IAM1141- Founding Partner Helps Businesses Dominate New Markets

Kevin is a founding partner of Category Design Advisors and co-author of the book The Category Design Practice is based on, Play Bigger. He's been a journalist, author, and consultant in the tech space for more than three decades — author of nine books, contributor to publications ranging from Fortune to Wired to The Atlantic, and commentator on CNN, NPR, ABC, and other broadcast outlets.

• CEO Hack: Being extremely organized about deadlines
• CEO Nugget: Always have a number one kind of person and not number two
• CEO Defined: Leadership position

Website: http://www.categorydesignadvisors.com/

www.kevinmaney.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kmaney

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Transcription

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00:13 – Intro 

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:41 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Kevin Maney of Category Design Advisors. Kevin, it's great to have you on the show.

00:49 – Kevin Maney

Yeah, great, Gresh. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

00:52 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you for taking some time out and hopping on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Kevin so you can hear about all those awesome things that he's doing. Kevin is a founding partner of Category Design Advisors and co-author of the book, The Category Design Practices, based on Play Bigger.

He's been a journalist, author, and consultant in the tech space for more than 3 decades, author of 9 books, contributor to publications ranging from Fortune to Wire to The Atlantic, and commentator on CNN, NPR, ABC, and others and why run somebody else run your run and creates y love everything that Kevin preaches one of my absolute Kevin, great to have you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:34 – Kevin Maney

Yep, I am. I'm ready to go.

01:34 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit, to hear a little bit more about your story and what led you to get started with all the awesome things you're working on.

01:42 – Kevin Maney

Yeah, well, as you said in the opener, I was a journalist and then as a tech and writing about tech and society and longtime columnist for USA Today about tech. And that led me to write books. And all the books have been having something to do with technology and business and how to run a business or the industry, whatever, all those things. And one of those books came out 5 years ago, it was called Play Bigger.

That one had an enormous impact on my trajectory because, you know, I mean, I thought I was going to just continue to write more books, which I have actually, I've written 2 more books since that one came out. But that book proposed this concept of category design and it created a playbook for how to do that. And the book has been a phenomenal success way beyond whatever I would have thought.

Not just in sales, but what happened was as the book started to get out there, founders and CEOs would read this and they'd get in touch with us and say, please help us do what you just wrote about. And so I started to get increasingly sucked into that. So now I would say, I don't know, maybe 2 thirds or more of what I do in my work is working with leadership teams at companies to help them define a strategy around this idea of how do you create a new market category and define it in a way that you can own it over time.

That, I mean, that was sort of the basis of the book Play Bigger, but now this has grown into a whole practice and we've learned a lot since and all of that, but it's been just an amazing transition and it's a blast, I have to say, to do this work.

03:23 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I can imagine it's gotta be one of the most invigorating and exciting things that you get to do. Obviously being able to write that book and be able to create that framework and then have people that want to know how to implement it. I imagine that you're around so many different creative and innovative minds and people who really like putting a ding in the universe, so to speak.

03:41 – Kevin Maney

Well, yeah, and you know, the side benefit of it is that I get to learn a lot about all these different companies that are doing fascinating new things that I never would have even conceived of. And they're all in these very different spaces all over the map and ranging from consumer products to deep inside like the data center software kind of stuff. And I get to kind of get a front-row seat on all of it, which is really amazing.

04:09 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say front row seat in a participant, it sounds like from all the work that we do.

04:13 – Kevin Maney

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're dragging me out into the field. Exactly.

04:18 – Gresham Harkless

It's like you wrote this book, come help us implement this pretty please. And so I know you touched a little bit upon your book. I want to hear a little bit more about that. Could you take us through a little bit more on some of that? I think you said 60% or so of the work that you do and how you work with the clients you have.

04:32 – Kevin Maney

Yeah, well, so this whole idea of like no category design, I mean, it's not new, I mean, but it does make more difference now than I'd ever used to. So I'll tell you a very quick little story of the past. I'm sure a lot of your listeners have at some point in time owned a minivan. And what happened with that was back in the 1980s, Chrysler was about to go bankrupt it could not possibly have made a typical kind of car and said we were making a better car than Toyota or somebody who was dominating the market at the time.

So instead they looked around at demographic data and like what was going on, baby boomers were starting to move to suburbs and have kids. And they noticed what they perceived as a missing thing in the marketplace. And that was that if you had started to have 2 or 3 kids, and you could either just, you could either get a station wagon, which is just a little bit of a bigger car, Or you could go out and buy like a full-size van, which drove like a truck and it was too tall to fit in your garage and all.

And so, they essentially created this new category of car called the minivan. And what was interesting about that is when Chrysler went to market with it, they marketed the category. This idea that you know, if you're going to move out to the suburbs and have 2 or 3 kids, you need a new kind of car that doesn't exist yet. So they didn't go out and say, we built this thing called the Plymouth Voyager and it has all these features and stuff, they went out and said, you're missing something if you don't have one of these things.

And marketed the idea of the minivan first, and then we've got these products that solve that problem that we describe you with the minivan. So it saves Chrysler by creating this new market space. By the way, 40 years later, they still own 50% of the worldwide market of minivans. So you create that category and you own it, it's pretty hard to dislodge you from it. But that kind of thinking is what we bring to companies is to say, okay, you've been around 3 years, you've been building some successful products, but you're kind of stuck because you're trying to grab market share out of an existing space and that's really hard to do.

So what if we looked at the marketplace you served, let's find that place, that open spot, like where the minivan would go, right? That thing that doesn't exist yet has to exist. Is there an old problem that we can solve in a new and better way than it's ever been solved before? For that matter, can we tell people that they have, explain to people they have a problem they didn't even know they had before? And then by doing that, by describing that category, describing that need first, and then saying we're the ones who are going to supply that. It's a it's a sort of an inside-out way to look at how to spot a market and go after it.

But it really as I've as this happened, I mean, we've worked out with 40, 45 companies or something like that over these last 5 years, it's a really effective way for a company to see a strategy that can work over the long term for them and put some words behind it so that it's well defined and get everybody in the company behind that, that North Star. So it's, that's sort of the bare essence of what the book is about and then what the practices that we've developed around it.

07:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And so would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for your book, your business, or a combination of both, or yourself personally. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique? Is it that ability to kind of, first of all, articulate that, but also it's happened to that for organizations and their leaders?

08:15 – Kevin Maney

Well, for me personally, if you're asking the personal secret sauce question, a lot of it. So this whole journalistic background is amazingly helpful in this whole process for a couple of reasons. For one, so I've been writing about technology for all these decades. I've seen everything and I've been And I read about technology history too. So I understand a huge broad context that even if a company that we start working with is doing something that I'm not familiar with, I will bring to the conversation a big historical context of what has worked and what hasn't in the past and what's out there and how different, I mean, I've interviewed everybody from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos to everybody else who got a name.

So even have some knowledge of how those people have handled these situations before that I can bring to these conversations. And then just that journalistic training of asking the right questions and listening hard to people to understand what they're saying behind what they're actually saying. And then being able to put all that together because one of the important deliverables that we have is this document we call the POV. The POV is maybe it's an 800, 1000 word narrative story that tells the story of the category you're trying to create and puts it in words so that everybody at the company can clearly understand what that goal is.

And so, you know, And I'm able to bring that writing ability to very clearly write that. I spent 20 years writing for USA Today where you had to write about complex technology in a way that your grandmother would understand. And that ends up being tremendously helpful in these situations. So that's, I mean, that past of mine, bringing it forward into this advisory role for startups, it has been my big advantage, my big secret sauce in this process.

10:12 – Gresham Harkless

And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something you think makes you more effective and efficient?

10:22 – Kevin Maney

I do think that one of the things that has helped me a lot is just being extremely organized around deadlines. And so when I take on a book, for instance, I've got enough experience at this point that I can understand what has to go into the book and the pace that things have to be written so that I meet the deadline and don't end up having to write everything in the last 3 weeks. And I take pieces of paper and I storyboard the whole thing out on a wall with dates about what has to be achieved.

10:59 – Gresham Harkless

So definitely appreciate that. And so I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell your younger business self or potentially something you might tell a client as well.

11:12 – Kevin Maney

Yeah, you know, I something when we scheduled this, actually, something came to mind about that was from an older book of mine called The 2 Second Advantage. The 2 second advantage, the idea behind the book was to write about the way that brain science was influencing computer science as people were starting to chase AI. And in fact, the way that the chase for AI was influencing the way people thought about brain science. So there's a lot of brain science kind of things in the book.

11:43 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. So I appreciate that. And so I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. Having interviewed, worked with, and spoken to so many quote-unquote CEOs, I wanted to ask you, Kevin, what being a CEO means to you.

11:57 – Kevin Maney

Well, I'm gonna play off of what we just talked about and say that the CEO has to be the one with the vision, the one that's going to walk up to the top of a hill and plant a flag and say, we're all going to march to this. The best CEOs that I've run across, even at small startups, are not the ones who are going to get involved with a lot of the day-to-day and dig deep into the data of every financial transaction or whatever that's happening.

They have this big idea and they can rally people around it. It's a leadership. It really is a leadership position a bully pulpit position and an image position. You want the CEO to create an image and a culture for the company that people feel good about and want to be a part of. And to me, a CEO, a great CEO are the people who can do those things really well and then surround themselves with great people that can do all of those other things and deal with the details and deal with the, you know the engineering and the finances and the marketing plans and all those kinds of things. So, I mean, that's, you know, again, going back to you really need to be a one.

13:15 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love that. I appreciate you, you know, expounding upon that. And I think so many times that you know, once you have that person that is able to chart that path to put that flag down, so to speak, there's this, there's this interview with Michael Jordan and his coach. And he said, like, what did you do to help Michael Jordan hit the last shot? I was like, I gave him the ball and I told everybody else to get the heck out of the way. And a lot of times as a leader, you have to do that same thing. You have to understand this is the one and everybody else, you know, handle what it is that you need to do, and let's get out of his way. And I think we need to do that ourselves as leaders, but also as the people that are around us as well to help them to prosper and to grow in the places that they have.

13:50 – Kevin Maney

Yep. And to add to that right there, the best CEOs don't care who gets the credit for whatever happens. They want their team to thrive speak up have the credit and do what they do well. When I go into a project, so because when we do these category design projects, we sit around a table with 6 or 10 or whatever of the leadership team. And when we go in and do one of these and the CEO is doing all the talking and everybody else is most listening, we'll go like, oh, this is a problem. There's real, there's trouble here. If we go into a company where the CEO decides that he or she wants to be the last one speaking most of the time and gets everybody else to take the lead, then we go like, all right, this is the right feeling here.

14:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that speaks volumes. You definitely have that collaborative environment. You can definitely hear and feel that as well too, as you said so well. So Kevin, truly appreciate that definition. I of course appreciate your time as well. What I want to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get ahold of you, get a copy of your books, and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

15:05 – Kevin Maney

Yeah, I know I appreciate that. Yeah, well, I mean, based on the book Play Bigger, we formed a firm called Category Design Advisors, and you can find us at categorydesignadvisors.com. And we love to work with companies and, and, you know, love to hear from anybody that's listening to you that is interested. And, and I have, I have a website if you're interested in the other books that I've written, you can find them all in one place on kevinmaney.com. And yeah, I'd be happy to hear from any of your listeners.

15:38 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, to make that even easier, we'll definitely have the links and information in the show notes. And I'll definitely reiterate it again. I say it so many times on the podcast is why. If you run your own race, then you'll never lose. So I appreciate you for helping organizations, leaders, and people run their own races and find out what that is and what that looks like. So thank you so much again, Kevin. Appreciate you. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:00 – Outro