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Jonathan David Lewis: If you’re not touching, feeling, using, the book. If you’re not reading it, if you’re not carrying with you everywhere, if it’s not in your bag on the plane then it’s not doing you any good. When you think about the scenario we’re all in today, the market place we’re all in today. It feels like we’re all in the trenches.

So, the concept behind the book, the cover, is that this is a field manual. This is something that you’re carrying with you everywhere you go. You’re referencing it all the time. Simply because you need to have that resource to go back to. You need that perspective, especially when you’re disrupted. Because disruption, by it’s very nature, disorients you. It forces you to lose perspective.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right. This book is really a conversation about disruptive businesses that you ran into during the last years and the great recession, in which we’re all still bailing out of and comparing to classic adventures. Where people went out against the wild and survived or not. You draw parallels between the experience of people being tossed into the middle of a survival situation where it literally was disrupt or die.

A lot of brands that we know that are now no longer in business. You put together a manual for helping people navigate the disruption and then, ultimately, create disruption. I think the thing that’s interesting about the book is the first half is how do you figure out what’s going on in the disruption of your business. The second half is how to you actively pursue disruption. Where does this inspiration come from?

Jonathan David Lewis: If you look at the research that led to the book, we’ve conducted two national studies over the last decade. In those two studies, we discovered there’s seven factors that affect growth in businesses today. Three of them are external. Statistically and significantly proving to affect the growth of companies.

They’re the things you’d expect, the economy. If the economy is suffering, we all suffer. Often that is the catalyst that is the disruption that causes companies to lose their way. You saw it with boarders when they had these terrible leases set up and they had way too much inventory.

The recession hit, didn’t have enough cash, they couldn’t get out of these leases. Of course, now they’re not with us anymore. You see it over and over. These companies just aren’t prepared for disruption.

The economy of aggressive competition which, as we’re seeing today, dislodges you if you’re not prepared for it. Then you have industry disruption itself. It might be a new regulation. So, healthcare is a great example today. They’re just constantly in the throes of disruption because there’s no certainty in their environment.

Mark S A Smith: That’s for sure. So, those are the three external factors of the seven.

Jonathan David Lewis: What we discovered, which was so fascinating, is four of the seven statistically significant factors that affect business growth are internal. They’re inside companies, they’re inside of you. They’re within your control and far too often they’re being ignored by all of us.

There are things like a lack of nerve on your team, a loss of focus in the market place. Inconsistency in your marketing itself. And then ultimately, companies turning savage. Where they have a real lack of alignment internally. These are things that if they’re out of wack, if they’re unhealthy, they actually affect your growth as a business.

Mark S A Smith: Let’s talk about these seven factors. I think they’re absolutely critical to success. You and I are in alignment with that.

Jonathan David Lewis: So, the aha. The thing that led to the premise of the book was we discovered these seven factors. When we correlated those factors with the latest in survival psychology we discovered that there’s actually very little different psychologically between a group of people that crash land on top of a mountain. And a group of business leaders in a board room trying to tackle a business problem. Both groups are going through the same very predictable response to disruption.

Both groups can get out of that bad negative space in the same way.

Mark S A Smith: That’s what makes the book an interesting read. As you weave together these survival stories with the survival stories of the brands, of corporation, that have made it or not. It really nails home the story around that. The economy, obviously, can make a huge impact on a company’s business.

In fact, one of the Selling Disruption strategies is to survive you must have a business infrastructure and operations that scale with business cycles. And if they don’t scale with business cycles, you will be put out of business by a bad downturn or a great upturn.

Jonathan David Lewis: Mm-hmm.

Mark S A Smith: Of course, aggressive competition, we’re seeing that everywhere. As a matter of fact, I saw something just this past week where the prediction is at 40% of the fortune 500 brands won’t last a decade. I think that number is low.

Jonathan David Lewis: I think you might be right. You look at where we are today, it feels in many ways like they reached the tipping point. The retail apocalypse is around us everywhere.

Mark S A Smith: Without a doubt.

Jonathan David Lewis: Everywhere you look, all of these historic iconic brands are falling apart. Guess how they’re reacting? They’re reacting to the very predictable way that’s outlined in the book. Where they’re falling into fear. Then they lose their focus, then they’re inconsistent and ultimately they’re savage. If you open up the hood and look inside these companies today you’ll find their best people are leaving.

There’s turf wars. They’re not on the same page. They’re paralyzed by their fear. The very things that we have discovered in the research, that you’re seeing everywhere around you. What people don’t understand is it’s not like Elon Musk and all these savants, it’s not like they have some secret knowledge that nobody else has. They can’t tell the future.

They just simply understand that the modern economy requires a different set of principles to succeed.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Jonathan David Lewis: As opposed to the old economy. The last 100 years, as you’ve outlined previously, we’ve all learned. We’ve all experienced that. You’re supposed to always grow and size is strength. You look at things like … I’ve been in business for 50 years.

That means that I know how to succeed. Well, unfortunately, that could be your greatest weakness today.

Mark S A Smith: Ain’t that the truth. As a matter of fact, it probably is what’s going to drive you out of business because what worked 50 years ago, isn’t working today. Heck, what worked five years ago isn’t working today. All those things that we have relied upon, such as efficiency has replaced by flexibility.

Jonathan David Lewis: You look at efficiency, I mean, this is something that’s almost in our human nature.

Mark S A Smith: Yes.

Jonathan David Lewis: We are obsessed with efficiency today. If you look at all the movements around self-help becoming more process driven and everyone in business, especially, is obsessed with efficiency. Efficiency only works when you have a lot of stability in the economy. If you have a lot of certainty in your industry or economy. Once you lose your certainty, once you lose that stability, than efficiency actually ways you down. You’re stuck in your process rather than the word you use, flexibility. This is the key.

It’s one thing to say, I need to be flexible. It’s another thing to put it in action. When you look at the businesses out there that truly understand this, you might look at somebody like Whole Foods. They’re facing their own disruption.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah they are.

Jonathan David Lewis: Truly. But when you look at structurally how they’re set up, they’re not top down central command controlled. Each of their stores has so much autonomy, picture them like an organism that each hop off the arm. The rest of the organism can continue to thrive. Each of their departments in empowered of PNL’s. Each of their stores is empowered.

If one fails, they have to have access to that information so they can thrive. Even if half their company disappears tomorrow. Simply because they’re structured in that way as opposed to, all of these examples we have over the last 10 – 15 years of companies that have been making assumptions that things will remain as they are today.

Of course, it leads to them going out of business.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right. This specific conversation about efficiency versus flexibility is the biggest disruptor in the world of technology. Specifically IT and information technology. In February of 2017, Mark Heard who is the CEO of Oracle, declared that 80% of the data centers in operation today will no longer be in operation by 2025. I believe that that’s’ going to happen a lot sooner.

He says the transition is going to be exponential. Part of the reason why is because data centers have been focusing on this concept of efficiency versus flexibility. The end result is the cloud.

Probably one of the most disruptive aspects in the world of IT and one of the biggest enablers of disruption across lots and lots of industries. As we talk about artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Making massive changes in the market place. We’re just getting started Jonathan.

It’s going to freak a lot of companies out. And, I think, you’ve really spelled out the path. Anybody who has a company who is under pressure needs to take look at this book. Anybody who wants to disrupt needs to take a look at this book.

Jonathan David Lewis: One of my favorite concepts that I learned recently is from Dave Gray, who wrote this wonderful book called The Connected Company. He talks about to bring to life the idea of efficiency versus flexibility. He explains that most of the time, most companies are facing some sort of disruption. They’re on train tracks and they face the disruption.

What they do, say there’s a landslide or something. They bring their team together, they go in the board room and they intense conversations. The whole conversation is all right, how do we get around this mudslide? Do we tunnel under it? Do we go around it? Do we go over it?

When really, fundamentally, the problem isn’t the landslide. The problem is the train tracks that you are a train on train tracks. You don’t just need to build a better system of train tracks, you need to get off the tracks. You need to become a helicopter transportation company. Or you need to do something else, buy an 18-wheeler. Simply because we all have all of these assumptions set and founded in efficiency that causes to not even understand how to get to a solution.

We can’t even conceive of a different solution because of our assumption are incorrect.

Mark S A Smith: That’s’ right. You have a really interesting exercise which you spell out in the book called the Wall Test. About how to break through those particular paradigms as views of the world. Would you describe for our listener the Wall Test that you invented and how you use it?

Jonathan David Lewis: It can be pretty funny or pretty sad, depending on how your brand is doing. But, what we do when we first begin working with new clients is we actually will take a snapshot of the entire industry as it exists today. So, we’ll do competitive research on every major competitor. We’ll take all the branding and marketing of the current client. We put it on a big wall. What happens is, visually, all of the sudden you start to make connections that you couldn’t see otherwise.

Where all of those paradigms and assumptions that everybody is making, if you look at it in the industry you can see that everybody sort of falls into the convention. Health care is probably the worst. Every ad you see health care has some elderly woman smiling at a nurse and everything his happy. The reality, obviously, is quite different.

Mark S A Smith: There’s a lot of cliché.

Jonathan David Lewis: It’s just so bad. But if you do this wall text and you look at how everyone is representing themselves, you look at the colors, the logos, the language they’re using. Not only do you see very clearly the conventions from a communications stand point. If you look really closely you can start to see the conventions in business and structure. You get to see, even just five minutes of this, looking at this wall. You get to see the opportunities of, if I zig here while everyone else is zagging, will that differentiate me? Is there an opportunity there?

So, it’s very simple but yet very effective.

Mark S A Smith: I love it. My suggestion, listener, is do the all test for your market place right now. If you’re going to look for any kind of clues for disruption, it’s going to be the part of what your competitors are doing that make you uncomfortable. And for anyway that you can disrupt.

Looking for what everybody else is doing and completely ignoring it. You are going to go a long way to surviving and thriving in this disruptive market place.

Jonathan David Lewis: Absolutely.

Mark S A Smith: Let’s talk about the four internal factors, Jonathan. The lack of nerve and the loss of focus, I think, are very similar that are obviously different but they’re very similar. A lot of companies lack courage.

Jonathan David Lewis: It’s interesting when you look at the predictable response to disruption. The first that happens in the wilderness, whenever you’re pushed in some uncertain environment you’re overcome with fear. This is physiological, you don’t have a choice. The same thing happens in business.

When an aggressive competitor comes out of nowhere or some disruption occurs, you are literally overcome with fear. There’s all these physiological processes that occur. Adrenaline is pumping, your rational brain actually moves to your irrational brain. And your irrational side starts taking over making the decision for you.

Mark S A Smith: That happens to a lot of people in the bar too, by the way.

Jonathan David Lewis: There’s multiple paths to your irrational brain. That’s for sure. You look at all of these responses.

First thing is fear and it paralyzes. There’s this interesting theory that Dr. John Leech has put together based on his years of research and survival psychology. He says in any survival scenario, that 10% of folks facing that survival scenario react rationally and can actually get through it with their logical mind.

80% freeze. They’re paralyzed. They don’t know what to do so they don’t do anything. Then another 10% panic. So, it’s the 10 – 80 – 10 theory. That means, 90% of the folks listening today, when they’re faced with something they’re not expecting in business are going to react incorrectly. They’re going to be paralyzed or even panic.

Mark S A Smith: My listeners are way more intelligent loon, that I put them closely to the 10%. Because they go through the training but you’re right. 90% of people who are faced with an emergency, a business emergency, a health emergency, a survival emergency, are going to not make it out.

Yet, I believe, that’s the reason why we have listeners to this show. Is because this is part of their business, this is what they have to do. A leader must be able to be in that 10% otherwise they tank their company and their career is over. As well as taking a lot of good people with them.

How do we be that 10%? How do we stay in that top 10%?

Jonathan David Lewis: That’s a good point. I love that you brought that up. In that, you don’t have to stay in the 90%.

Mark S A Smith: No.

Jonathan David Lewis: Where most of the population is. You can actually move to the 10%. It’s as simple as, I hate to say it but, if you’re smart today and you go to movie and you’re sitting in the theater you should be looking at the exits. You should run through the shooter scenario, or the fighter scenario, in your mind. Take two seconds to do it before you sit down and relax and watch the movie.

If you do that, you are far more likely to be in the 10% who can react without thinking with the crisis occurs and live. Same thing is true in business. It’s simple in that, if you’re not taking time to consider what you need to walk through to keep in mind, and put into an active state of collecting information. Looking at your surroundings, versus a passive state of just letting things happen to you.

If you’re not taking that time to be active, you will be dislodged and disoriented when crisis strikes.

Mark S A Smith: It’s inevitable. I think it’s a really important element that you have to keep retraining and retraining and retraining. Even though I’m a multi-million miler, every time I sit down in the airplane I find out where the exits are. I also identify where the life raft is and where the life vest is. I pray that I never have to use any of them but I still know where they are.

I think the same thing happens in business. The classic Archilochus quote of “We don’t rise to our level of aspiration. We fall to our level of training.” Is absolutely spot on in this particular discussion. You have to be prepared.

Jonathan David Lewis: This is one of the mistakes you have to be careful of. Someone like you, someone like me, we travel a lot. So, when I enter a plane, the last thing I’m doing is listening to the emergency instructions or reading the pamphlet in front of me. I assume that I know it.

Studies say, that you really absolutely, no matter how many times you’ve been on a plane, should listen to the emergency instructions and read the pamphlet in front of you. Because if you’re not actively preparing when the disaster strikes, something you learned two, five years ago isn’t just going to jump to the front of your brain. You have to be prepared.

Mark S A Smith: Absolutely true. So, lack of nerve happens because of the impact of the unexpected. So, we have to have training. We have to keep on top of these situations.

Jonathan David Lewis: Yes. And I would say, it’s not so much about not being afraid because fear is a physical response that we cannot control. You will be afraid. It’s about what do you do once you are afraid?

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Jonathan David Lewis: If you’re most people, it ends poorly. However, if you know that you’re going to be afraid you can take the appropriate steps. In the book, it outlines the very first thing you do when you’re in that survival scenario is you stop. It might be two seconds, it might be an hour. Whatever it is.

But you have to stop because your irrational brain is in control. You have to physically stop and allow your rational brain to take back control.

Mark S A Smith: Right. We get back to the old boy scout survival tactic.

Jonathan David Lewis: Exactly.

Mark S A Smith: Of stop, think, observe, and plan.

Jonathan David Lewis: Exactly.

Mark S A Smith: So, all of that boy scout and girl scout training, listener, pull that out when you’re up against any kind of a threatening situation. Including a competitive sales situation.

Jonathan David Lewis: Yeah. We find ourselves in the situation when we’re lost, say, in the wilderness or we’re afraid. We can be paralyzed but often the 10%, that want to panic, they often just want to do something just to do it. They want action for action sake. We see this in business as well.

Action isn’t always positive. If it’s irrational or erratic or inconsistent. Stopping may be the last thing you want to do. Your body may be screaming for action but you need to calm yourself just for a moment to begin the process of getting perspective. That’s where it all comes back to. You have to have perspective in order to navigate a disrupted market place.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right. That leads us to that fifth point, loss of focus. We have to regain our focus.

Jonathan David Lewis: Absolutely. What we’ve discovered is when you are in that survival scenario, distraction is the name of the game. Your body is either frozen in place or screaming for action and the last thing it wants to do is focus on one thing. Your mind is going to be all over the place and in marketing and in business building your brain is going to be all over the place.

If you just take a moment to calm yourself and consider your own actions today in this moment or your own mind as you drove to work this morning, you probably had a million things on your brain. You probably were not focused on what is the thing I have to accomplish to advance my business today.

Focus, after fear, it’s the very next thing to go. Your body doesn’t want to focus. It actually, in a physiological sense, it gets tunnel vision. Where very literally, you cannot focus. You can see one point of clarity and everything else in your surroundings is not visible to your mind in that moment.

That’s a very, very dangerous place to be when you’re in the wilderness.

Mark S A Smith: Yes.

Jonathan David Lewis: The next step, after you’ve stopped. You have to orient. This is where you begin to get perspective. You look at the classic example, Steve Jobs for instance, coming back to Apple when Apple was near bankruptcy about to break up. Everybody Steve Jobs is a miracle worker and he’s just this incredible genius. Of course, he’s very, very talented. The only reason Steve Jobs came back and was so successful is because he was gone for year.

Mark S A Smith: Very good.

Jonathan David Lewis: He was gone. He was in his own wilderness at that time toying around with his other businesses. He was gaining perspective. When he came back, he was making moves nobody could believe. He was making partnerships with Microsoft and no body understood what the heck is Steve Jobs up to?

He simply saw clearly. He didn’t have access to any more information than anybody else. The fundamental problem that Microsoft and others had was they were entrenched in the status quo. They had a web of partnerships. They could not disrupt themselves without cannibalizing their own profits.

Steve Jobs had the perspective and was able to come in and just take the very logical steps. Take advantage of that situation.

Mark S A Smith: Yep. That’s exactly it. So, his stopping and breathing and doing other things created the focus he needed to slash down to the core products that could make a massive difference in the market place. Of course, today, Apple is the most valuable company on the planet.

Let’s talk about inconsistent marketing as the sixth factor of success that you’ve identified through your research.

Jonathan David Lewis: When you look at the research and as people find themselves in these situations where they’re lost, they become very, very inconsistent. How we phrase it is, the wild, quite literally turns brands and companies wild.

When you’re in that state of wanting action for actions sake, you begin to look for easy answers. You begin to look for silver bullet thinking. Or you might just act because it feels good to do something.

Mark S A Smith: I think, Jonathan, that a lot of companies have done that in the past and been successful with it and rewarded by it but it just no longer works.

Jonathan David Lewis: Absolutely, it’s not that you should try new things, it’s that if you’re not strategic or if you don’t know why you’re doing it, you’re very predictably acting inconsistently. If you’ve gone through five CMO’s in the last five years, you are inconsistent. You’ve gone through give marketing partners in the last five years, you are very inconsistent.

It’s so easy in survival scenarios to scape goat. To blame somebody else. Guess who gets blame? It’s usually the marketing folks. When really you should be looking at yourself, are you inconsistent? Do you understand, where you’re going, why you’re going there and how to get there?

Mark S A Smith: Jonathan, I think it’s not just inconsistent but it’s also abdication of responsibility. I see a lot of companies advocate responsibility into a VP of sales, VP of marketing, where the executive running the organization says, you do that. That’s your area of expertise. Those people then recycle what worked at the last company that they worked for without thinking about context.

You talk about context in the book, how critical that is to success. Context, content, and then curation. Really extraordinary conversation in that particular chapter. But let’s talk about this fact that inconsistent marketing kills virtually every organization that has it happen to them.

In fact, Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing and one of my co-authors, pointed out that consistency is the number one impact for marketing. The fact that we get sick to death about what we’re doing, about the time people take notice and start to take action.

Jonathan David Lewis: Absolutely, when you look at inconsistency, I would venture to say most companies today are acting inconsistently. Especially when it comes to marketing communications. Your point about abdicating responsibility is really interesting in that, this raises the point that while there’s a predictable path from fear, to loss of focus, to inconsistency, to savagery in terms to response to disruption. They all play into each other.

Abdicating responsibility is another way of saying, you’re afraid.

Mark S A Smith: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan David Lewis: You don’t have the courage to have a bold vision and take responsibility for implementing that bold vision.

Mark S A Smith: Or your flat our lazy and not learning what you need to learn as a director, as a manager, as an executive. What you need to know to make the judgment.

Jonathan David Lewis: Absolutely. If you look at inconsistency, you look at someone like Blockbuster. This is a situation where the market was demanding more entertainment than ever in history. It wasn’t that the market didn’t want what Blockbuster provided. It was that they wanted more of it, in a different way.

Mark S A Smith: Yes.

Jonathan David Lewis: If you look at what Blockbuster did in the midst of that, not only did they turn down Netflix, they made a deal with Enron for online streaming. Of course, we know what happened to Enron. They had all this in fighting, they tried to do their own version of Netflix. They were just all over the place.

But when you briefly look at what they were trying to do, they had zero context or perspective. They went all in on the retail experience. They actually went a hiring spree. Hired all of these managers out of 7-Eleven, brought them in to focus on the retail experience. They were selling tchotchkes and all kind of random things at the checkout because they couldn’t see … it’s amazing. One of the biggest companies at that time, they couldn’t see clearly that nobody wanted what they were providing. They wanted what they were facilitation.

Mark S A Smith: The problem is that they didn’t take the 7-Eleven experience far enough. They didn’t have Slurpee machines.

Jonathan David Lewis: That had to have been it.

Mark S A Smith: That’s got to be it.

Jonathan David Lewis: That’s the silver bullet answer, Slurpee machines.

Mark S A Smith: Well, because you can’t make it at home. Everything else you can pretty much get everywhere else. Nothing like a movie and a Slurpee.

You talk about companies turning savage. We see this all the time. In fact, I guarantee our listener has experienced a company turning savage. Where organizations turn on each other and out of desperation they become cannibalistic and just destroy people. Of course, the best people flee.

Jonathan David Lewis: It’s really a lack of alignment. When you look at what happens in survival scenarios, lack of alignment, turns into savagery. Now, you have these scenarios like Earnest Shackleton, who tried to traverse Antarctica and was trapped in the ice and this harrowing story of survival. Very, very powerful story. They did not turn savage. Even though they had some of the worst circumstances on earth. Why were they able to consistently push forward through some of the worst environment on earth and survive?

Mark S A Smith: Shackleton’s leadership.

Jonathan David Lewis: Exactly. There was alignment from top down and courage and focus. All of the things necessary to survive, regardless of the external factors.

Mark S A Smith: I also know that Shackleton celebrated every breath. He would do things every day to celebrate the small success they had to keep people moving forward.

Jonathan David Lewis: That’s the internal moral. When a leader understands how important the culture, the moral, the alignment is internally and what that actually even means. There’s a lot of cliché ways of looking at that, but if a leader really understands that, that is the differentiator when faced with disruption.

Between a company who faces it and collapses and someone who gets through it. Contrast Earnest Shackleton. One of the rarer situations where they made it through and survived, in this harrowing story, with most of the other survival scenarios. You’ll find incredible savagery.

One of the, I think most poignant examples of this … one of the famous expeditionary teams who have done a lot of climbing on Everest and Into Thin Air was the famous book and movie about it. There’s a scenario where his climbers, they’re headed up Everest. They are put in a situation where they’re near death.

These other climbers come along, they help them live. They give them food and their provisions and then move on. So, these climbers continue later up the mountain. This original crew who almost died come across another crew of people trying to climb who are in a perilous situation and don’t do anything. They let this other crew, essentially die, as they climb to the top of Everest.

When a reporter asked these climbers when they came back down the mountain, “How could you have received this help and continued on your journey and then not giving?” The answer from the climbers was, “There is no morality above 18,000 feet.”

Mark S A Smith: Oh boy.

Jonathan David Lewis: This is a poignant example of when the heat is on, people lose themselves. They lose what matters. And if your entire perspective has no understanding of humanity or the heart or human nature, you might make it to the summit this time. You’re probably going to each other alive the next time, or somebody is going to die.

If you’re like Ernest Shackleton, and you have this not only incredible leadership but a real understanding of human nature and how people tick, then you can take the time to nurture that internal alignment. Which isn’t some soft skill that doesn’t really matter for people that are action oriented. No, no, no. It is everything in marketing and business to make it through these disruptive environments.

Mark S A Smith: That’s it. Well said. What a great conversation, Jonathan David Lewis and your new book Brand Vs. Wild. I got to tell you listener, I got it the first day it was available from Amazon.com. I have 20 pages dog eared. Which means, I came up with 20 ideas that were worth reviewing and lots of highlighting here and lots of wonderful sharing of stories and strategies.

My suggestion is get the book, read the book, because you will be disrupted and you need to disrupt. Jonathan, you’ve put together a really magnificent handbook on how to survive disruption and disrupt to thrive. Well done.

How can people get a hold of you?

Jonathan David Lewis: Of course, you can find Brand Vs. Wild on Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, anywhere books are sold.

Mark S A Smith: And on the show page.

Jonathan David Lewis: You can find me at JonathanDavidLewis.com, learn more about the book and more about surviving the wild.

Mark S A Smith: What a great conversation, thank you so much for being my guest on the Selling Disruption show.

Jonathan David Lewis: Thanks for having me.