Name: Keynote — Find a Way: Innovating Your Path to Institutional Resilience
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T17:45:07.583Z
Duration: 45 min 56 s
Description: Keynote — Find a Way: Innovating Your Path to Institutional Resilience

Transcript for "Keynote — Find a Way: Innovating Your Path to Institutional Resilience": Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome in. So excited to see you all here. Hope you were able to join us for Chase's opening remarks. We are so so excited to have you all with us here today. We will get started shortly. Just letting everyone funnel in here. Hope you're having a nice morning. I keep telling people to get their coffee. I must need some really this morning, so get some more coffee if you need it. We are so excited excited to have you all here. So I am thrilled, to welcome our keynote, Josh Linkner. Josh Linkner is a rare blend of business, art, and science. He is the New York Times best selling author of four books and widely regarded as one of the world's foremost innovation and leadership experts. On the business front, he's been the founder and CEO of five tech companies, which have created over 10,000 jobs and and sold for a combined value of over $200,000,000. He is also the cofounder and managing part partner of Mudita Venture Partners, an early stage venture capital firm investing in groundbreaking technologies. Over the last thirty years, he has helped over 100 startups launch and scale, creating over a billion in investor returns. And while proud of his business success, his roots are in the dangerous world of jazz music. He's been playing guitar in smokey jazz clubs for forty years and has performed nearly 2,000 concerts around the world. So best selling author, proven CEO, tech entrepreneur, jazz guitarist, please help me welcome Josh Linkner. Danny, thank you so much, and great to be with everybody today. Chase, I really enjoyed your remarks, and we are at a pivotal moment. There's no question about it. And so today, we're gonna explore what do we do? How can we respond to this moment in time? Go ahead and share my screen, and then we'll dive in. Alright. There we go. Good. So, as Chase mentioned, I I like this now this analogy of this Netflix moment. And it's not just Netflix. There was a Zoom moment. There there there is an AI moment. And and what's happening is that these moments are coming even faster, which means that for those of us in higher ed, we need to rise to that challenge. We're at an inflection point, and the the choices that we make right now, we're gonna lay the foundation for our future success or or or something that falls short of it. I was thinking often about, my college experience when I when I was preparing for today, and I remember stepping foot into, Boston at the Berkeley College of Music as a freshman. And, my experience I didn't even think of a digital experience. I didn't even know what digital was. I I had no mobile phone, no email. Everything was done on paper. You had to submit punch cards the whole thing. And so you might say, yeah. Of course. Like, that was a long time ago. And sure it was thirty years ago, but the pace of change is accelerating. And so while that sounds so distant, like I'm an ancient dinosaur, I love this quote from Mark Cuban that the next five years will dwarf the last thirty. So to Chase's point, it's not only that we're having a Netflix moment, but those Netflix moments are accelerating, which means that we're being called to show up differently, called to lead, ultimately called to find a way. And that's why we're here, to to to explore new possibilities, to think differently, and ultimately to serve all of those that we care about throughout our campuses. Think about what's happening in the world. There's not just one factor, there's multiple factors stacking. So there's inflation and rising cost, and there's a skills gap that's evolving, and there's geopolitical turmoil and tech transformation, etcetera. Then when you look specifically into the world of of universities and and higher ed, there's this demographic cliff that we're we're, facing. Legacy portals, digital sprawl, there's constraints on LMS systems, digital campuses, shared governance. And so all of this is coming together to tell us a very clear message that we can't simply rely on the models of the past and expect the same outcome. As mentioned, today, we're call we're being called to lead differently. I've always loved this one by researcher Edward de Bono. You can't look in a new direction by looking harder in the same direction. To Chase's point, it wasn't that Blockbuster needed to, you know, sell more DVDs or open more stores. They needed to evolve completely. And I think that's the opportunity that we face in higher ed right now, which leads me to my passion. As Andy mentioned, I'm a a a very passionate jazz guitar player. I know not everyone loves listening to it. I get it. It's an acquired taste. I heard a funny one recently that a, country musician plays three chords to 100,000 people in the audience. A jazz musician plays a 100,000 chords to three people in the audience. It's kinda true. Whether or not you love listening to jazz, to me, I think it's the ideal metaphor for what we're facing. The truth is that many of us got to this point in our career. We're on this call because we were very good, what I would call, is classical music leaders. Classical music is around precision and accuracy and alignment, playing the notes exactly as Mozart intended. And there's nothing wrong with classical music. I love it. But you're not doing this you're definitely net new creation. You're simply replicating a creative act of the past. The problem is today, we live in a world that's too fluid. We don't have the luxury of relying on somebody else's work. We have to perform at our best without all the notes in front of us. We gotta play some jazz. So I hope that one of the shifts that you walk away with today is is sort of going from this classical music mindset, which is checklists and training, into this new mindset, which is around fluidity and adaptation. When you pull the musical instruments out of the equation, this is what jazz musicians actually do. We're constantly adapting to changing conditions, navigating uncertainty and ambiguity, using situational awareness and active listening to drive results, real time collaboration and problem solving. In jazz, there are all kinds of mistakes you have to constantly adapt, especially recovering from setbacks and ultimately improvising to deliver the best possible outcomes. Here's the fun part. If I pull that word jazz musician off and swap in the word great leader, nothing changes. To me, this is exactly the mindset, the framework that we're being required, not optional, required to step into to perform at our best and to have our our our our institutions do as well. In other words, we have to find a way. My whole vision of what campus experiences was is so radically different than it is today. I have, two older kids that are already out of college and I have two young ones. I they're they're they're nine right now, nine year old twins. I can't even imagine the world that they're gonna step into and what their digital campus experience is gonna be like. Hopefully, it's gonna be one that is that is powered by Pathify. So to give you a sense of of finding a way, what does that look like in in a leadership or organizational sense? A quick example. This is a picture of the company that I built, years back called ePRISE. We designed, built, and ran digital promotions mostly for large brand advertisers. I had the chance to win a massive new account from a company you may have heard of called ConAgra. So this big company decided to single source their purchases of our type of work, give all the business to one supplier. It gets very competitive. In our case, we made it to the finals. So now there's three companies remaining. My little shop from Detroit, Michigan to much larger companies. We wanted it that. The problem is that the lead decision maker I hate to say it. He was, he was kinda mean, condescending, arrogant, difficult. And it was it was difficult to deal with because he was dragging this decision process out. He kept setting a deadline to make a decision, blew every deadline. We just wanted closure. I'd see this man and his wife next at an industry event. He was there, brought his wife along with this digital marketing conference, and I'm thinking this is my shot. At every meal, at every coffee break, I'm running up to him trying to close this deal. Meanwhile, he wants nothing to do with me. He's totally dismissive. I just figured it was over. Well, I see him again at the airport. It turns out this man and his wife were on the same outbound flight that I was. Here's what happens next. I can't even make this up if I tried. He gets an upgrade to first class. Well, being the lovely gentleman that he is, he takes the seat for himself, sends his wife back to coach. Just for the record, if I tried that with my wife, Tia, off with my head. Not happening. Anyway, next thing is I hear my own name. I also get an upgrade. I walk on that flight, and there it is. I had this seat next to him. But think what your instincts would be telling you. I was feeling a flood of emotions. Going for the kill. Don't let him off the flight. But then I took a deep breath and paused. These pauses give us a chance to explore an alternative route, to try something different, to find a way. I said, hey, man. I have the seat next to you. He looks up at me. Okay. Fine. We could chat. I said, I'd love that. But I plan to catch up on a lot of work on this flight. Also, I noticed that you're not sitting with your wife. So how about we switch seats? You two can enjoy some family time. I'll get my work done back in coach. Anyway, I walk back, find his wife, give her my ticket. I said, go sit with your husband. Have a great flight. She gets a little teary eyed. She says to me, thank you so much. This means the world to me. I'm so happy to be sitting with my husband. I was thinking, really? I I almost expected her to reject the offer. Like, now we're good. Anyway, flight takes off. I get to work. The first thing we all do when we land is we check our mobile device. I look down at mine and I see an email from my office. It says, Josh, ConAgra deal signed. True story. Here's what he later told me. He said, you know, I was looking for a tie breaker. All three companies were decent, but when you demonstrated some humanity instead of only chasing the bottom line, when you showed a willingness to be innovative in the moment, I knew I needed you on my team. So before that flight took off, he texted into headquarters. By the time we landed, the deal had been signed. $30,000,000. I don't bring this up to be boastful. Quite the opposite. I've been researching human creativity now for a couple decades, and the research is crystal clear. All of us. I mean, all of us. We're built to be creative. You don't have to play jazz guitar or do interpretive dance. You could find areas to be creative in your own role in higher ed. But there always is an opportunity, and when we do so, we drive better outcomes. Think Think about a student deciding which university to attend. Well, one's got a great campus experience, the other doesn't, you know, digital campus experience. That could be the decision maker just like this was for me on a flight. Because even in higher ed, we win or lose in photo finish moments, don't we? Winning a grant, winning a student, winning a a new development for a program, winning funding for an idea. And so that's where we can step forward and win at a higher rate. All the talk about innovation and jazz and creativity, it doesn't have to feel scary. My most recent book was called Big Little Breakthroughs, how small everyday innovations drive oversized results. I set out on a mission. I wanted to understand how do the most innovative leaders think and act. What I discovered was fascinating. The opposite of what you would think. The biggest innovators don't swing for the fences with every pitch. They're not taking high risk moonshots all the time. Instead, they cultivate small daily acts of creative output. Think of them as micro innovations. And by the way, in the book, I cover not only, businesses, I cover nonprofits, higher ed, public service as well. The same principles apply. It's those little doses that add up to greatness. Don't think of innovation in all caps. That that word can be overwhelming. Now think of the word just with a capital I. Capital I innovation are the two or three a year that any one of us might land on. And while they don't make history, they make a difference. And then this is the important one, the all lowercase version. These are two or three a day. Little adjustments that add up over time. Totally accessible to us all. Let me give you a quick example. Turns out the Panama Canal almost wasn't in Panama. Came down to two countries, Panama and Nicaragua. At the time, both countries agreed to the project. US government agreed to fund it, and it all had to get decided in a vote in the US Congress. If you ever wonder what a single baby drop of innovation can do, check this out. One person really wants it in Panama, takes it upon himself to act. He sends a postage stamp to each US senator responsible for the vote. Now remember, he wants it in Panama, but instead of sending a Panama stamp, he sends a Nicaragua stamp. It's a little grainy and hard to see. This is the original stamp. But if you look close, you might notice there's a volcano on the stamp. Loud signal to congress that Nicaragua was filled with volcanoes, Panama had none. History reflects that the single act of ingenuity tipped the scales in favor of Panama. That's why we have the Panama Canal instead of the Nicaragua Canal. Now if you're ever curious what a little baby dose of innovation can do over time, check this out. When that canal was built, both countries were nearly identical, income, population levels, all that. Look at the countries today. Nicaragua has had runaway population growth, but the GDP of Panama is four times higher. Nearly every social metric is in favor of Panama, schooling, health care, public safety, and the per capita income is 15 times higher. Since the canal was built, it's contributed a trillion dollars of economic impact to this country, all from a postage stamp. To me, this is so awesome and liberating because you don't have to be Picasso or Da Vinci. You can send a postage stamp. There's postage stamp opportunities for us every day. All the little ones are waiting for us, and we're built for this. So when you can look for those little baby opportunities to inject your creativity, we drive better student outcomes, university outcomes, higher ed outcomes across the board. Poet Tula Kupferberg once said, when patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. The Netflix moment that Chase talked about. So together, let's break some patterns and discover new ways to lead and win. With that in mind, I've organized our conversation today around four big ideas. Think of them as core mindset shifts to help you find a way. I'll pause at a couple points throughout to take your questions. So if you have any questions, stick them in the chat, and we'll get to as many as we possibly can. Alright? Let's dive in. Big idea number one, start before you're ready. Too often, we see an opportunity or a challenge, but instead of getting after it, we we wait. Maybe we're waiting for ideal conditions or or the perfect plan. I know in higher ed, we can have a lot of kind of bureaucratic, gravity. But this is a challenge to say, let's get past that. Let's just put ourselves in motion even if we can't see the finish line. And you adjust as you go. You navigate. You play some jazz. To bring this idea to life, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine named Jesse Cole. Jesse was 23 years old and flat broke. He had a dream. Well, more like a fantasy. That one day he wants to own a professional sports team, But this seemed impossibly out of reach. He had no money, no contacts, no game plan, nothing. But one day, he learns that in Savannah, Georgia, a thousand miles from his house, the minor league baseball team was going through a bankruptcy. Jesse could have done nothing. But instead, he gets into his rusted out old car. He drives a thousand miles to Savannah, Georgia. He shows up at the bankruptcy. The city manager didn't know what to do because he was the only one that showed up. So eventually, he says, alright. Give the kid a shot. So now here's Jesse in charge of a team. He has no pro no money, no plan. The stadium was crumbling. 90% of the seats are vacant. Worst performance team. It was a mess. And so what does he do? Well, he starts before he's ready. He does something else that each of us can do. Jesse had to awaken the artist within. Think about this. When you and I were six years old, each of us was an artist, weren't we? This is a skill that we are it's it's innate to us as a human being. We may have to dust off the cobwebs a bit, but we can reconnect to it pretty quickly. That's exactly what Jesse did. As I see a couple of people putting in the chat, he probably renamed the team the Savannah Bananas. I'm sure many of you have heard of it Bananas. I see a few people in in the chat already. But, he needed a fresh start, so he he said we we gotta come up with this totally different thing. We gotta have our Netflix moment. We gotta become the most fun, the most interesting, the best experience in any sport. But not only does Jesse rebrand the team, he rebrands himself. This is that he's ready to create a emotionally charged, highly differentiated experience. And here are some of the things that he does to bring the team to life. He recognized that in between innings was often a slow and boring period. Jesse trains the team to do choreographed dance routines and lip sync battles to blaring music. What would ordinarily be a slow and snoozer moment, everybody's on their feet, they're dancing, the team's getting into it, everybody's having a blast. At the beginning of every season, the uniforms start out as green because they're not ripe yet. Anybody can have an umpire, but they have a dancing umpire. And he's still doing his job. He's officiating. He's making sure compliance is in is there, but, man, this guy's got some rad moves. They have a player that hits and pitches on stilts. A few years back, I'm sitting at my desk in my office, and I get a bright yellow oversized handwritten envelope in the mail. I open it up, and there's a handwritten note. It says, Josh, my name is Jesse Cole. I followed your work. I read your books. I applied the same thinking to this team in Savannah. I just wanted to say thanks. At the time, I had never heard of the team. But I called up Jesse. We became friends. And in 2021, I joined the board of directors of the Savannah Bananas. So I have a little inside baseball to share with you today. Because when I was thinking about the campus experience, it's all I did experience, no better way to personify it than than the the bananas. Anyway, Jesse says to me one time, hey, Josh. Do you know what a first base coach does? I said, no. Not really. He's like, yeah. Me neither. It's a dumb position. He's like, seriously, these are professional baseball players. They know when to run. But, he tells me, if I have an extra player on the field, what if I flip it? Instead of taking care of the runners, what if I flip it, take care of the fans? The guy flipping upside down is a professional breakdancer. He knows nothing about baseball. His job on the team, first base coach. He's not only doing a physical flip, he's doing a technique that I'm so excited to share with you today. It's simple and powerful. You'll never forget it. I just call the technique the judo flip. The judo flip. When you're taking on a challenge or an opportunity in higher ed, you first say, how have you always done it? What's the standard operating procedure? And then you ask a simple but powerful question. What's the opposite? What would it look like as if it have complied with that tradition if I judo flipped it? So in Jesse's case, you got a first base coach, take care of the fans. The job runners is the is the job. Judo flip, take care of the fans. Here are a couple other judo flips that Jesse brought to life. Instead of young women dancing for the crowd, they have the Savannah Nanas, a grandma troupe of dancers. They're awesome by the way I've been to games. Before every game, there's the presentation of the banana baby where they blast the circle of life like where they held up Simba instead of playing the national anthem. So they're having so much fun judo flipping all the old traditions into new ones. They don't just take care of fans. They film everything and share it online. Today, the team has 30,000,000 social media followers, more than any major league baseball team. Fans fall in love. They start showing up dressed as bananas. They've come from all 50 states and over a 100 countries. People have tattooed the team's logo on their body. And there's Jesse making sure everyone is having fun. But Jesse was playing when he got that team as mentioned. It was it was a mess. No one came to the stadium. They've, of course, outgrown Savannah. Now they're on tour going to 30 some cities. Here they are selling out Fenway Park. What had happens is next is is remarkable. They start reimagining the the league of, the the rules of baseball, launched their own league called Banana Ball. They now own six teams in the league. They've been featured on sixty Minutes. There's a 2,000,000 fan waiting list for tickets. So what happened is this they became the most successful team in baseball. The most revenue, the most profit, the most merchandise sales, the best team engagement, the best fan engagement, every objective measure. From Jesse who starts with nothing, and he awakens the artist within. How does he do this? Through experience, through starting before you're ready. Of course, I'm still close with, with Jesse and the team. Here we are, my family and I, a couple months back and seeing, the game in Chicago. And, Jesse and his wife, Emily, are just lovely people. Here they are holding one of their three foster kids. Now that Jesse and Emily have had some success, they decided to give back. They started a foundation to raise money and awareness for foster care. What did they name it? Well, you guessed, bananas foster. Can't even make this up, it's so good. So you might be saying, wait a bit. We're in higher end. Why are we talking about a weird dude in the yellow tuxedo? Different industry, but the exact same principles apply. Think about it. Start before you're ready. Awaken the artist within. Stand out instead of blend in. Create customer experiences or, you know, your campus experiences that are so profound they can't be ignored. This is what Jesse did in a mature state industry. Think what we can do, especially with the support of our friends at Pathify. So with that, I'm gonna actually, Annie, toss it over to you. Before we go to our next point, I wanna see if any questions came in from the chat before I could answer anything that is on people's minds. Yeah. Definitely, Josh. Thanks so much. A couple questions here. Let's start with this one. So with your experience, talk a little bit about how you would advise higher ed leaders to start the process of innovating, or starting a new game changing idea that feels a little out there for for their team or department or institution. Awesome. Well, first thing I would do is say start small. Don't worry about, you know, like, flipping the switch and the whole university is completely something different. I would say start with little small ones, those big little breakthroughs. Look for the postage staff opportunities, not the giant ones. And what happens is that it it's so less stressful. It's less risky, and then you start to build critical skill. Think about DaVinci, you know, his his painting the Mona Lisa. That wasn't his first painting. First, he had to learn to paint. And so those little innovations, first of all, they're they're important. They add up. They're not risky. We're also building skill along the way, and that'll ultimately lead to the bigger ones going forward. So I would say start small. The other thing that I would say is is is look outside the field. Sometimes the greatest innovations come from looking outside of one's industry. In Jesse's case, he didn't look at baseball. He looked at Walt Disney. And and so he started borrowing from other sources and applying it. It could take a fresh perspective to a to a more mature environment. I love that. Thanks, Josh. One more, and then I'll I'll kick it back over to you. So kind of on the flip side, this person says my team is ready to innovate, but we're really struggling to get buy in from leadership. How do teams that aren't decision makers gain influence to drive that change? Awesome question. What I've seen is that people tend to be decision makers pretty resistant to global wide sweeping permanent change, but they have a healthy appetite for prototypes and experiments. So instead of saying, I wanna change this thing and then they think all all the risk and cost, say, I'd like to run an experiment. I'd like to run a prototype and make it cheap and fast. And so what that does, it starts letting people feel more safe in trying something new. When you do your first few of those, put your shoulder behind them so you can kinda put points on the board. And if you can start to show some results, early win results, people start to open up their hearts, minds, and, of course, their wallets. And the other thing I'll share is that, you know, when people make a decision, nearly every decision really, you're weighing the the good versus the bad, the risk versus the reward. I believe that people have a a an unrealistic view on the status quo. They think it's safe. But one thing I've learned now in thirty five years in business is that too often, we tend to overestimate the risk of trying something new, but we underestimate the risk of standing still. To Chase's point, that's what Blockbuster did. And so I think we need to do is help help those decision makers see the real risk and reward. Try to bright flashlight on the risk of doing nothing and then try to minimize the risk of trying something new. Cool. Thanks, Josh. Alright. My pleasure. We'll keep going and I'll be happy to answer some more questions in a few minutes. Big idea number two, burn the blueprints. The idea here is letting go of old traditions to discover new ones. Instead of feeling like this is the way it's done, it's gotta be done this way in higher ed. It's having that pioneering spirit to try something bold and new. So I'm from Detroit as I mentioned earlier. And, one thing we do pretty cool in Detroit, every year there's a new model year. Even when the Corvette came out and won all these awards, the very next year, they made over a 100 modifications. It was the new model year of the car and every year since. Sometimes those modifications are are are undetectable. Sometimes they're more profound, which is why that car is still relevant, seventy years later. There's something crucial to this, which is a willingness to let go. Letting go of the way things were so we can discover what's next, what's possible. Easier said than done, but this is a skill of of innovative leaders. Again, willingness to let go to try something new. I know many of us have had a deja vu moment. You walk into some place and feel like you've been there before even though it's the first time. I'd like you to consider the opposite. Consider vu deja. Vudeja is seeing something for the hundredth time as if it were the first. I can't take credit for the phrase. It was borrowed I borrowed this from a friend of mine, a fellow author named Adam Grant who's also professor at Wharton. And I know, by the way, if anyone speaks French, it's not a perfect translation, but the idea still holds. Deja vu is seeing something for the first time as if it were you've seen it before, but Budeja is seeing something for the thousandth time with a fresh lens. Deja Vu is a weird thing that just happens, but Budeja is a choice. We can choose to look at something with a fresh set of eyes. You've probably heard of Stanley. They make thermoses. They were chartered in '19, '13. So over a hundred years, they basically made almost no innovative changes. They knew their customer and they stuck in their lane. They made these rugged outdoorsy, thermoses mostly for men who were either outdoors people or construction workers. The company had about a $70,000,000 a year, business. It was fine, but it was flat. No real change. Decade after decade. Until a deja a boudais moment. They finally had the courage to look at the same thing with a fresh lens. Picking up on social media, they were seeing some young women gravitating to this nostalgic brand. So they made a couple modifications. They changed the color. They added a handle and a straw. But keep in mind, it's still a first. It's still the exact same product. Here's what happened. The company had been flat $70,000,000 a year year over year. In a four year period, they more than 10 times the revenue of the company. This happened because they unlocked something new because they had a willingness to burn the blueprints, let go in order to move ahead. Now all this might feel risky especially in higher ed, doesn't have to. It's part of the question before, but we can reduce risk through experimentation. Think of experimentation as the antidote to innovation risk. I've seen the best leaders testing three or four or five little baby experiments every week. Most don't work. Dump them fast. The ones that do show promise, just expand the size of the experiment. It's a much easier, more rigorous, less risky way to bring ideas forward and to make a difference. Question for you. If you think about the movie industry, what percentage of movies do you think are a hit? Now keep in mind, major studios spend millions of dollars to hire they hire a list actors. All these high hopes, they promote the movies. What percent do you think are a hit? Well, many of you are probably thinking five, ten, 20%. Turns out the answer is 36%. I'm sure we've all seen some pretty bad movies and can can understand that, but that's a lousy batting average. Think about it. But the whole industry, that's just the way they expect things to be done. Enter Reese Witherspoon. Reese is not only a wonderful actor, she's a wonderful business person. Reese owns and runs a a movie production company called Hell Sunshine. And the secret to her success is using experimentation to derisk progress progress. She's experimenting all the time, tinkering, experimenting. And here's one thing that she does. Every month, Reese promotes a book in something called Reese's book club followed by millions of people around the world. But it's actually a cleverly disguised experimentation laboratory. Before promoting the book, she signs a deal with the author. At this point, Reese's company controls the movie rights, the TV rights, the podcast rights. She then promotes the book and sits down with a team of data scientists. Together, they study everything, dozens of metrics, geographic pull throughs, selling rates, social media influence. And now with data in hand, she knows which movies to back and which ones to not. Average success rate in Hollywood, as mentioned, thirty six percent. Reese's success rate is 90%. 90%. She takes 90% of that risk off the table because she's great at experimenting. So how do you and I do this on a practical day to day basis? Well, today, I wanna not only share some fun stories, but give you some really practical tools. We already have one, the judo flip. You'll never forget that. Here's our second. I'm pretty sure that everyone on today's session has a to do list. My recommendation is after today, let's also keep a to test list. Pretty simple. Anytime an idea pops on your head, stick it stick it on the list. No judgment. Don't worry if it's half baked. No no worries. Here's the cool part. The mere existence of this list will boost your ability as an innovator because it serves as an ongoing reminder that part of our responsibility is to experiment, to be an innovator. Just so you know, I I in our venture fund, we have about 30 portfolio companies. I have a separate two test list for each of them. I have one for my house. I have one for my family. And so I've been doing this now for several years, and it's so cool. It's just liberating because you just have this running list going and and once a week or so, I sit down and say, what am I going to test this week? Here's what I've learned. The best leaders are the best experimenters. The best innovators are the best experimenters. Brings us to our third big idea of the day, seek the unexpected. It's easy to go to the obvious. The prompt here is to go out on a creative limit bit, looking for those odd ball ideas, the unorthodox ones. Not only can they be the most fun, sometimes they can be the most productive. For the people in the food industry, not higher ed, but in the food industry, if you're trying to market a product, it's really difficult because people make the exact same claims, and there's not a lot of structure to those claims. In other words, you could have two companies saying the word organic, but they really do things very differently. And so every company now promotes the big words like organic and pasture raise and free range this, and it's really hard to discern which is a high quality product and which isn't. This was the exact same problem that, Chase, your your country men and women were facing, at Honest Egg Company. This is an Australian egg brand. Problem is they they really cared about their, animal welfare and the environment, but it was hard for them to get their message heard among all these big buzzwords. Well, they could have hired a killer ad agency, but instead, they decided to seek the unexpected. And they did a pretty weird idea. They created Fitbit for chickens. It's a simple plastic pedometer that monitors the number of steps the chicken has taken. It's very low cost. It doesn't hurt the chickens and all that. But here's the fun part. Once they get that data, they print it on the egg. So you go in the store, open up a carton of eggs, and know that this particular egg came from a chicken that took 21,647 steps. Data driven decision making completely stood out from the competitive pack. When they launched this, they got all kinds of media attention. They sold out all their inventory, back ordered for months. Even a year later, the entire company's revenue was up 25%. The point is they solved the problem in a nontraditional way. They decided to seek the unexpected. One more technique for you. We talked about the judo flip. We talked about the two test list. Here's our third. When you and I make a decision, big or small, we generally choose for option a, option b, or option c. Option a, b, and c are the obvious ones. Here's my prompt. Before you just gravitate to a, b, or c, pause, Take a breath and say, I wonder if there's an option d. Could there be an option e, or what about an option x? Fitbit for chickens. That's an option x. I was seated next to my biggest sales prospect on an airplane. Option a would be sit down and try to close the deal. Option x, give the seat to his wife. As we get to know each other a bit, I wanna introduce you to my family. This is my wife, Tia, love of my wife. We've been married for twelve years. These are, our twins, Avi and Talia. Don't let their cuteness fool you. They're little monsters half the time. Anyway, today, thank God Avi and Talia are are healthy happy kiddos, but their lives didn't start out that way. T and I went, when she was twenty six weeks pregnant to Vegas, figured we'd take in a couple shows, do some shopping. Well, we ran into a medical crisis that required an emergency c section. One night, we're picking out baby names. The next morning, we're learning about survival rates. Fourteen weeks premature is a pretty bad thing, and we were thrust into a world of chaos and and and terror. This is what our lives look like for one hundred and four days in the neonatal intensive care unit. Again, it may turn out fine. Thank god. But I didn't know that. So this is a very difficult period for us both. The reason I bring all this up is this next example really hit me in the heart. Children's hospital, University of Pittsburgh. Their customers are families like mine. The administrators, they wanted to make a better experience for their, guests. What's an obvious approach? Softer pillows, better lighting? What's an option x approach? These are the window washers. Dress up the window washers like superheroes. No productivity was lost. They had to clean the windows anyway. But now you got Spiderman and Batman. And as they're doing the work, they're entertaining the kids. Absolute game changer. Takes the attention away from the medical care. The kids look forward to it for days. It's even better for the window washers who now discovered purpose and meaning to a rather mundane job. This is what I mean by a big little breakthrough. This didn't make history, but it sure made a difference. And the same difference that each of us can make, we have these ideas inside of us that will build for every one of us here today. And if we can start to cultivate those and put them into the world, amazing progress can follow. So, Annie, before we hit our fourth and final point, I'll toss back to you to see if we have any questions coming in. I'd be happy to address them. Yeah. This is great. I feel just, like, so jazzed about all the things you're sharing, Josh. We have a great question from Tara. She asked, how do you reconcile this playful approach, that you alluded to earlier with the bureaucratic gravity that you acknowledged? Yeah. So a lot of these examples I'm showing are playful, like window washers dressed as superheroes. But creativity doesn't have to be playful to be effective. In some cases, by the way, I think we could use some playfulness in higher ed. That's a whole different discussion. But that's just one way that it can manifest in a playful manner. Another way it can manifest is is in a more serious way, but it's still doing the same principle. Looking for the opposite of what's ordinarily, been done before, seeking the unexpected, looking for those option x ideas. They don't only have to give you a chuckle, they can make a difference. And then we see examples of this all the time in financial services, health care, or higher ed, where it's not so much like a chuckle story, but still has a has a material impact on the outcomes that we crave. Absolutely. And then last one here. So this concept of the postage stamp opportunity, you've you've sort of addressed this, but can you say you know, what would you say to someone who's maybe sitting in the audience today and they are sitting at their desk grinding every day to support students, and they need they need a pick me up. They need a pep talk. They need someone to inspire them, to to promote the change that you're talking about. Well, good question. I'm glad one of the places joining us here today, so I'm glad glad we're doing that. But you might wanna consider getting sort of an innovation buddy. Remember the old days you have, like, a pen panel? What if you and someone down the hall who you work with and, yeah, you know, there's work to be done or you're gonna be heads down. What if you just say, hey. Let let's be partners in crime here. Let's let's spend some time being heads up together. Not just heads down doing the work, but heads up exploring what's possible. And maybe the two of you, you know, once a week grab breakfast or a coffee and say, how can we effectuate change? How can we inject some creativity to drive even better outcomes? And maybe you support one another, that buddy system, just like it helps when you're going to the gym with a friend, you actually show up. That may be one helpful way to do it. Another one would be that if you rally behind a particular thing that you really care about, could be student experience, it could be something else. But if there's a specific thing that you're really passionate about, then you can rally yourself and a couple people around it. In other words, you're focused more on the outcome than you are on the task. That can be very motivating in those dark days that that that can sometimes feel difficult. Thanks, Josh. Sure. Well, let's go ahead and bring it home then with our fourth and final big idea, fall seven times, stand eight. I didn't write this phrase. I borrowed it from a Japanese proverb. But here's why. My observation working with some of the boldest innovators around the world is that they look at setbacks and failure a bit differently. Instead of win or lose, they think win or learn. They recognize that stumbles and setbacks are naturally a part of the process. So if they wanna be innovative, they wanna live to their full potential, they're gonna have to tolerate some setbacks along the way. And they just look into the data. What can I learn and how can I adapt? Fall seven, stand eight. April Cole is a good example of this. April had this idea, to use AI to create better mental health care outcomes. She had a family member affected by a mental health condition. And in fact, there's sixty million in American million Americans that suffer from mental health conditions of one type or another. Problem is mental health is very hard to diagnose, very hard to prescriptively treat. So she thought couldn't AI help with that? Better diagnostics, better treatment plans, lower cost. She builds a little prototype. She goes to an investor, and they tell her no. She could just quit there, but instead, fall seven, stand eight. She didn't just go then go to the next one. She said, what's the lesson? What can I learn from this feedback? How can I make a little adjustment before I go back to the next time? She goes back to her second investor. No. What's the lesson? Go back to tinker a little bit. Third investor. No. Fourth investor. No. Fifth investor. Each time, April would make modifications and adjustments because she was learning and adapting. It took 110 no's to get to a yes. She finally gets a yes and launches the company she dreamed of, accessible mental health care to help you thrive. It's called Spring Health. And, they have had wild success. They've helped hundreds of thousands of patients. She is now the youngest female, CEO of a of a billion dollar plus company. The company's recently valued at $3,300,000,000. It was the no that led to the yes. It was the fall seven to stand eight. I'm often asked when I'm playing jazz, how do you know you're gonna get it right? You're playing very fast complicated music. It requires intense physical dexterity. You've never rehearsed or making it up as you go. How do you know you're gonna get it right? I always smile and say I know I'm not gonna get it right. Never have, never will. Every performance, nearly 2,000 since I've been playing music, I've made mistakes. My confidence as a musician isn't thinking I'm going to be perfect. It's knowing how to recover. I think it's so important. I wanna put it on the screen because it goes way beyond jazz guitar and applies to higher up higher ed. Confidence is not expecting to always get it right. Confidence is knowing how to bounce back. So when you can enter a tense situation or an unknown situation, not thinking you have to be perfect or the weight of the world on your shoulder to never make a mistake, but rather saying, I might make a mistake, but I can learn and adapt. Fall seven, stand eight. One last example to bring us home. As mentioned, I'm probably from Detroit, and my city is a good example of this principle in action. For many years, we were very successful as a city, but then we kind of lost our way. Well, for those who've maybe visited recently, you might notice there's this renewed energy. The city is coming back in a fierce way. Really proud of that that transformation. Personal example. A few years ago, my partners and I had a really, well, unexpected idea. We said, what if we start a venture capital fund right in the middle of Detroit, Michigan? So maybe we can help restore our city as as a as a beacon of innovation and opportunity. People laughed at me. They said, no. You can't. You can go to Silicon Valley. You can go to New York. Cannot happen in Detroit. So we did it anyway. We took over this bombed out building. It didn't like this for twenty years. All the windows were gone, tagged with graffiti, vandalized. We decided to invest. We wanted to make an environment where people could apply these ideas every day. Fall seven stand eight, where they could seek the unexpected, where they could start before they're ready. We started backing passionate entrepreneurs, giving them not just money, but but support and coaching and mentorship. We really wanted to give them a fighting chance. Here's what happened. When we opened this fund, there was not a single tech startup in the entire 140 square miles of Detroit, Michigan, not one. Within eighteen months of opening our building, there were 70. Now most we did fund, but we got a little momentum going. We made it safe, and we helped take a very difficult situation to improve it. And, no, it's still a lot of work to be done, by the way, and I'm not taking that I'm not taking credit for Detroit's turnaround. They're way more important people than me doing way more important things. I just wanna share from a personal standpoint. We took on a very difficult problem. We applied the exact same principles I share with you today. Start before you're ready. Break it to fix it. We're coming up with our two test list, and we're able to drive some real momentum in the city that we love. Alright. Quick recap of our points, and then I'm gonna give you a downloadable quick start guide and keynote summary that I hope you can take and put into use, share with your teams. We covered four big ideas here today. Start before you're ready. Getting yourself in motion even if you don't know how you're gonna land and you figure it out as you go, just like Jesse Cole did with the Savannah bananas. Burn the blueprints. This is rejecting the old on the face value to discover something even better, letting go to move ahead. Judo flipping the old into the new, and being great experimenter with our to test list. Seeking the unexpected, those oddball option x ideas, window washers dressed as superheroes. And finally, fall seven stand eight, which is essentially creative tenacity. The willingness to get back up and try something new just like April Coe did. What's the lesson? How can I adapt and how can I move forward? These principles are universal. They apply in business and they absolutely apply in higher ed as we think about this pivotal Netflix moment that Chase mentioned. So here's that download. If you wanted to grab your phone or you wanna take a screen grab, it's mentioned, it's a it's a keynote summary and quick start guide. It's free. I will not spam you. None of that. But there's a number of resources that I think will be helpful to you as you move things forward in your own teams and across higher ed. I really hope you found a couple nuggets here you can try out because if you build a little bit momentum, it just starts to magnify. So with that in mind as I toss back you to you, Annie, I'll just say this. I I I'm such a lover of higher ed. I I often tell my wife I wish I was back in school. You know, it was like the best time of life. And and I think we we have a responsibility to create a campus experience that is meaningful to those students. And now is this time. We're at a beautiful inflection point of opportunity. And I think it's time to start before we're ready and awaken the artist within. It's time to burn the blueprints and discover something new. It's time to seek the unexpected. If we fall seven, let's stand eight. And together, with the support of Pathify, let's find a way. Annie, back to you. Thank you, Josh. Thank you so much. That was really insightful, really energizing, and thank you all for joining us and asking great questions. Our next session is gonna be, a really fun one. We are meeting with MIT. Their Sloan School of Management is gonna talk about cost savings and their digital brand, a little bit about boosting operational efficiency, strengthening their brand. So it is definitely one you don't wanna miss. Before we jump there, we're gonna have a fifteen minute break. So I encourage you to go head over to the attendee lounge. I mentioned this earlier, but that's in your top navigation bar. We've got some really great resources for you to explore in there. And, otherwise, hope you enjoy the rest of the day, and thank you so so much, to Josh Linkner. Thank you.