilliant, and they're more brilliant than we are. There's plenty of people that are more brilliant than I am in certain areas.
Dorie: But also, it is equally true that there are people that it's like, "Oh my God. How did they ever get that book contract? That is bonkers." If you look at that and focus on that and just say, "You know what? I'm at least as qualified as that person. Let's give it a go." I feel like that is actually, in the end, a very empowering belief.
Daniel: Yeah. It's funny what's coming to mind is, this is almost the large scale equivalent of grounding yourself in your body. It's one of the basics of mindfulness. Just feeling your feet on the floor. This is a ... and doing that instead of just with your body. It's looking around your environment and saying, "Well, look, this is what's really happening. It's okay."
Dorie: Yeah, it's a really good analogy. I love that.
Daniel: I'm curious about community building, because I get the sense I've heard tell that you run networking dinners that you actively cultivate community for yourself, and that seems to be a really important component. But outside of building an online community and building a community around your ideas, there's also building an actual community. I'm wondering if we can just unpack that, how you take care of those aspects of yourself.
Dorie: Yeah, it's a great point. For me, I got really serious about it about five and a half years ago when I first moved to New York, because I came here and I just had this sudden realization, "Oh wow! I don't have any plans tonight. I also don't have any plans tomorrow night. Oh wait. I also don't have any plans ever," because no one was inviting me to anything. I realized that this was not a good state of affairs, that I would need to do something different and make some effort if I was going to actually have any kind of a social life.
Dorie: So I thought back to what my mom used to say. She used to say, "If you want to get an invitation, you have to give an invitation," and I appreciated her approach on controlling what you can control. So instead of just sitting back and bemoaning my fate, I decided that I would start trying to organize things and bring people together. That was where I started, and so I began organizing usually, typically monthly dinners. At first, for the first couple of years, it was really primarily focused around business authors or authors of different stripes.
Dorie: I have subsequently expanded it out, and now I'll have a lot of entrepreneurs or I'll have ... theater is something that I've gotten into a lot more recently, writing theater and investing in theater. So I'll mix that in as well. So I have a lot of creative collisions in there, but I would say on average for the past five years, I've had about one dinner a month, where I bring people together. It's really been wonderful in terms of building business connections, but also just friendships.
Daniel: Yeah. Well, so let's roll back for a second. Tell me about your interest in investing in theater. That's fascinating.
Dorie: Yeah. Thank you. I got interested in investing in theater. Actually, that was the second piece of it. The piece that came first was about three and a half years ago. I decided that I was going to learn to write musical theater, specifically book and lyrics for musical theater. I did not know how to do it. I had no experience in it. I grew up in a little tiny town. We didn't have a theater program, none of it. I did not have any background whatsoever, but I decided I wanted to learn.
Dorie: So I committed myself onto a program of self improvement and figuring out how to do that. I subsequently found out about, and then got accepted into the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, which is a rather prestigious musical theater training program, which I'm really proud to be part of. As part of that, I realized that if I was going to be successful in writing musical theater, in the act of getting it produced, essentially, I wanted to understand the business of Broadway, which is really its own animal.
Dorie: I think that, like a lot of creative endeavors, many people who are involved in the musical theater space on the creative side don't necessarily fully or properly understand the business mechanics to their detriment. I thought that that could be essentially a competitive advantage that I knew that I could. So I started to invest so that I could learn more about how shows are capitalized and what that process looks like.
Daniel: That's fascinating. I presume you like actual musicals. You sound like somebody who has a good singing voice. Is this true or not true?
Dorie: Oh, thank you. When I was a teenager, I would write angsty folk songs, and I would sing in with my guitar and I would get a lot of-
Daniel: This was the Indigo Girls era, I presume?
Dorie: Oh, for sure. For sure.
Daniel: Oh man. Closer to Fine all the way.
Dorie: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:18:39] Yeah. The local college coffee house, all that kind of stuff. But interestingly, I don't really know how to read music. I learned whatever the play Indigo Girls around a campfire kind of guitar rather than-
Daniel: Yes.
Dorie: ... actually legitimately learning how to read music. In our BMI class presentations, I'm actually a little paranoid to do the singing because it's all very precise. The main vocal line comes in. Here! When you're strumming along, you can fudge it a little bit, and for things like this, it's so precise that I actually like to yield it to my colleagues who have BFAs in musical theater.
Daniel: Yeah.
Dorie: [crosstalk 00:19:31] really know it. But I do like to sing when the stakes are lower.
Daniel: I understand. The shower, the kitchen, those places.
Dorie: That's right. Serenading my cats.
Daniel: Totally unrelated then. I mean, what's your favorite musical? I suppose that's an impossible question, but ...
Dorie: Yes. There's so many good ones. In fact, this year I've embarked upon a campaign, a self improvement campaign, of watching as many musicals as I can, especially particularly canonical musicals, just to-
Daniel: Yes.
Dorie: ... make sure that I am fully briefed in all the history of the genre. But I would say in terms of just overall, I mean probably rent. A lot of musical theater purists don't love it in the sense that there's things that could be tightened or improved. I mean, poor Jonathan Larson of course died before-
Daniel: Spoiler alert.
Dorie: Yeah, right before it opened. He was getting ready for its off-Broadway opening. So it was just this tragic thing, and it would have been refined certainly further had he lived. But it's just such an energetic and powerful piece, so I really love it. In terms of classical musical theater, there's a lot of things that I ... It's so interesting to look back on things, especially from the '50s, the '60s, and see what has aged well and what hasn't, and it's just really fascinating how that breaks down. But I have to confess a soft spot for Mame. I think that was a great musical.
Daniel: Yeah. My mother listens to all of my podcasts, and I gained a love of musicals from her. We listened to Annie Get Your Gun and The Pajama Game-
Dorie: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Daniel: ... when I was a kid, and so I still have ... In fact, I was shopping with her the other day and we were singing Seven And A Half Cents, which is one of these, we talk about, canonical musicals. I feel like there's some ... we can pull this back. What lessons, what do you feel like you've transferred or transported some of your lessons from this learning process into the other parts of your business?
Dorie: For sure, for sure. I mean, ultimately, so I wrote this book, Reinventing You, but in some ways in writing it, it was a post facto creation, right? Because in my 20s, I had done a million things. I had been a journalist, I had been a political campaign spokesperson, I had been a nonprofit executive director, and then I finally landed on my current career, being self employed and writing and speaking and teaching and consulting and executive coaching, et cetera, and so it was a book that ... I interviewed many professionals, many successful professionals about their reinventions, but the perspective of the book was coming from someone who had done it, essentially.
Daniel: Sure.
Dorie: Now, it's very interesting because it's like you're reliving it, but you're doing it in real time, and saying, "All right, well, how can I do this as effectively as possible? How can I essentially use this knowledge to hack the process?" It's TBD, but there are certain things that I am doing really deliberately. I mean, number one, chief among them as we talked about, if I want to get a show on Broadway, which I do because I am not the kind of person that has hobbies just for the sake of having hobbies. I want to actually make this count.
Dorie: One of the best things, I think, that one can do is build relationships with producers, especially building relationships with producers before you need relationships with producers, and therefore starting to become an investor so that A, you're knowledgeable about the process overall, but B, you have an excuse to network with producers for years prior to when a show would be ready for them to even look at, I think is valuable. Over the past year and a half, my business partner and I ... I mean, we went from knowing zero producers basically, maybe aside from our friend, Michael Roderick, who is doing less of it now of course, but has done a little tiny bit.
Dorie: But that was really it, to now knowing, I mean, probably 30, and those numbers will increase. That has been I think certainly something that is powerful. Another of course is understanding that people are skeptical sometimes about transitions, and so what you need to do is over-index on social proof in order to convince them that you are serious and credible and should be taken seriously. That is why it was really important to me, as a goal, to get into the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.
Daniel: Interesting.
Dorie: Because there's a lot of people that write musical theater, la, la, la, la, but people who are in the industry are familiar with the BMI workshop. It has bred many successful people. Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez from Frozen fame, Bobby Lopez with Jeff Marx did Avenue Q, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty who did Ragtime, and Once on This Island. We have Tom Kitt who did Next To Normal, who's the orchestrator now for Jagged Little Pill, which is opening imminently. All of these folks have been through the program, and so it really is a premier training ground. So people who are in the know understand that if someone is in that program, they have been vetted, at least to a certain extent, and they are not dilettante.
Daniel: Yeah. You're serious. You're putting your money and time where your mouth is.
Dorie: Yes. Although thankfully not money, because one really amazing thing about it is it is free.
Daniel: What?
Dorie: It is offered for free by BMI, which is really amazing.
Daniel: Wow, that is amazing. It's extraordinary in fact. So it's really interesting. There's a couple of fascinating things to unpack here, because what we started with is this idea of going ... Peter Thiel calls us the zero to one innovation. If you're not talking about your idea, you should start talking about your idea, and well, you talked about your mother's idea of controlling what you can control, or maybe that was your idea. Your mother talked about sending more invitations, because that is in fact what you can control.
Dorie: Exactly. Yes.
Daniel: I think if this idea of the minimum viable permission, a different MVP, that you don't need anybody else's permission to throw a dinner, you don't need anybody else's permission. You can write a musical. In fact, you could rent a tiny theater and start ... try to sell tickets to it. But what's interesting is that you're building your wave, your credibility, your social proof slowly, and building that network way before you intend to utilize it more intensely, let's just say.
Dorie: Yes.
Daniel: Those are two really different strategies of just starting versus the three dimensional chess approach.
Dorie: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Daniel: I suppose that's not a question. That was a comment. [crosstalk 00:27:24]
Dorie: But it's a good one, Daniel. I liked it.
Daniel: Well, thanks. It seems like you do both, but I'm wondering how you decide between the two. They're not mutually incompatible, but it seems like in some situations you choose one or another [inaudible 00:27:41] situations, you rely on the other.
Dorie: Can we rewind for a second to what the two or-
Daniel: Yeah, it's-
Dorie: ... three dimensional chess? In our metaphor, that refers to which piece? I'm sorry.
Daniel: Well, it sounds like the process of you getting a play on Broadway involves a lot of different moves that you're making.
Dorie: Yes.
Daniel: Over time. You're not taking the zero to one approach to it, where you're just writing an article on LinkedIn about it, or just writing a play and selling 10 tickets to a small theater. That would be the just getting started approach, which I think you sometimes advocate in the entrepreneurial you approach, which is start.
Dorie: Right. Right. Well, I do think, to your point, it is both end, in the sense that, for instance, if the advantage of the lean startup be, what's the minimum viable product, that becomes really important when it comes to the actual content of it, right? For instance, it is an entirely separate question, what musical should I write? What would audiences be interested in? Where do I have something that I can contribute to uniquely? That's a really different question than just setting up the infrastructure that would enable me if I did have the right musical to be able to get it heard.
Daniel: Yes.
Dorie: I think they are two simultaneous things. I mean, right now, building a network and building social proof. So I created an online course as a compliment to my book, Stand Out, and the course is called Recognized Expert, about how to become a recognized expert. As part of that, I talk the three pillars of how to do that. What does it really take to get recognized in your field? The three pillars, which I really am consciously trying to live in the musical theater space because I believe very strongly that this framework works, is that you need to have strong network, you need to have social proof, and you need to have content.
Dorie: All three are really important. In this case, you need a network because ... Okay, I could have written the greatest musical in the world, but obviously, if no one knows who I am, if no one cares about who I am, then it's not going to get heard. So developing the network of people who are actually interested is primary. I already have friends with producers that have said to me on multiple occasions, they're like, "Show me what you're working on. We want to see, we want to see," and I just pushed back and I say, "You know what? I'll tell you when we're ready. Thank you. Thank you very much. For sure, I will tell you."
Dorie: But right now, it's about building the relationship. It's not about any kind of quick sale or anything like that. That's not what I'm interested in. But I do have people who are interested when I am ready, and when I think it's quality enough. So you've got to have that. Number two is the social proof, which we talked about, which is getting into the BMI program so that people understand, "Oh, she's worth listening to. This is not somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. This is somebody who is trained and who has been validated by a certain set of gatekeepers."
Dorie: But then number three is the content. So you can have the other pieces, but if what you're producing is not interesting, it's not relevant, it's not good, then obviously that's not going to work either, especially with regards to the content. This is the place where the minimum viable product testing is important. It is doing a workshop, reading, it's presenting a song, whatever, and just seeing how it's received and seeing what the feedback is, so you can understand is this the thing that is going to capture people's imagination? If it is, then it becomes really powerful. You're able to get exponential growth with it, if you also have the social proof and the network to layer on top of it.
Daniel: Yeah, and one without the other is not going to deliver impact.
Dorie: Yes, that's right.
Daniel: I'm assuming you have written the great American musical already. I'm just assuming that that's possible for you. Why not?
Dorie: What I am doing right now actually ... So year two of the BMI program, which I am in right now, is the year that you are writing an original musical. So I am working with a partner right now on our musical, which we will be finishing by the end of the academic year, if not before then. I'm pretty excited about it, but that part is in process and we are taking our time to create a really high quality product.
Daniel: That's awesome. It'd be really interesting to unpack a little bit about ... I'm building this map of different conversations that you managed, and we've talked about going from zero to one and talking to people about your ideas, and building community around those ideas. It'd be really interesting to talk about collaboration and how you bring people into your circle to collaborate with them. Because obviously working with someone else on a play is very different than writing on your own, and writing a book on your own is very different than doing a project with someone else. How does collaboration show up in your work?
Dorie: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think collaboration is often easiest. The low hanging fruit is where you have completely different skill sets, and so it's very obvious. I think that the trouble with collaboration, there's multiple places where it can go awry. One is where it's not really clearly defined who's doing what or who has the final vote or whatever on certain things. For musical theater, it's pretty straight up. I mean, obviously collaborations can go sideways in plenty of ways, but archetypally, you have a lyricist and you have a composer.
Dorie: So of course, each person can weigh in. I mean, if I was thinking about something as a Somber Dirge, and my composer comes back to me with like, "Oh, it's like Mariachi," then I can say, "this is not really what I was thinking." But most often it's not going to be that crazy of a disagreement. You have someone who is the recognized expert in that domain. He might tell me, "I'm not sure about this lyric," or whatever but, by and large, I am responsible for the lyrics. So I think that simplifies things.
Dorie: I would say in general, while I support the idea of collaboration, I am almost always hesitant to take on collaborators or collaborations because I think obviously when done well, it's great, but I think that a common problem that occurs in practical terms in business life, is that there are a lot of people who are ... What's the way to put it? Less successful aspirants [inaudible 00:35:08] will say, "Let's collaborate." Essentially what they're saying is, "Oh, you have access to shit I don't, let's do something together so I can get that access," and they have not properly thought through how to bring value to the equation, and so it just becomes this colossal hassle. So a real collaboration, both partners need to be very clear about what they are adding to the mix so that one plus one is more than two.
Daniel: Yeah, and I love the thing you said right before that about the idea of being a recognized expert within the conversation, and it seems like in order for a collaboration to really work, you have to recognize someone else, the other person in the collaboration, is having something really valuable to bring to the dialogue, in some way [crosstalk 00:36:06]
Dorie: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It is especially helpful if you recognize that the other person has a unique talent. I mean, for instance, my musical collaborator, Derek, is a fantastic musician. I mean, he went to an art school literally from elementary school on. He is a beautiful [inaudible 00:36:27], he is a music director at a church. It just comes out his pores. Especially if you take him versus me, who can't even really properly read music, it's like, "Okay." I may have opinions about things, but ultimately nine times out of 10, I'm going to defer to Derek because I know that he knows what he's talking about.
Daniel: That kind of respect is really ... It's great for that respect to be both ways. I'm sure there's stuff that he looks at you and says, "I'm so glad that Dorie is bringing blank to this process."
Dorie: Let's hope man.
Daniel: Well, we're almost out of time. Is there anything we haven't talked about that we should touch on?
Dorie: Well, I want to hear more about your thoughts about collaboration, Daniel. What do you see as the big challenges? Or how do you-
Daniel: Oh, man.
Dorie: ... get past that?
Daniel: It is very hard. I'm glad we talked about it because I was looking at an article you wrote about this, and it is very, very much the case that when somebody says, "Hey, let's do a blank together," it can feel like one person is carrying most of the load. I will say this year, I've been very lucky to collaborate with three other consultants who are at my level or higher, and it's really exciting to be able to collaborate with someone and get to learn from them, and to feel respected that I'm bringing content that's valuable, and to understand that they're bringing something else like operational excellence or amazing client contacts or more years of experience for me. So that respect is really, really important. If the respect isn't there, it's like any marriage.
Dorie: Yes.
Daniel: [crosstalk 00:38:24] The respect has to be there, otherwise, it starts to fall apart, and I've certainly been in that experience with at least one of my businesses, where I think the biggest challenge is everyone having the same talent profile and everyone thinking that they're bringing everything to [inaudible 00:38:43] to the table.
Dorie: Yes.
Daniel: If one feels like they're bringing more, than that's bad, especially in ... If both people feel like they're bringing more, that's really bad, and if everyone has the same talent profile, then there can be a lot of a struggle for power and that's not great.
Dorie: Absolutely, yeah.
Daniel: I don't know. That's my hot take on that, for reverse interviewing and I guess we are.
Dorie: I'm with you. That makes perfect sense. I love it.
Daniel: I want to respect your time. I want to thank you for your time. This has all been really awesome, eyeopening stuff to meditate on< for me. So thank you, Dorie.
Dorie: Yeah, Daniel. Thank you so much. It's great speaking with you, and I'll just mention if folks want to go any deeper, on my website, I have more than 500 free articles that I've written for places like Harvard Business Review and Forbes about a lot of these issues in business. Especially for folks who are interested in questions, like you were asking around how to stand out in business, I actually do have a free 42-page self-assessment that folks can get for free at dorieclark.com/join. J-O-I-N.
Daniel: You're stealing my thunder. I was going to pitch your website, and that 42 page. The questions are voluminous, and they're all amazing sparks for contemplation. I highly recommend people download that and work through it in their own time.
Dorie: I appreciate it. Thank you.
Daniel: I haven't gotten through it all the way. What do you think the approximate amount of time it takes someone to get through all of those questions [inaudible 00:40:31] Dorie?
Dorie: Possibly a lifetime.
Daniel: Well, we'll leave it right there. That's the perfect end point.