My take-aways from Nordic Business Forum day 2

For my own learning and in order to share them with my network, I thought of writing down my take-aways and some own reflections from Nordic Business Forum day 2. (Picture above is from Brene Brown). You may find my take-aways from the day 1 in the earlier blog. The amount of text of different speakers vary a lot depending on what I found relevant, interesting or what level of focus. I hope you will get some insights you find useful.

The second day of the NBF seminar was full of powerful, especially female speakers. The day started with Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx who was presented as Frustrated Consumer Turned Entrepreneur. Her topic was: How to find your idea for growth? One of her points was that sometimes what you do not know makes you do things in a different way. For example, at the beginning of Spanx, she did not know that there were fashion shows, so she contacted the store managers directly, which anyone had not dared to do. Innovation only happens when you are doing differently than anyone else. She also told about how she started her career as a door- to door salesperson of fax machines, which included a lot of setbacks for many years. I got an impression her that she must had a lot of grit and persistence to overcome difficulties, and just believing in herself after so many setbacks. She told us surprising thing about her upbringing and how her dad used to encourage her to fail. Typical question from her dad was: “What did you fail this week? And if the answer was nothing, he was not happy. Failure comes when you try. Obviously, this has worked very well for her, since not getting the fear of failure stop her. 

She pointed out that we do not want to appear that we do not understand something, because then we could be at risk. We need to overcome the fear of embarrassment and do not let the fear of embarrassment go after us. We need to be vulnerable to ask the question why, if you want be an innovator. Children ask often the question why, but when we grow up most adults forget to ask. We are too much on autopilot. It is important to you to switch off our inner autopilot if you want to innovate and overcome the fear of embarrassment. Her advice was: Go ahead and make a mistake and you might become memorable because of it. She told us funny examples how she has done that. She thinks that it is important to be free of things that others say and take risk to do things differently.

Spanx did not advertise for 17 years and during that time it became a global brand via worth of mouth. The reason behind this might be that she he said she is inspired about elevating women and for her it is always about the customer. She explained that we should not wait that customers will see that you are different, and to do that visuals are important. Spanx’s culture is very innovative. She said that ideas come from the universe. Therefore, it is important to always have a notebook, in case your mind wonders. She said it is also important to schedule think time think travels alone and allow time for daydreaming.

She said that for her doing business was never about money, but her love for innovation, and she thinks that it was just luck that she had succeeded. She also mentioned that she feels gratitude every day for all the women that have been there before her and who did not have the same opportunity as she did, eg. her mother and grandmother. She continued “that wakes me up every day to keep fire under my belly.”

I loved her story the most of all the presenters. It was very genuine and down to earth, and she could laugh at herself. As an entrepreneur, I have a lot to learn from her. I also use a notebook with me, when ever an idea, a vision or dream or a plan will come to my head. Challenge for me has been that I have too many of them, so being selective and follow them up in a more consistent way and with the same persistence as she has would be something I would like to work on. If you have not failed you have not tried enough- is good to remember, because it helps to recover more quickly after setbacks which happen to anyone in life from time to time. Feeling grateful, is something I have also learned to practice a lot, since I have worked on my tendency to more easily notice what is not missing.

The next lady brought a lot of energy, will power and confidence to the seminar hall. Carla Stanley is MD of Morgan Stanley and her topic was strategize to win. She talked about that we should expect to win and strategize to win. Based on her start I did not expect to end up with teachings about the leadership skills, but her main point was how to develop powerful and impactful leadership and socalled success equation. According to her in order to attract, motivate and sustain people, and to strategize to win you must be intentional in eight things.

1. Authenticity is your distinct competitive advantage. Be confident in your own skin. When you bring your authentic self, you attract others to do the same and then we will always outperform.

2. Build trust. You cannot lead if other people will not follow. You build trust by simply and intentionally delivering over and over again what you promise. Listen and people will tell what they value.

3. Create clarity - even when you cannot see clearly yourself. Find a way to create clarity around what success looks like - open gateways to people to outperform. I think this is something that should be done together with people to get a most holistic picture. It is not only leader’s job, otherwise the so called clear picture can be very subjective and wrong and people are also more committed when they can build the clarity together.

4. Be occupied by creating other leaders. The way to grow your power is to give it away. People have a fear of uncertainty, and leader’s job according to her is take the uncertainty away. I think that building other leaders so that everyone can feel that they are leaders in an organization is the key for leader’s job, but the purpose of it should not be growing leader’s own power by doing it.

5. Diversity is a dominant competitive parameter. You have to have a lot of ideas and perspectives in the room and for that you need to have a lot of different people. If you have a homogeneous thinking go-to-market strategy, it will not work. 

6. Innovation. You have to be intentional in teaching your teams how to fail. If people are afraid of failure, they will never try and reach it. Celebrate the failures. Leaders need to also be careful about their response in case of a failure, and people will become more comfortable in taking risk. Fear has no place in success equation. Out of fear you will underperform. It is always worth taking the risk.

7. Inclusivity. You need to be intentional in soliciting other people’s voices. Play devil’s advocate, ask each person by name and listen to them and see them. Everyone values being heard. Give feedback.

8. Your voice. You have to be willing to call a thing a thing. She was referring that it is important to speak up and bring up things that need to be discussed.

She concluded that it takes courage to be intentional about all these points. According to her you have to take the time to know who you are. We are all the time evolving. Bringing all that to the table, then you can relax. Based on my own experience this is one of the cornerstones in growing as a leader, knowing your self, what drives you and what triggers you.

She thinks that business has a new role in addition to serving the clients, owners and employees and that is community. The role of business is also to solve some of society’s needs.

She was very convincing and showed a clear path on how to develop as a leader. However, I think it is essential for leaders think where the motivation to lead and select different leadership behaviors come from. I think becoming more powerful should not be in any leader’s agenda but help others to be more powerful. I think that understanding our own hidden automatic patterns of thinking and core beliefs and motivation is very important. Carla Harris was definitely a great performer and she was the only speaker (if I recall correctly) applauds during the whole seminar from a standing audience.

Next speaker was Donald Miller, the CEO of StoryBrand. He talked about how the power of story can change your business. He started by saying that we should not tell our story, because telling our story can hurt our business. He continued, that most companies waste enormous amounts of money on marketing. If you cannot communicate what you do and what the person can get out of so that the potential client can understand it in 8 seconds, you will not make money. It is important to understand that customer wants to 1. Survive and thrive, and 2. Conserve calories. If your marketing is causing too much calories to understand, people do not see no more reason to listen to this person. Therefore, he stressed that marketing needs to get through this survival mechanism, and it should never be confusing. Instead it is important to use simple language. Eg. Trump’s message is something that everyone will remember: Make America great again. He thinks that people do not buy the best products and services but they buy products and services they can understand.

According to Miller, a story gives us meaning and a story is a sense making device, because human brain loves clarity. Only then we pause for attention otherwise we ignore. He presented 7 formulas for making stories ie. StoryBrand Messaging Filter. First create a character and second clarify, what the person wants. If your story is about too many things, it’s a problem. Third define what is the character’s problem (external, internal or philosophical). Fourth: the character meets a guide (your company) who help’s the character with empathy to win. Fifth: Guide gives the character a path to do business with her/her company. Sixth: The guide calls the character to action, which will result (seventh) in either success/failure depending on buying/not buying your product. If there are no stakes, there is no story. One main thing what the customer wants is to know what is the problem, that we will solve. If you confuse you will lose.

I really enjoyed the clarity of his teachings, that I try to remember more in my own business. Often the more you know about your services and longer the experience, more complicated the message can become, which might be confusing for the potential customers. Simple is beautiful.

Randi Zuckerberg. CEO of Zuckerberg Media shared several interesting stories about her career about eg. starting-up Facebook Live. She challenged us to think of what is our personal brand. She thinks we are all media companies, so it is important to clarify, who’s listening and identify what you are uniquely about and what are your three most memorable traits and combine them into a catchy phrase. Examples of these were the Green-haired Oprah of Linkedin. “You Zen Business Sherpa” or how she had identified herself being a Professional Mom to Entrepreneurs. The key is to get noticed by being authentic. She also encouraged people to take big bold idea and not be afraid to fail. 

George Clooney, Actor and Co-Founder of the flow Genome Project was interviewed on storytelling, branding and legacy. He gave an impression of himself being humble, humane, fun and thoughtful man who wants to make good things happen in the world and is also taking steps to do that. When helping the world it is important to pick your fights, go after the bad guys and use power against them. Opposite to the Randi Zuckerberg, he does not think people should be a brand. I interpreted that he calls more for authenticity than defining and presenting yourself to the market via a certain image/ brand. I think he was a great example of this himself in the interview being so relaxed, humble and down to earth.

He also showed his values by saying that “my children do not need to worry about insurance, so we need to work hard to make them understand (how hard the life can be when you do not have an insurance).” When choosing new collaboration partners, he uses so called “waiter test”. If a person is kind to him and rude to a waiter in the restaurant, and takes advantage of people, he is not interested in working with them. 

The last speaker was Brene Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston with the topic dare to lead. She has studied courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, leadership for 20 years. And after studying 150 transformation leaders, her conclusion was that the future of leadership is courage, because you cannot address the challenges without courage. According to her there is no innovation, without vulnerability.

In the absence of leadership, we easily tap out hard conversations, which are important to practice. We are emotional beings who occasionally think and therefore it is very important to develop our self-awareness. She thinks that we have to build organizations, where you can have difficult conversations. Brave leaders are not silent in front of hard issues. Leaders should ask every morning a question: Do I choose courage over comfort?

Failure is a great teacher, but after that you need to move on. It is not useful to find out whose fault the failure was. People who tend to blame when something goes wrong might have an action bias with inability to stay in the problem and be vulnerable and instead want to fix the everything immediately. She calls for staying in the problems longer. According to her we should spend 55 min finding the problem and 5 min solving the problem.

Then she continued talking about the shame and claimed that when you see the shame, there is already crisis in your office. It corrodes everything but you will not be able to see it. It is like termites, who have destroyed almost the whole house, before you have noticed anything. She pointed out that courage is teachable, because courage is just a habit. She presented fours steps on how to do that:

The first step is rumbling (ie. dancing) with vulnerability. Our armors get easily into the way of courage. She said that we are both brave and afraid all the time. There is no courage without vulnerability. If we do not experience and recognize eg. shame, scarcity, fear, anxiety, uncertainty we will not experience fully love, belonging and joy. (please find a beautiful picture of Brene Brown above). There is also no ethics without vulnerability. The second step that Brown presented is living into our values. It is important to think of what are your most important values and understand how they add value. She stresses that leaders have to have observable behaviors otherwise they are not living according to their values. The third step is braving trust. Leaders need to be clear since clear is kind, unclear is unkind. In building trust, ask for help, since according to her, we tend to trust people who ask for help. The final step is learning to rise after setbacks.

We do not get where we want to go without being brave. No 1 shame driver is am I still relevant and then if we do not feel that way, we armor up. Change is to take the armor out and she admits that it is not easy. One of her final piece of advice to the audience was: "Show up and be seen, stay engaged, change and innovate or die."

Having worked for 20 years within leadership development with the focus on human skills, including self-awareness and emotional intelligence, it is great to notice that this finally seems to be now being the hard core and mainstream of business events like this. Personally, in my growth as a person and a leader, I have learned a lot in dealing with shame and vulnerability. Eg. when I worked as a CEO of a subsidiary and start-up, I had unrealistic view of my own capability to carry out workload, which in a start-up is often endless and still too often felt not doing enough and felt shame because of it. Showing my vulnerability and allowing others to help and work with myself by developing self-awareness (which is a life-long journey), clarifying my values and mission, what brings me joy and what does not, helped me to clarify what I wanted and took the risk of resigning and started to work as an entrepreneur. I am glad I woke up before being burned out, but unfortunately many people nowadays don't. We should be more self-compassionate and take care of one another, encourage even more people to ask for help and build a sustainable working life. It is not weakness - like Brenè Brown said "it takes courage to show vulnerability."

In general, I think Nordic Business Forum has again done great job in creating this seminar with excellent speakers and awesome atmosphere. It is always great to see people you know as well easy to connect with new people. The brilliant customer service NBF is well known and it continued to excel again. For the future, it would be great to have more speakers from other parts of the world but USA, eg. Nordics and Europe to make it truly global. Looking forward to the next year, especially Yuval Noah Harari, and thank you for a great event!

My day 2's take-aways shortly are: Be authentic, constantly develop self-awareness, show vulnerability, ask the question why, organize thinking time, be courageous, be clear, take risks, do things in a different way, learn to fail, rise above setbacks and be grateful.

Sari Vuohtoniemi’s passion and mission is to help people and teams to unlock their true potential. She is Entrepreneur, Social Psychologist, Professional Certified Coach (ICF PCC) Certified Business Coach Master and seasoned leadership development and coaching professional with 20 years of experience. Sari has worked as a trainer, coach, consultant, leadership team member, vice president and CEO of a subsidiary. She has worked with a multitude of industries both in Finland and internationally and in government and other public organizations. Sari’s special expertise is in executive and leadership coaching and leadership team development, especially in the areas of creating better self-awareness and self-leadership, emotional intelligence, resilience, team dynamics, coaching leadership and handling challenging leadership and team situations. For more information www.truepotential.fi/en.