Contemporary Authors

• The New How: Building Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy O'Reilly (Sebastopol, CA), 2010
• The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World Viking (New York, NY), 2017

1. The new how : building business solutions through collaborative strategy LCCN 2011410942 Type of material Book Personal name Merchant, Nilofer. Main title The new how : building business solutions through collaborative strategy / Nilofer Merchant. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Sebastopol, Calif. : O'Reilly, c2010. Description xvii, 266 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780596156251 (hbk.) 0596156251 (hbk.) CALL NUMBER HD30.28 .M453 2010 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HD30.28 .M453 2010 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. The power of onlyness : make your wild ideas mighty enough to dent the world LCCN 2017025380 Type of material Book Personal name Merchant, Nilofer, author. Main title The power of onlyness : make your wild ideas mighty enough to dent the world / Nilofer Merchant. Published/Produced New York, New York : Viking, [2017] Description 292 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780525429135 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER HM1146 .M47 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• 11 Rules for Creating Value In #SocialEra - 2012 CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Charleston

• Nilofer Merchant - http://nilofermerchant.com/dossier/bio/

  BIO
  DOSSIERBIOIN THE PRESSEAVESDROPPING
  AUTHOR. SPEAKER. BASED IN SILICON VALLEY. | Because it is unusual, you might want help to know how to say the name. Any chance you remember those cookies that Nabisco creates called Nilla-wafer’s? That will help, cause the name sounds a lot like that but with an o in the middle. It’s Nil – O – fer. (Just don’t call her NIL or FUR, okay?)

  Nilofer Merchant is a master at turning seemingly “wild” ideas into new realities and showing the rest of us how we can too. She has done so through her books, her top ranked TED talk, and her accomplishments at Fortune 500 companies and startups. So much so that she was awarded the Future Thinker Award from Thinkers50, which ranks the world’s leading business thinkers and which also named her the #1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice.

  She began her career in business 25 years ago as an administrative assistant, and quickly rose to division leader, to CEO to board member of a NASDAQ-traded company gathering monikers such as the “Jane Bond of Innovation” along the way for her ability to guide organizations through impossible odds.

  She has personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18B in sales and has held executive positions at everywhere from Fortune 500 companies like Apple and Autodesk to startups in the early days of the Web (Golive/ later bought by Adobe). Logitech, Symantec, HP, Yahoo, VMWare, and many others have turned to her guidance on new product strategies, entering new markets, defending against competitors, and optimizing revenues. Merchant is one of the few people who can say they’ve fought a competitive battle against Microsoft and won, for Symantec’s Anti-Virus $2.1B annual business. She has served on boards for both public and private companies, as well as on governance boards on public policies.

  The author of two previous books on how organizations can better employ new ideas, Merchant’s latest, THE POWER OF ONLYNESS: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World (Viking Hardcover, August 29, 2017), shares her insider expertise with general readers to reveal new ways of connecting our ideas to the world around us in an era when the potential to make a difference is no longer bound by social status.

  CNBC has called Nilofer a visionary. Her 2nd book, 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra, was released in the Fall of 2012, by Harvard Business Press. It was chosen by Fast Company as one of the Best Business Books of 2012.

  This Yes & Know blog has been around since 2003. You’ll find ideas that are both “provocative and yet practical” as Seth Godin has said. Nilofer has been featured in the WSJ, written innovation columns for BusinessWeek and Forbes. You’ve probably seen her byline and ideas in publications like the Harvard Business Review, Wired, and Oprah. A TED speaker, she shares the stage with luminaries regularly, including Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell, and Bono (yes, THAT Bono). Her ideas resonate because they help close the gap between idea and reality.

  Wife and mother, a wilderness backpacker in the summer, and an avid hiker year-round – she gets around. She is an unfortunate addict of caffeine, poetry, dark-chocolate-covered-orange-peels that are best when eaten in France, and all-things-bacon.

• MIT Sloan - https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/collaborative-strategy-with-nilofer-merchant/

  Collaborative Strategy: A Q & A With Nilofer Merchant
  Blog March 22, 2010 Reading Time: 7 min
  Jimmy Guterman
  Strategy, Talent Management, Developing Strategy
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  If nothing else, Nilofer Merchant's The New How: Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy is ambitious. While many management gurus go on about the value of employee empowerment, Merchant spends an entire book showing not only how strategy with input from all employees is better than strategy from a few people at the top, but also how to make it happen.
  Merchant takes for granted that every company is full of people with good ideas. What makes her book so intriguing is that she offers a way for companies to eliminate as many good ideas as possible so they can concentrate on the great ones.

  Merchant is founder, chief strategist, and CEO of the Rubicon consultancy, and she is both strategic and practical. She identifies one of the major problems companies face — how to conceive of and execute better strategies — and creates a framework for solving that problem.

  In direct, provocative language (sample section title: "Blaming People Only Works for So Long"), she lays out a new way to make every employee a strategist. MIT Sloan Management Review Executive Editor Jimmy Guterman talked to Merchant about her theory, how to put it into practice, and what an "air sandwich" is. (If you want more, read an excerpt from The New How.)

  One of your basic arguments is that companies need to include employees at all levels in their strategy. That's conventional wisdom, but few companies do that well. Why do companies who try to do that fail — and how can they succeed?

  Companies fail to include employees for three reasons. First, companies often confuse collaboration with a "kumbaya" kind of approach as if how we feel about each other is the point. It’s not. It’s about co-laboring towards a goal. The only real reason we want to include employees at all levels is to let us create better solutions, better outcomes. To avoid this, we need to move beyond “inclusion” to a full engagement where you get ideas and demand that people engage the process of figuring out what should “we” do to win.

  The second reason companies fail is that they include employees without engaging them in making decisions. The bottom line is we don’t have the time in this economy to have a smallish group of people setting strategy or innovating or leading. Instead, that old approach means we’ve created a bottleneck in a business where a few people are responsible for making decisions. That’s not flexible, complete, or nimble enough. So we’ve got to figure out how to have as much distributed decision-making as possible with many employees sharing that responsibility.

  The third reason companies fail in this is they lack a way to make tough qualitative decisions. Sometimes that means we don’t ask questions that will only make the process of picking more complicated.

  How does "co-creation" work?

  For this new era of creative work, we will need to have a new set of management tools. In a creative era, we need to co-create, not just coordinate work. But most of our management tools and rewards are set up to manage within discrete boxes — essentially asking the question: Did Joe do what he was supposed to do?

  But those boxes — they don’t help us achieve success. They help us define what each person does. But as soon as we are thinking of boxes, what we also get is the space between the boxes. Those gaps — those spaces in between the boxes — they are where organizations fail. It’s whether engineering makes what customers need or whether sales and marketing are aligned.

  It’s the lack of connection across a company or a silo-ed approach to going in a new direction that quite often causes failure. Roles matter, but what matters more going forward is how those roles interact to “mind the gap” for the business.

  Co-creation acknowledges that most value created today is not done in discrete pieces that any one person owns. We need to find a way to co-own that big picture of where to go so that any specific new piece of information or market response doesn’t throw us - our highly educated, creative workforce can figure out the right answers. Information flows freely today, and we need not focus on to tell people what to do but rather helping all of us to get a place where we co-create the strategy, co-own the outcome and co-create a new marketplace reality.

  How does corporate culture change in an era of collaborative strategy?

  Collaborative strategy gets us to stop moving from companies where a few people tell other people what to do to a place a bunch of us create value. We go from “I think, you do” to “we think, we win.” This cultural change will, of course, require a change in how leaders perceive their own value. Most leaders are still taking a stand of “chief of answers” where their value is to know most — if not all — the answers.

  But whenever a leaders is the chief of answers, it makes everyone else the tribe of doing things. When we have a collaborative culture, we have a culture able to create momentum, on how to create action. It acts more like a living, breathing organism that can take in information from the market, knows what questions to ask and answer, can envision many options to success, can decide amongst all those option quickly and can take the vision into reality. Momentum then keeps up with or sets the pace for the competition.

  How can companies get from whiteboarding to MurderBoarding?

  We’re all good at whiteboarding or brainstorming. We all thrive on coming up with brilliant new ideas. But no company I know of — from start-up to a big global titan — is failing because of a lack of ideas. What companies are struggling with is knowing which of these many things we could do, what should we do? That’s where MurderBoarding comes in. We need a set way of picking from many options to “the one” that makes most sense; we need to go from whiteboarding or generating options to picking the right option for us — at this time, in this market.

  I created MurderBoarding when I helped a CEO and his team define direction as they went for a new round of capital. The CEO kept going to the whiteboard adding more and more options for what this $100M company could do. And the group kept giving me that look, like — make him stop. I came up with the term MurderBoarding to captivate his attention. The methodology is really an integration of best practices for making tough qualitative decisions.

  MurderBoarding is a common framework for a group to make tough choices and walk away being able to tell anyone, which idea matters most to us and why. This allows companies to create alignment and velocity because they are no longer mired in confusion or diluting resources or a political quagmire. When a group can have a shared approach to making a tough set of calls, they can actually make forward motion on making those big ideas real.

  Finally, what is an "Air Sandwich"?

  I’ve come to characterize traditional strategy creation as one that guarantees an “Air Sandwich.” This is where the company’s new direction is delivered from an 80,000-foot perspective to the folks holding a 20,000-foot view, who in turn then try to coordinate the people working on the ground—producing a big “Air Sandwich” of strategy. It would be like having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no peanut butter or jelly — the good stuff that is incredibly necessary is missing.

  An Air Sandwich is a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle—no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy filling to align the new direction with new actions within the company. By doing strategy the old way, we’re missing the substance of the business—the debate of options, the understanding of capabilities, the sharing of the underlying assumptions, the identification of risks, issues that need to be tracked, and all of the rest of the things that need to be managed. The middle is missing a set of shared understandings that would connect the vision to the direction to the reality.

  When a company has an Air Sandwich, the most valuable details and decisions that enable a strategy to succeed are left out of the strategy.

  TAGS: Decision-Making, Leadership Vision, Team Building
  REPRINT #: W5005

• Strategy + Business - https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Nilofer-Merchants-Required-Reading?gko=16c46

  strategy+business: Corporate Strategies and News Articles on Global Business, Management, Competition and Marketing
  S+B BLOGSOctober 12, 2016
  BUSINESS LITERATURE
  Nilofer Merchant’s Required Reading
  Theodore Kinni
  Ted Kinni
  Theodore Kinni is a contributing editor of strategy+business. He also blogs at Reading, Writing re: Management.

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  Nilofer Merchant knows something about value creation. By her reckoning, she has had a hand in launching more than 100 products that have netted a combined US$18 billion in sales — first in stints at Apple and Autodesk, and later as an advisor to technology companies such as Logitech, Symantec, and HP.

  Rather than focusing on processes and tools, Merchant sees the humanist values of diversity, inclusivity, and collaboration as the keys to creating corporate value. “It’s not that everyone will but that anyone can contribute,” she says.

  Her two books reiterate the message. In The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy (O’Reilly Media, 2010), Merchant traces the difficulties that many companies encounter in executing strategy to the conventional top-down approach to strategy formulation. She argues for a more inclusive approach to strategy-making that enlists the people responsible for executing it. In 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra (Harvard Business Press, 2012), Merchant contends that social technologies and tools have given rise to a new era in which the basis for value creation is collaboration and co-creation by communities of people who are united by an aspirational purpose.

  Named to the Thinkers50 list in 2015, Merchant is also a fellow at the Martin Prosperity Institute, where she is exploring the implications of “onlyness” on the future of democratic capitalism. “Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies,” she says. “This individual onlyness is the fuel of vast creativity, innovations, and adaptability.”

  I asked Merchant for a short list of the best reads on value creation. She called out the following three books and a seminal article on organizational learning.

  “Despite having information up the wazoo, most companies struggle to innovate and create new value.”

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  Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, by Steven Johnson (Riverhead, 2010). “Johnson identifies the key principles that drive creativity — things like the connected ‘hive mind’ is smarter than the lone thinker; where you think matters just as much as what you think; and the best ideas come from building on the ideas and inventions of others. I recommend his book to leaders to counter any erroneous notions they might have regarding from where and from whom new ideas come. Too often, leaders expect creative thinking and new ideas to come from only a few, duly appointed employees. Instead, they need to know that ideas can and do (and should) come from everyone and everywhere — even outside their corporate perimeters. When we open up our mental apertures to receive new ideas from anyone and from anywhere, we fuel value creation.”

  The Change Masters: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Simon & Schuster, 1983). “Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s book about the unwritten rules of what actually fuels growth — the ability to create change — is epic. No idea becomes real without changes to the status quo. And anyone who wants to change the status quo needs to learn how to go against the grain without getting shredded in the process. Kanter’s book describes how people react and respond to new ideas and the change agents who promote them, and how change agents can use that knowledge to realize the world they want to create. My copy is dog-eared from nearly 30 years of reading and re-reading.”

  RELATED STORIES

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  by Rob Shelton

  THE FUTURE OF MANAGEMENT IS TEAL
  by Frederic Laloux

  AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS ARGYRIS
  by Joel Kurtzman
  “Double Loop Learning in Organizations,” by Chris Argyris, Harvard Business Review, Sept. 1977. “Despite having information up the wazoo, most companies struggle to innovate and create new value. And my experience suggests that internal surveys at these companies would reveal that their ability to get new things done is declining over time, rather than improving. That’s not because they are suffering from a lack of new ideas; it’s because they can’t reinvent themselves — think Kodak and Xerox. As the late, great organizational development expert Chris Argyris put it, they don’t know how to unlearn enough to create new value. I regularly hand out his classic article on double loop learning. Nearly 40 years after it was published, it remains the clearest articulation of how companies can create new value through a continual cycle of learning and unlearning.”

  Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (Wiley, 2010). “The other day, an entrepreneur came to me. She was thinking big, but she hadn't given a thought to what her company would need to do to transform big thinking into real value. You create value by lining up the pieces of a complex puzzle: whom do you serve, with what, and how do you reach them. Big becomes real when you figure out what your company needs to do on Day One — and 31, and 61, and 91. Osterwalder’s book, illustrated by Yves Pigneur, is indispensable because it provides a repeatable methodology for doing that work.”

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• CNBC - https://www.cnbc.com/id/47905099?view=story&$DEVICE$=native-android-tablet

  5 Minutes With a Visionary: Nilofer Merchant
  Mary Catherine Wellons | @mcwellons
  Published 4:54 PM ET Thu, 21 June 2012 Updated 1:50 PM ET Mon, 2 July 2012
  Editor’s note: As part of CNBC’s “20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow” TV documentary, we interviewed thought leaders and visionaries who have paved the way for the next generation of entrepreneurs. In a series of Q&As called “5 Minutes with a Visionary,” we discover what has shaped and molded the careers of these innovators.

  Who is Nilofer Merchant? As her website reads, she is the “(female) James Bond for Innovation.”

  Photo: Nilofer Merchant
  Nilofer Merchant
  To garner that title, you have to personally launch over 100 products, netting $18 billion in global sales and found a company called Rubicon Consulting. It also helps to work at Apple and collaborate with innovators at Autodesk,VMware, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, and Yahoo. Merchant has worked not only with Fortune 500s, but also startups. She was the vice president of GoLive, which ultimately was bought by Adobe Systems, and has advised a wide range of social and e-commerce companies. Oh, and she’s also written a book called "The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy."

  Today, Merchant shares her expertise as a lecturer at Stanford and in her columns for The Harvard Business Review, where she writes about social business models. In an email interview, Merchant provided her insights into entrepreneurship and innovation.

  Q: What do you consider to be your greatest success as an entrepreneur or business leader?

  I’ve had a chance to work on some pretty big things, with some pretty amazing teams of people. And one thing that you realize, regardless of what you are working on, is that until you have a shared purpose, you’ll never actually be aligned. When an organization has a unifying purpose, it overrides territorialism. Everyone owns the whole. Without purpose, everything is procedural.

  Q: What innovation in the last 20 years has had the most positive impact on your life?

  Social communities. There are so many ways that we can find other people with similar interests and passions, which probably explains why I spend way too much time on Twitter (btw, you can follower her @nilofer). But, it also changes how we create value, who gets to create value, and how work gets done.

  The “Social Era” unlocks new doors of both who can contribute and what can be created, and thus changes the very source of power itself.

  Q: What current challenge, when resolved, would do the most to change the world?

  We’ve got to unlock the power of girls and women in the economy.

  Today, women receive 3 percent of venture funding, represent less than 15 percent of corporate board seats, and 10 percent of the CEO spots in the Fortune 500. They represent less than 20 percent of the actors or speakers on stage and are quoted only 15 percent of the time in the press. ... These statistics all add up one thing: We are categorically underutilizing an asset in the economy.

  Q: If you had the world's intellectual elite all in one room, what thought-provoking question would you pose for debate?

  Well, I wouldn’t ask for debate, I’d ask for dialogue. We seem — as a broad culture — unable to listen to opposing points of view, to things that play to our bias. And I believe that opening up our aperture to one another will let us see where we have more in common, and what we can build on. Until that happens, I worry about our ability to create and solve the many problems we see around us because we can’t even consider alternative points of view.

  Q: What individual or innovator has had the biggest impact on society?

  I’m still pretty impressed with what the web has enabled. And because I believe it will enable many to participate in the world in ways that weren’t possible before, I’d pick [World Wide Web inventor] Tim Berners-Lee. I also like that he continues to want data to be free, for this enabling technology to truly enable.

  Q: You’ve worked both in the startup space and with major companies — what were some of the biggest takeaways from both?

  I really do love both. I spend time with startups by teaching at Stanford and with big firms still. But one thing I’ve noticed is each side really has a disdain for the other. In 1909, [the philosopher Joseph] Schumpter said that small companies were more inventive. In 1942, he reversed himself saying that big companies had more incentive to invest in new products. Today, people assume that small companies are creative and big firms are slow and bureaucratic — both are gross over-simplifications.

  Small firms have the ability and the necessity to create from scratch. Each time you can do that, you do it better than you did before, so that’s pretty cool. The big companies create scale and manage for quality in a way that typically smaller organizations haven’t been able to. The key is to figure out how to create value in a demanding, ever-changing market.

  Editor's Note: This interview has been condensed and edited.

  Tune in:

  Watch "20 Under 20" on CNBC. Part I Premieres August 13 and Part II Premieres August 14 at 10p ET

  For more details on “20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow,” check out our Facebook app and follow our Tumblr blog.

• TED - https://www.ted.com/speakers/nilofer_merchant

  Nilofer Merchant
  Corporate director, author
  Home: nilofermerchant.com Twitter: @nilofer
  TED Speaker
  Personal profile
  Business innovator Nilofer Merchant thinks deeply about the frameworks, strategies and cultural values of companies.
  Why you should listen
  Nilofer Merchant has been helping to grow businesses -- from Fortune 500s to web startups -- for 20 years. She’s worked for major companies (like Apple and Autodesk) and early web startups (remember Golive?). Logitech, Symantec, HP, Yahoo, VMWare, and many others have turned to her guidance to develop new product strategies, enter new markets, defend against competitors and optimize revenue.

  Today she serves on boards for both public and private companies, and writes books about collaboration, like The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy, and openness -- check out her recent ebook 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra, chosen by Fast Company as one of the Best Business Books of 2012. She also writes for HBR, including the personal and brave essay about a previous attempt on the TED stage: "What I Learned from My TED Talk."

  Watch Nilofer's moving TEDxHouston talk on "onlyness" >>

  Nilofer Merchant’s TED talk

• Thinkers 50 - http://thinkers50.com/biographies/nilofer-merchant/

  Nilofer Merchant
  2017, 2015 Ranked Thinker 2013 Award Winner

  Blogs
  Nilofer Merchant and The Power of Onlyness
  In this podcast brought to you in partnership with the Brightline Initiative, Des Dearlove interviews Nilofer Merchant on her newest […]
  Nilofer MerchantCreating Value: Nilofer Merchant
  Nilofer Merchant teaches innovation at Stanford and Santa Clara Universities. In a meteoric 20-year career, Merchant has gone from being […]
  #22
  2017
  #48
  2015 Future Thinker Award
  2013
  Shortlisted: 2015 Digital Thinking Award

  Nilofer Merchant is a master at turning seemingly “wild” ideas into new realities. A bestselling author on innovation and collaborative work, a TED mainstage speaker, and the recipient of the 2013 “Future Thinker Award” from Thinkers50, Nilofer reveals new mechanisms for unlocking the capacity of people. She brings an operational understanding to her work, having personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18B in revenues, and has held executive positions in tech, from Fortune 500 companies like Apple and Autodesk, to start-ups in the early days of the web, such as Golive, which was later bought by Adobe. In her spare time, she teaches at Stanford and Santa Clara University.

  Keynote Speech in Odense

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilofermerchant/

  Nilofer Merchant
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  Champion of Turning "Wild" Ideas into New Realities
  Penguin Books Ltd Santa Clara University
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  Nilofer Merchant has transformed our understanding of how ideas originate, spread and create impact through her books, her TED talk (ranked in the top 10% of all TEDtalks), and her accomplishments at Fortune 500 companies and startups. She won the "Future Thinker Award" from Thinkers50, which ranks the world’s leading business thinkers and thus recognized her the #1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice.

  She began her career in business 25 years ago as an administrative assistant, and quickly rose to Business Leader, then to CEO to Corporate Board Member of a NASDAQ-traded company gathering monikers such as the "Jane Bond of Innovation" along the way for her ability to guide outcomes through impossible odds by tapping into unnoticed ideas and capabilities of those involved.

  She has personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18 Billion in sales and has held executive positions at Fortune 500 companies like Apple and Autodesk and startups in the early days of the Web (Golive/ later bought by Adobe). Logitech, Symantec, HP, Yahoo, VMWare, and many others have turned to her guidance on new product strategies, entering new markets, defending against competitors, and optimizing revenues. Merchant is one of the few people who can say they’ve fought a competitive battle against Microsoft and won, for Symantec’s Anti-Virus $2.1B annual business. She has served on boards for both public and private companies as well as governance boards.

  Today, she's asked to speak around the work around the topics of innovation, social change and leadership; alongside luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Simon Sinek, Robin Chase, Malcolm Gladwell, Hillary Clinton, Peter Diamandis, Arianna Huffington, Bono, and more.

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  DEAR NILOFER, HOW DO I KEEP EVERYONE HAPPY WHILE INNOVATING?
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  DEAR NILOFER, HOW DO I KEEP EVERYONE HAPPY WHILE INNOVATING?
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  A newsletter reader wrote in and asked about how to balance comfort and change for her team while innovating. Here's my response.
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  Penguin Books Ltd
  Author, THE POWER OF ONLYNESS (Viking, Fall/2017)
  Company NamePenguin Books Ltd
  Dates EmployedJun 2014 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs 10 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  In The Power of Onlyness, Nilofer Merchant, one of the world’s top-ranked business thinkers, reveals that, in fact, we have now reached an unprecedented moment of opportunity for your ideas to “make a dent” on the world. Now that the Internet has liberated ideas to spread through networks instead of hierarchies, power is no longer determined by your status, but by “onlyness”—that spot in the world only you stand in, a function of your distinct history and experiences, visions and hopes. If you build upon your signature ingredient of purpose and connect with those who are equally passionate, you have a lever by which to move the world.
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  The Martin Prosperity Institute
  Fellow
  Company NameThe Martin Prosperity Institute
  Dates EmployedSep 2014 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs 7 mos
  LocationParis Area, France
  Leading thinkers in innovation, business ethics, management and public policy have been appointed to the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), which is a research centre at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. The appointments strengthen the Infrastructure for Democratic Capitalism project, which is part of the expanded mandate of the MPI, and is being led by Prof. Roger Martin, the former Dean of the Rotman School. The project is exploring ways to improve the critical underpinnings of our social, political and financial systems.

  Nilofer Merchant is chartered to study and publish on society’s emerging power infrastructure. Other fellows in this class include Jonathan Haidt, Adam Grant, and Mark Stabile.

  Merchant has published 2 major papers during this fellowship: The first asks and answers the question, “What is untapped capacity of talent in our modern economy?” While it is commonly understood that a vast variety of ideas, judgment, creativity, and passion produces hidden capacity and related economic gain, there is not currently the framework to measure it. This paper, created with research associate Darren Karn, provides both a framework for measuring the potential capacity of workers as well as global economic sizing, two important dimensions that will advance our understanding of economic prosperity.

  The 2nd research paper provides a career roadmap for knowledge workers in the creative economy. Common knowledge is that working for a global firm is the optimal vehicle for financial and personal gain, but that turns out to not be applicable to women. Produced with associate director of cities Vass Bednar, and research associate Melissa Pogue, it uses a novel combination of occupations, industries, employment, and demographics to help modern professionals not only identify when and where they are most valuable, but also how they can best harness that value they create in the workplace.

  Harvard Business Review
  Writer
  Company NameHarvard Business Review
  Dates EmployedJan 2011 – Present Employment Duration7 yrs 3 mos
  Speakers' Spotlight
  Speaker
  Company NameSpeakers' Spotlight
  Dates EmployedJun 2009 – Present Employment Duration8 yrs 10 mos
  As the only keynote speaker and author to talk about the ways to thrive and perform in the Social Era … Nilofer brings the high-energy delivery required to inspire and engage your community.

  Engage her to know how you, and your organizations can create value to thrive in the Social Era.

  - Curating greatness is more than hiring great people; it’s about Shared Purpose.

  - Answer the question, Just How Powerful are You? by understanding the ways the Social Era changes the very foundation of influence and power through Onlyness.

  - Learn the New Rules of business performance. Understand why Gazelles & not Gorillas have an edge in The Social Era because Porter’s Models No Longer Work.

  Seasoned and solid, she delivers. Organizations and conferences hire Nilofer to ignite and inspire real change. She blends empirical evidence, memorable stories, insights, and wisdom based on years of practical experience. Nilofer’s talks get people thinking (and doing).

  She has spoken on the same program as Malcolm Gladwell, and Simon Sinek and Michael Eisner at the The Art of Management. She’s keynoted alongside Arianna Huffington at PWBC (Professional Women’s Business Conference), and Margaret Atwood at Canada’s Most Powerful Women’s summit, and is speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women’s Conference in 2012. She headlined at global venues like TEDGlobal 2012 and TEDIndia 2009, technology conferences like Web 2.0, spoken at corporate events at Cisco, IBM, and Intuit, and educated at industry venues like Parc’s.

  She is the definitive innovation speaker, instigating mindset shifts at national HR conferences, and venues like TEDx.

  Hire Nilofer as your keynote speaker by contacting her bureau Speakers Spotlight (email is martin@speakers.ca) and they’ll help you get some fearlessness on the calendar.

  Media (2)This position has 2 media
  Nilofer Merchant: Got a meeting? Take a walk | Video on TED.com
  Nilofer Merchant: Got a meeting? Take a walk | Video on TED.com
  This media is a video
  Nilofer Merchant at TEDxHouston 2012 RESONATE
  Nilofer Merchant at TEDxHouston 2012 RESONATE
  This media is a video
  Santa Clara University
  Board Member
  Company NameSanta Clara University
  Dates Employed2008 – Jun 2014 Employment Duration6 yrs
  Harvard Business Review
  Author, #SocialEra (11 Rules for Creating Value)
  Company NameHarvard Business Review
  Dates EmployedSep 2012 – May 2014 Employment Duration1 yr 9 mos
  LocationGlobal
  Named by Fast Company as one of the Best Business Books in 2012, Social Era added a brand new framework, tilting leaders to understand that social is more than media. Smart companies are letting Social become the backbone of their business models, increasing their speed and flexibility by pursuing openness and fluidity.

  These organizations don’t operate like the powerful “800-pound gorillas” of yesteryear—but instead act more like a herd of 800 gazelles, moving together across a savannah, outrunning the competition.

  This quick-read offers new rules for creating value, leading, and innovating in our rapidly changing world. These social era rules are both provocative and grounded in reality—they cover thorny challenges like forsaking hierarchy and control for collaboration; getting the most out of all talent; allowing your customers to become co-creators in your organization; inspiring employees through purpose in a world where money alone no longer wields power; and soliciting community investment in an idea so that it can take hold and grow.

  The Industrial Era and the Information Age are over and their governing rule are passé. Leading in the Social Era requires a rethink and reimagination of what can be. Read 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era to be ready to meet the challenges of this new age and thrive.

  Media (3)This position has 3 media
  Previous Next
  Nilofer Merchant on the Rise of the Social Era
  Nilofer Merchant on the Rise of the Social Era
  This media is a video
  Social Era is Named Best Biz Books Of 2012 by Fast Company
  Social Era is Named Best Biz Books Of 2012 by Fast Company
  This media is a link
  11 Rules for Creating Value (all fancy-like)
  11 Rules for Creating Value (all fancy-like)
  This media is a document
  People to People Ambassador Programs
  Corporate Board Director
  Company NamePeople to People Ambassador Programs
  Dates Employed2011 – Aug 2013 Employment Duration2 yrs
  LocationNASDAQ: EPAX
  Ambassadors Group Inc. is a socially conscious, education company located in Spokane, Washington. Ambassadors Group Inc. is the parent company of Ambassador Programs Inc., World Adventures Unlimited, and BookRags, an educational research website. The company also oversees the Washington School of World Studies, an accredited travel study and distance learning school. Additional information about Ambassadors Group Inc. and its subsidiaries is available at www.ambassadorsgroup.com.

  Buyosphere, Oodle, Crowdscience, ModeWalk, and others
  Corporate Advisor
  Company NameBuyosphere, Oodle, Crowdscience, ModeWalk, and others
  Dates EmployedSep 2010 – Aug 2013 Employment Duration3 yrs
  Advising interesting start-ups to scale. Main areas: market definition / value proposition / pricing and biz models.

  Rubicon Consulting, Inc
  CEO & Founder
  Company NameRubicon Consulting, Inc
  Dates EmployedJun 1999 – Jun 2010 Employment Duration11 yrs 1 mo
  CEO and founder of a strategy firm that helped high-tech firms win markets.

  Notable companies that hired Rubicon included Adobe, Symantec, Nokia, HP, OpenWave, Autodesk, Logitech, Genesys, VMware, PayCycle, Tessera, Genesys, and Symbian.

  Started firm as a sole proprietor with am emphasis on go-to-market strategy, and grew partners and practices to cover the full range of where companies typically fail, to be the one-stop shop for tough problem solving and strategies that worked.

  The big difference between Rubicon and the big Consulting firms is that Rubicon worked with clients to help them not only define the big idea, but also a plan and approach that everyone buys into, and ultimately makes real. This best-practice methodology was captured and published (by O'Reilly Media) in a book called The New How (2010).

  Autodesk
  Business Development, Americas
  Company NameAutodesk
  Dates Employed1997 – 1999 Employment Duration2 yrs
  LocationSan Rafael, California & Cupertino, CAlifornia
  The 2nd half of the Vice President, Americas with broad responsibilities to manage daily business. Served as the Revenue Manager for Americas. Grew business from $200 to $300M in FY99. Functioned as cross-product, sales, and marketing leader, and as the division team lead for acquisitions, mergers, and new business opportunities.

  Developed stratetgy analysis & recommendations: pricing, policies, product launches, compensation, new business opportunities, open licensing, telesales, SI program, and 2 $200m+ acquisitions. Redesigned Education Program for Autodesk, including Products, Pricing, Channel, Sales Programs for both Institution and Student Markets -- $38M annual revenue stream. Managed both budget and staff.

  GoLive Systems Inc.
  VP WW Sales and Channel Marketing
  Company NameGoLive Systems Inc.
  Dates EmployedAug 1996 – 1997 Employment Duration1 yr
  LocationMenlo Park, CA
  Reported to President / CEO of privately held Internet company, later acquired by Adobe Inc.Responsibility for sales team, international channel, marketing, program, plans, and sales.Computer Reseller News’ review of GoLive channel program called it the ‘most comprehensive and effective ‘Go-to-Market’ program seen from a company of its size’. Built sales and marketing team.Created business plan, pricing, international distribution partnerships (inc. retail, VAR, multi-tier distribution, catalogs) for business & ED markets, marketing/PR/advertising, promotions, sales tools, and strategic alliances.Grew sales to $4.5 M within 6 months of first product. Company attained unexpected profitability. Captured 8% of the Internet authoring software market share (source: Web Week). Initiated strategic relationships/co-marketing/licensing agreements with Power Computing, Motorola, Apple, Netcom, Live Picture, Nikon, BlueWorld, Wacom, & Terran.

  Apple Computer
  Sr Manager Server Channel Dev & Plng
  Company NameApple Computer
  Dates Employed1989 – 1996 Employment Duration7 yrs
  Reported to Sr. Director, Worldwide Server Marketing. Full responsibility for server channel marketing strategies, reseller relationship management, channel marketing, direct mail, advertising, product promotions, and training
  programs Recognized as an industry-leading manager of channel programs. Received the “Best VAR Program” 1996 Award from VAR Business Publications (NOS Category).
  Manager * Channel Operations * Apple USA Marketing & Sales 1994-1995
  Marketing Project Manager * Apple USA Marketing & Sales 1992-1993
  Marketing Programs * Apple Customer Support 1989-1992

  CA Community College Chancellor's Office
  Board Member
  Company NameCA Community College Chancellor's Office
  Dates Employed1987 – 1989 Employment Duration2 yrs
  Show less
  Education
  Santa Clara University
  Santa Clara University
  Degree NameMBA Field Of StudyBusiness & Marketing
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1995 – 2000

  University of San Francisco
  University of San Francisco
  Degree NameB.S. Field Of StudyEconomics
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1989 – 1992

• Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trailblazers-harness-the-power-of-onlyness_us_599b32a4e4b0521e90cfb479

  Vala Afshar, Contributor
  Chief Digital Evangelist, Salesforce
  Trailblazers Harness The Power of Onlyness
  08/21/2017 09:25 pm ET

  “Talk to yourself as a friend, not an enemy. And remember, you cannot change anything unless you first see your own self as powerful enough to act. The way we talk of ourselves and to ourselves grants power – narrative power — to what happens next.” — Nilofer Merchant

  Why do companies and individuals get disrupted? Why can some individuals change organizations and transform businesses with their ideas, regardless of title, experience or status? Ray Wang and I invite business leaders and trailblazers from Fortune 1,000 companies, founders and CEOs of startups, venture capitalists and bestselling authors so that we identify common characteristics and approaches of highly accomplished business and innovation professionals. To learn more about the power of influence, and the science of driving meaningful change, Ray and I invited a world renowned innovation and business transformation expert who worked with Steve Jobs and now helps Fortune 500 companies and startups with strategy, go-to-market and growth initiatives to our weekly show DisrupTV.

  Nilofer Merchant - Author Onlyness, TEDTalks Speaker, Winner @Thinkers50 Future Thinker Award
  Nilofer Merchant is an innovation expert. She helps grow businesses — from Fortune 500s to web startups — for 20 years by turning seemingly “wild” ideas into new realities and showing the rest of us how we can too. She has done so through her books, her top ranked TED talk, and her accomplishments at Fortune 500 companies and startups. Merchant was awarded the Future Thinker Award from Thinkers50, which ranks the world’s leading business thinkers and which also named her the #1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice.

  Merchant began her career in business 25 years ago as an administrative assistant, and quickly rose to division leader, to CEO to board member of a NASDAQ-traded company gathering monikers such as the “Jane Bond of Innovation” along the way for her ability to guide organizations through impossible odds. She has personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18B in sales and has held executive positions at everywhere from Fortune 500 companies like Apple to startups.

  The author of two previous books on how organizations can better employ new ideas, Merchant’s latest, THE POWER OF ONLYNESS: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World , shares her insider expertise with general readers to reveal new ways of connecting our ideas to the world around us in an era when the potential to make a difference is no longer bound by social status.

  Here are the key takeaways of our conversation with Nilofer Merchant on the power of onlyness:

  The power of finding your onlyness - So Why are some individuals able to make sizable impact with their ideas, regardless of their power or status? They know how to claim their “onlyness”—what innovation expert Nilofer Merchant has named, “that spot in the world only you stand in, a function of your distinct history and experiences, visions and hopes.”

  “Onlyness is that thing that only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human. Onlyness is fundamentally about honoring each person: first as we view ourselves and second as we are valued. Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and vision. “ — Nilofer Merchant

  A sense of belonging is key to advocating ideas - According to Merchant, onlyness is an economic shift that allows real original ideas to enter the market place in a brand new way. In her book, Merchant talked about the power of onlyness but didn’t quite answer the question of ‘how can someone find their onlyness?’. Since the book, Merchant explored and qualitatively researched individuals that had put an ‘dent in the universe’ by finding their onlyness. Based on her research, Merchant discovered that a sense of belonging is key to advocacy of ideas. Belonging to a group is key to advocacy. We don’t give up on our selves unless we don’t already belong to a group. This changes the instruction set - instead of saying ‘just do it’ we must change the narrative to ‘find your tribe and then use your network to amplify your ideas’.

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  “The best research says that if you have to pick between belonging and your ideas, belonging wins every time. 61% of our society conforms rather than innovates. So, this seemingly “little thing” affects everything. With belonging comes the right to occupy space, to contribute your ideas. This explains why some people are able to make a difference and others seem to give up on their own ideas. Someone’s ability to contribute that which ONLY they can is not based on their boldness, or their status, but far more affected by how they belong and what connects them.” — Nilofer Merchant
  To find our community, we have clearly signal who we are - Merchant discussed examples of people who found their onlyness were those who clearly and honestly showed others who they really were. Signalling our interests and seeking like-minded people helps us find our onlyness and the courage to be advocates of our ideas, core beliefs and guiding principles. To find your onlyness, Merchant asks the question: what color is my weird?

  “In the modern workplace, there is an emphasis on empowering individuals to take initiative, share ideas, and drive real impact. Yet, most teams are still trying to reward IQ and IP. So, what really needs to change? Leaders need to recruit, reward, and recognize the underpinnings of teams that enable them to takes risks and innovates together, a kind of CQ (collaborative quotient), so individuals share their best, most creative ideas.” — Nilofer Merchant
  A good sponsor finds your onlyness, not your otherness - Merchant warns us to not work with sponsors that try to shove you into a box. Find sponsors who see the real you. Find sponsors that notice the things that matters to you.

  “The world will give you feedback on what works and what doesn’t. But first, you must do the work, relentlessly being yourself. If you wait for someone else to first give you permission to pursue a new direction, then you are, in effect, seeking permission to be yourself.” — Nilofer Merchant
  Specificity leads to actions and real outcomes - Merchant talks about both success and failure in her book. Her advice to achieve success is to be concise and clear with the problems statement, the stakeholders involved and the necessary actions to drive measurable outcomes. Focus, accelerates.

  The big shift in onlyness is focus less on about control, experience and pedigree, and more about experimentation, collaboration and co-creation of value. Who here wants to play? Merchant asks companies to find people with passion and grit, willing to experiment and play.

  “Figuring out your onlyness means considering your particular history, experiences, insights, and ideas— even, maybe especially, the things you’ve been told don’t matter or make you “less than.” What do you care about? What dent do you wish to make in the world? And how will your onlyness help you to shape that dent? All progress is born of new ideas. They let us re-imagine who we are, and how we might be. Ideas rupture the status quo and incubate the future. A future that works not just for the few, but for many.” — Nilofer Merchant
  Belonging to a community, means being willing to be changed by the community - Merchant advises us to ask ourselves what we are willing to add to the community, what is the shared framework, and the shared purpose? Answering these questions will guide and show us the opportunity to find ways to collaborate together, stay flexible, co-create and make forward progress.

  Merchant is a lifelong student, connecting with many, always willing to teach and be taught. Here is one of my favorite stories, where Merchant learned about growth from Steve Jobs. She remind us that the best gift that you can give yourself is the permission to learn from many. I encourage you to watch the entire video conversation with Nilofer Merchant to learn more about the power of onlyness and how it can shape your future as a successful entrepreneur and innovator. You can also listen to our podcast conversation with Nilofer.

• The Muse - https://www.themuse.com/advice/theres-no-such-thing-as-being-completely-stuck-an-interview-with-nilofer-merchant

  There’s No Such Thing as Being Completely Stuck: An Interview With Nilofer Merchant
  by

  ALEX TRYON
  Nilofer Merchant
  Have a question about job search?
  ASK YOUR QUESTION HERE
  I spent most of the last year feeling stuck in my career. My company, which I’d poured all my energy into for nearly five years, had shut down and I had completely lost track of my professional identity. Who was I now and what kind of job should I look for? And who would want to hire me, a failed entrepreneur?

  Nilofer Merchant’s new book, The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World, spoke directly to that feeling and reminded me that my unique perspective is a strength, not a weakness. In the book, she introduces the powerful idea of “onlyness,” your spot in the universe that is unique to you, where your life experience and vision for the future collide. Reading the book reminded me that everyone, even me in my frustrated state, have ideas to contribute.

  Finding my onlyness helped me focus on my passions, rather than my credentials, and think about the dent I want to make in the world—inside and outside the office. I may not look like a typical candidate for most jobs. In fact, I don’t look like anyone else, and that’s OK.

  The Muse was lucky enough to sit down with author Nilofer Merchant to discuss her early experiences forcing a unique path and how you can use your onlyness to have more impact, in your current role and beyond.

  How Do You Know What's Within Your Control at Work if Your Boss and/or Company Follow Very Specific Protocols and Insist on Sticking to Existing Processes?

  Often when I work with teams, they’ll say we’ve tried everything, or our boss won’t let us try everything.

  So, I ask them, where’s the proposal of the idea that they rejected?

  And most times, I get blank stares. Because, they never went that far. Instead, most of us act out of the fear of rejection rather than actually doing the work necessary to be rejected.

  So, what I advise is this: Propose things so clearly that if they say no, you know you’ve done everything you could to give them a clear choice to act in such a way that grows the business.

  If they reject that proposal, you know more about whether it’s a place for you. But if you’ve not done the analysis, gathered the data, and teed up the business case clearly, you’re not doing the part you can control.

  What's the First Step a Person Should Take if They're Looking to Feel More Powerful in Their Current Role?

  It’s counterintuitive to say big new ideas start by one person acting on what only they see. Yet, it’s the first step to being more powerful. Because others will see that action, and join in, so that you—plural—you, together make a new idea into a new reality.

  This reminds me of a bank executive I recently met. She had an idea to serve the low-end of the market. But she didn’t tell anyone, because it might become evident that she grew up poor.

  So her idea was stifled. Yet, if she spoke up, owning what mattered to her, based on that spot in the world where only she stood, she might very well find those who cared, too.

  It could be an issue that bothers you, or a way something doesn’t work, or a question that perplexes you. But, by acting on what you see that matters, you go toward your own ideas.

  How Do You Make Sure That Your Ideas—No Matter How Small—Are Impactful and Meaningful?

  Now that you can grow and realize ideas through the power of networks, you have a new lever to move the world.

  So, the key is to figure out why your idea deeply matters to you and use that to mobilize others. I mentioned the banker who cared about serving people? She knew that often the poor pay about 5% to cash their checks when they are the least able to afford that 5%.

  It mattered to her because she had experienced that life. Imagine if she had shared how this idea was meaningful to her. Surely others would care about that problem.

  This is how we scale an idea. By caring about the same things, your co‑denters become evident. Purpose can achieve something that money alone cannot, as it motivates the best in people and brings out the very best people.

  When's the First Time in Your Professional Life You Came to a Crossroads and Had to Decide Between Someone Else's Choice or Making Your Own—and Made Your Own?

  The General Manager of Apple Americas told me, “All of our products except one are declining in margin; only one isn’t, but that one has low revenues. Can you help me figure out how to grow the topline growth?”

  To be entirely truthful, I didn’t know much about margins back then, or even growth strategies. But I answered, absolutely! Taking the spreadsheet, I went into my managers’ office and shared the exchange.

  Instead of being excited, she said, “He’s been trying to tag everyone with that dog project.” She thought it was entirely unsolvable and proceeded to tell me all the super well-educated, and far more experienced people who had passed on it. And she advised me to do the same. I didn’t agree but I didn’t know what to say.

  I could listen to her—or I could at least give it a shot.

  So, I got going and did as many calls as I could that afternoon. One day later, I walked back into my boss’ office and said I had an idea for what would work. She was shocked that I didn’t listen to her. But, because I had a specific proposal, she listened. In the end, I got her support and the general manager’s, and ultimately the responsibility to run that idea.

  Choices define us. The hand we’re dealt is just a starting point; it’s our choices afterward that reveal what genuinely matters to us. When we face these seemingly unmovable situations, we must decide between making someone else’s choice or our own.

  It’s understandable how anyone can let the pressures of given situations, circumstances, or people around them define their next step. But it’s powerful–deeply so–to make your own choices, find your own path, open up your own door of opportunity— not just for yourself, but for your purpose.

  Oh, and that business?

  It was the Apple server business; which grew from $2M to $180M in less than 18 months. And I got to personally present that data to Steve Jobs in the first week he returned to Apple and helped bring it to back to life.

  None of that was possible without acting toward solutions.

• The Drum - http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/10/28/nilofer-merchant-the-power-onlyness

  Nilofer Merchant on the power of “Onlyness”
  By Kyle O'Brien-28 October 2016 17:59pm
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  Nilofer Merchant on the power of “Onlyness”
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  “Onlyness” isn’t a word we think of much. Come to think of it, it isn’t actually a word. But perhaps the more Nilofer Merchant uses her coined term, the more pertinent it would be to add it to our lexicon.

  Merchant is a fellow at the Martin Prosperity Institute and the author of the upcoming book, Onlyness. In it she tells of a new way to triumph over the status quo. She is also giving the opening keynote Friday at the 3% Conference, playing off her theme: “Onlyness: Make Your Ideas Powerful Enough to Dent the World.”

  Power in business has been vertical, tied to an organization, rank or influencers. Merchant sees the opportunity to make a difference as broadly horizontal. She says that at the intersection of power and opportunity lies “onlyness.” It’s a way for anyone and perhaps everyone to count and make a difference with ideas powerful enough to make a dent in the world.

  In her keynote, Merchant will touch on the ideas she puts forth in the book, ideas she has built up in her 20-plus years helping grow businesses as varied as Fortune 500s and Silicon Valley startups. Her entrepreneurial and innovative ways – launching over 100 products, netting $18 billion in sales – have earned her much respect and a few nicknames, including the “Jane Bond of Innovation.” She is highly sought for her product strategy advice by companies like Logitech, Symantec, HP, Yahoo and others, and many see her as a visionary. Her other books include The Future is not Created, The Future is Co-Created and 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra, and her popular blog, This Yes & Know, has been around since 2003.

  The Bay Area resident was born in India and raised in Northern California, though she lived for a few years recently in Paris. She got the initial idea for “Onlyness” in 2011 when she was trying to articulate value creation and how it is changing in our economy.

  “I had been working in company turnarounds for a long time. I kept noticing that the ways companies were thinking about strategy or advantage were entirely based on how big are we. That's a very old construct. I was sitting in a corporate boardroom and being vetted for a corporate board role. I realized these guys were saying things that were so 1980s, about competitive advantage kind of stuff, and I thought, ‘No, no, you're wrong.’ I actually came back to my desk to find the people who had written about why they're wrong so I could send it to them and advise them. I couldn't find anything,” said Merchant.

  Her ideas became five blog posts in the Harvard Business Review articulating how value creation is different in modern times than the past.

  “I ended up coining a term in order to get to this nugget, which was, ‘If value creation used to be about the means of production or capital, now it's about ideas. But where do ideas come from? They come from that spot in the world only you stand in, which is a function of your history and experience, visions and hopes.’ My argument was each of us has something that only each of us can offer, that when connected together using networks – not hierarchical organization constructs – that when connected together can now scale in a way that we've never had before. Now ideas born of an ‘only’ can scale and make a dent in the world. ‘Onlyness’ is that thesis,” she said.

  “I would say all ideas go to die inside organizations — all the weird and wild ideas typically die. But in the network construct, weird and wild ideas actually have a shot, if you can find the other people who care about the same thing as you.”

  Merchant researched roughly 300 stories to get to the 20 or so she included in the book. One she relayed was of a man in his 60s, the dean of a business school a year from retirement.

  “He gets asked, ‘What are you going to do?’ He's known all these years that the reason that Enron and all these other major problems exist in business is we don't teach people how to have a moral compass, how to actually live out your values. It's one thing to know theoretically, it's another thing to have the muscle memory to know how to handle things. He ends up, as the dean of fellows, building a spirituality in business course at Santa Clara University,” she said.

  Merchant went on to say that the weirdest and wildest ideas are sometimes scoffed at, yet those are the ones we should embrace more, especially since we can use neuroscience and multi-disciplinary research to back up the ideas that don’t fit neatly into traditional business modes, like compassion, meditation and spirituality.

  She also sees a shift in how we connect, with social media being the obvious tool that enables us to find one another rather than being alone.

  “If you're an ‘only’, if you're all alone in the world and you have a novel idea, you're more likely to give it up in order to belong to whatever tribe you sit with. Rosabeth Moss Kanter's research from the 1970s talked about that – she called it tokenism. She said if you're less than 15% of any group, your weirdness will die with you, because there's no way you can sacrifice belonging to chase a new idea. The reason social media actually creates the net change is you can now find the other people who care about the same thing as you relatively easily,” she stated, adding that during her research she found tons of people changing industries and changing their own sense of community and city in the process.

  Merchant sees not only the practical value new ideas have on business, but also the economic impact.

  “These wild ideas that are currently trapped inside people, because we don't know how to actually unleash that individual power and then connect to the power of many. That represents a huge amount of economic growth. Ideas drive our modern economy, but if the only ideas we accept are from the people we expect to see it from, then we're basically telling a really large swath of a group, saying, ‘No, no, no, we're not going to acknowledge you,’” said Merchant, who said that the people that are being told no are often young, women, people of color or older.

  “This is where I think we can actually start to change what happens at the 3% Conference, so just tying it all to Kat (Gordon)'s work. Kat's got a really nice group of people already in the room who care about this notion of change. The question, then, is what are the constructs that allow you to scale together? That's what I'm going to put the emphasis of the talk on, which is, how do you actually isolate and act as one?”

  Merchant says that each of us has the potential to be a change maker, owning the narrative power of our wild idea. But we must understand that we cannot do it alone. We need to use our allies to help change our industry and our work, and we must allow ourselves to unlock a level of capacity we may not have ever seen before.

  This article is about: North America, 3% Conference, Leadership, Long Reads, Career, Events, Marketing

3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Merchant, Nilofer: THE POWER OF
ONLYNESS
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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Full Text:
Merchant, Nilofer THE POWER OF ONLYNESS Viking (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 9, 1 ISBN: 978-0-525-
42913-5
An exhortation to raise one's freak flag, dust off that notebook full of plans and dreams, and set up
shop.Merchant (11 Rules for Creating Value in #SocialEra, 2012, etc.) has built a career as a brand of one.
She was an early-ish hire at Apple and Autodesk, was hired (and fired, to her devastation) by a startup that
Adobe would acquire, and so on. She was also raised in a tradition-minded immigrant family that valued
success--for men, that is. As a business consultant, she has since become an advocate for level playing
fields for those outside the system, the target audience for her concept of "onlyness," built on experience,
talents, and ideas in possession only of particular individuals, such as the African-American woman
engineer who, against the odds, worked her way through Vanderbilt and was instrumental in getting that
institution to divest itself of holdings in Apartheid-era South Africa. "If only a few ideas are valued,"
Merchant writes, "the wealth of many humans is lost." By Merchant's account, social media and the web do
much to create that level playing field in which outside-the-box, outside-the-system ideas can get an airing,
though the largely unstated problem is not expressing them but driving audiences to find them. Still, after
some false starts and the business-book-as-usual laying out of a few wondrous anecdotes to support the
rightness and wrongness of approach, the author gets down to some interesting cases, including a grassroots
effort to convince the Boy Scouts to abandon anti-gay policies and a self-styled cougar's campaign
against pornography. Unfortunately, there's too much windup, the narrative is scattershot, and the
scaffolding is wobbly. The best of Merchant's case studies illustrate the operating principles of cultural
difference and the power of persistence in getting things done. A by-the-numbers business book stuffed
with case studies of success and failure but also with good material for priming the pump.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Merchant, Nilofer: THE POWER OF ONLYNESS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498344887/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2443afcf.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498344887
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521934812953 2/3
The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild
Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World
Nilofer Merchant. Viking, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-0-525-42913-5
Merchant (11 Rules for Creating in the #SocialEra) encourages her readers to embrace their uniqueness in
this self-help guide for would-be innovators. She begins by asserting the importance of identifying one's
purpose, or what she calls "the dent," and then tells her readers how to find theirs. Her examples of people
who found their dent include Kim Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code, and Zach Walls, a former Eagle
Scout who helped end the Boy Scouts' anti-LGBT prohibitions. Next, Merchant encourages her readers to
find "co-denters," those people who can help you amplify your message. Finally, she urges readers to
galvanize others to act, using as an example Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz, who started the movement
that resulted in French railway company SNCF paying $60 million in reparations to Holocaust survivors.
Elsewhere, Merchant asserts that trust is rewarded, pointing to the management style of PatientsLikeMe.
The website solicits input from people with rare diseases and then shares the information they provide with
physicians and researchers, maintaining transparency with patients about how their information is used and
how the company makes money throughout the process. Merchant delivers an inspiring message about the
power of believing in one's dreams. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World." Publishers Weekly, 29
May 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500739/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=974b0198. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500739
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521934812953 3/3
Economics
Library Journal.
142.12 (July 1, 2017): p87+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Merchant, Nilofer. The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough To Dent the World.
Viking. Aug. 2017.304p. illus. notes, index. ISBN 9780525429135. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780698196155. BUS
Business thinker Merchant (The New How) here introduces the concept of "onlyness," that everyone
possesses qualities that make them unique and valuable. Merchant asserts that instead of status or
credentials, a person's distinct background and skill can influence or complement a team. Despite its name,
"onlyness" does not imply working in isolation. Merchant demonstrates how people can come together
(with "codenters") to navigate the new social economy in the workplace. She provides examples of how to
use onlyness to find a voice among the deafening "noise" of the tech age, to stop questioning our
qualifications (or lack thereof), and to collaborate to make positive change. Bite-sized anecdotes and stories
from the tech world and media provide support for Merchant's ideas. In a time when the word "snowflake"
is being used as an insult, it's refreshing to read what is essentially a celebration of our unique selves.
VERDICT Readers searching for their career or online "voice" will be inspired by Merchant's advice.--
Jennifer Clifton, Indiana State Lib., Indianapolis
Stenfors, Alexis. Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking
Scandal in History. Zed. Jun. 2017. 252p. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781783609291. $95; pap. ISBN
9781783609284. $16.95; ebk. ISBN 9781783609314. BUS
Stenfors's (economics, Univ. of Portsmouth, UK) book is a detached mea culpa for the global financial
crisis of the early 2000s. Stenfors, who was a Merrill Lynch currency trader in London, cost his employer
$100 million via misplaced bets. He tried to cover his tracks, then told his boss the truth while he was on
vacation. He was barred from the industry for five years and cooperated with authorities. This book is the
author's attempt to explain what happened and to clear his reputation as a "rogue trader." He says he was
caught up in a competitive culture of greed among major banks to rig the financial market, and as a high
achiever, was merciless toward underperforming colleagues. Reading like an expanded doctoral
dissertation, detailing the author's reflections and providing a finance primer, this is not the allencompassing
overview of David Enrich's The Spider Network. To its credit, there's a glossary of financial
terms and solid explanations of London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and financial derivatives.
VERDICT Readers should start with Enrich's book, then read this volume for one player's inside account.
Recommended for financial professionals and scholarly audiences.--Harry Charles, St. Louis
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Economics." Library Journal, 1 July 2017, p. 87+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497612725/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1e9c788e.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497612725

"Merchant, Nilofer: THE POWER OF ONLYNESS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498344887/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500739/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "Economics." Library Journal, 1 July 2017, p. 87+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497612725/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

• Sourcing Innovation
  http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2010/02/05/the-new-how-a-book-review/
  Word count: 1429

  The New How, A Book Review
  Nilofer Merchant’s The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy is a great book for those that truly want to collaborate but also need a framework for collaboration along with some practical advice on how to actually get down to the business of collaboration. A veteran of strategic thinking and innovation in the business context, Nilofer goes beyond simple academic frameworks and packs each chapter with examples and real-life situations that illustrate her points.

  Furthermore, while the book does introduce some new terminology that, for the most part, is unnecessary, it’s pretty much limited to:

  The New How
  which is Nilofer’s way of saying that siloed businesses can no longer survive and that they have to embrace more collaborative ways of working together,
  The Air Sandwich
  which is Nilofer’s way of referring to the void that exists between the executive suite and the trenches in an average large organization, filled by middle management who are supposed to be bridging the gap but who, usually, only widen it with their inability to truly understand both the corporate strategy and shop floor details that they are not part of on a daily basis,
  Murderboarding
  which is Nilofer’s process of using a razor-sharp tool to slice away at fuzzy thinking and kill off good ideas to let the great ideas thrive, and
  Chief of Answers
  which is Nilofer’s characterization of the current, doomed, organizational model where one person is responsible for driving all strategy.
  Furthermore, while most of the book is focussed on Nilofer’s QuEST (Question, Envision, Select, and Take ownership) process for the collaborative creation of strategy, Nilofer also realizes that collaboration requires more than just a process. Thus, the first part of the book spends a couple of chapters on how to “be” a collaborator — which requires us, at a minimum, to listen and understand, and the last part of the book focusses on the bigger picture and provides us with the “glue” necessary to mesh the people with the process in a way that can produce real results.

  But what makes the book great is that even if you tossed the framework, every chapter is filled with practical, down-to-earth advice, on how to become a true collaborator and real-world examples of not only how to apply the concepts, but what might happen if you don’t. For example, Nilofer starts the book by describing one of her own experiences where she was in charge of revenues for the Americas in a large multi-national software company. She described how, one day, the VP dropped by to explain how the company had decided to diversify their product line six-fold within the coming eighteen months — with no input at all from the trenches or even (senior) middle management — based solely on the results of a market exploration which convinced senior management it was “the right idea”. Somehow, sales and marketing would generate demand while new products were developed in parallel. The CEO said “We Must”, the (senior) VPs said “We Will”, and everyone charged forward on the vision, and edict, handed down from on high.

  The results were, as we would now expect, predictable. A few months into the new revenue cycle, Nilofer received a call from the lead product manager for the new suite. It started off with “We have a problem here. You know the lead product? Yeah, the one that’s supposed to net us most of this year’s revenue? We’re not going to be able to ship it with all the features we originally planned.” Meetings and chaos resulted, with the typical end-result where the product was shipped on the planned release date, knowing full well it wouldn’t live up to the expectations marketing had created. And it didn’t sell well. Revenues were weak. Customers that bought were unhappy. The team was demoralized and the corporate culture took a nosedive. Several talented staff members resigned. And it took a while for the company to recover.

  And it was all preventable. Had the strategy not been created in a vacuum in the senior executive suite, but collaboratively with the front-lines who could have provided feedback on what could be done, and when, chances are that a simpler vision could have been successfully delivered to greater profits than the unmaintainable grand vision that was decided on the simple basis of a market-study with no cross-company input.

  After all, as Nilofer points out in the Introduction, there’s not much difference between strategy success and strategy failure. The formula for both is summarized as:
  good intent + good idea + talented direction + hard work + "magic black box".

  The difference is that in a successful strategy, the “magic black box”, or the details of a successful execution are worked out before the strategy is adopted and launched. Strategy fails when the keys to making a strategy operational cross-functionally are not uncovered soon enough. This happens when a company jumps from “grand vision” to “execution” without sufficient exploration and planning, not because the idea is bad, or the direction is off, or the people aren’t talented and hard-working enough. And that’s why Nilofer wrote the book, to try and help people understand how to replace the “magic black box” with a “successful execution strategy” so that you can be a winner every time. (Because winning today is not enough, you have to win tomorrow, and smart companies go for a series of smaller wins rather than betting the farm on one big win.)

  And while I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty details and give it all away, since this is another book I believe you should carefully read cover-to-cover (I did), I am going to give you some examples of the practical, down-to-earth advice that the book is crammed with.

  Even bright, talented, and motivated people cannot jointly create effective strategies until the fundamental enablers of collaboration are in place.
  Some people have to be guided, and, more importantly, the organization has to foster a culture of collaboration. If the corporate culture is “I own my domain, you own yours” and every manager is always trying to one-up the manager down the hall for greater recognition from the CEO, collaboration is not going to happen.
  Setting direction is an art and a practice.
  Just like strategy is a noun and a verb. You have to have a vision not only of a goal, but of a realistic execution strategy to get to the goal.
  The hallmark of thorny strategy problems is that they involve contradiction – that is, they contain a set of conflicting goals or imperatives that create a tension that defies objective resolution.
  And there’s rarely just one right answer. To find the answer, you’ll have to take on tough debates, uncover tacit issues, and work with your “foes” to developer a deeper understanding of the issue that will allow everyone to collectively reach a solution that everyone can live with, get behind, and execute on. Furthermore, by acknowledging and addressing those tensions as we develop ideas rather than smoothing things over, we’ll end up with an even stronger, more viable set of options. It’s one of those pay-me-now or pay-me-later choices.
  It often happens that our Achilles heel as leaders is attempting to come up with the answers and solve the tough problems by ourselves.
  Even a genius doesn’t know everything, and a true genius admits it.
  In the long run, what truly matters is not what each of us knows today, but out ability to continue expanding the aperture of what each of us can see and understand tomorrow.
  That’s pretty much the reason Sourcing Innovation exists!
  Powerpoint slides are just another form of air in the sandwich.
  Powerpoint slides capture high-level ideas, not understanding. For a corporate strategy to be successfully executed, everyone in the organization has to understand it, not just 1 in 20 individuals (which is the number of individuals who understand corporate strategy in your typical organization today). You don’t want to be in the situation where you were looking for a strategy, but only found a PowerPoint.
  Share This on Linked In

  This entry was posted in Best Practices, Book Review, Strategy on February 5, 2010.

• Soundview
  https://www.summary.com/book-reviews/_/The-Power-of-Onlyness/
  Word count: 706

  Review
  Some readers might be skeptical of Nilofer Merchant’s new book, The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World. Yes, Sara Blakely cut the feet out of her pantyhose and became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, but there is still essentially no chance that this will happen to the rest of us. Readers on alert for pipe-dream selling will be relieved when it quickly appears that The Power of Onlyness will not be just another sophisticated, anecdote-filled pep talk.

  In the early pages, Merchant, a former Silicon Valley marketer who, the book jacket tells us, “has personally launched more than 100 products netting $18 billion in sales,” does oversell a bit the idea that anyone can change the world: “Without permission or a need to be appointed by someone. Without specialized expertise. Without a ton of money. Without the external credentials of titles or education. Without investing loads of time.”

  Changing or “denting” the world, as Merchant phrases it, is not so simple. It’s true that Samar Minallah Khan, for example, almost singlehandedly eliminated the barbaric practice in Pakistan of letting murderers go free if the murderer’s family “gives” one of its young girls to the victim’s family. Khan, however, was a well-connected Pakistani anthropologist and a devout Muslim who could speak to the rural people of Pakistan in many of the local dialects of the areas where this practice took place.

  However, one finishes reading the story of Khan, and the many other detailed stories in this book, with a full appreciation of how anyone can, indeed, launch a world-changing idea if, as Merchant argues persuasively, they focus on what makes them unique and different.

  From Only You to Scaling With Others

  This brings us to Merchant’s term “onlyness.” The “only” part refers to that which belongs to only you, what Merchant refers to as “your spot”: not just your experiences, knowledge, personality, skills, habits and strengths but also your decisions and choices as well as the context in which you have lived. “You’re standing in a spot in the world that only you stand in,” she writes, “a function of your history and experiences, visions and hope.”

  For example, Merchant tells the story of Kim Bryant, who time and again in school and in her tech jobs found herself to be the only black and often the only woman (“We got a two-fer” is how she was introduced at one company). This experience and the persistence and resilience she learned growing up in the rough areas of Memphis, her schooling and work experiences at Vanderbilt and DuPont, and the desire to help her daughter and young black girls succeed in STEM professions all converged to put Bryant in position to launch STEM training camps for minority 6- to 17-year-olds, called Black Girls Code (BGC). More than 7,000 girls have learned skills such as robotics, app development and computer programming through BGC.

  “Only,” however, is only the beginning. For your idea to make a difference, you need to scale, Merchant writes. You need to connect with other people to join you in your quest — what Merchant calls “connectedness.” Unfortunately, she writes, many people believe that they have a wild idea that no one else will share.

  Put your idea out there, Merchant writes, and you’ll be surprised who shows up. When Leo Bretholz wrote his memoir of being deported to Auschwitz aboard the French national railway system, SNCF, he had no idea that his book would lead to a 10-year international legal battle to get SNCF, paid handsomely to transport Jews to the concentration camps, to apologize and pay reparations after 70 years of rejecting responsibility. The successful two-continent campaign would involve high-powered law firms and the 165,000 people who signed Bretholz’s Change.org petition.

  The stories in The Power of Onlyness inspire because they emphasize how people can change the world if they start with who they are — a grounded, realistic approach that can inspire even the most skeptical reader to break down any limits that they might have put on their dreams.

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/b1d35b6c-8b89-11e7-9084-d0c17942ba93
  Word count: 111

  The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World, by Nilofer Merchant

  Books about innovation tend to focus on how ideas flourish within organisations — the subject of Nilofer Merchant’s earlier works — but The Power of Onlyness goes beyond the borders of organisations. Merchant looks at how movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Change.org, are born when people come together to turn ideas that seem marginal into meaningful forces. Starting with her personal story about breaking out of her own cultural norms, Merchant describes how other activists successfully amplified their life-changing messages, however weird those messages seemed when first conceived.

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