Here is a brief portion of an interview of Lisa Bodell by Raul Candeloro in an article written by Glenn Burr for the Inc. Small Giants Community (ISGC). To read the complete article, check out other resources, and learn more about ISGC, please click here.

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Ever think about how you would put yourself out of business? You should be thinking about it since that is what your competitor is doing on a daily basis. In this interview with Lisa Bodell, author of Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution and Wall Street Journal guest columnist, Inc. Small Giants Community Executive Director Raul Candeloro gets to the bottom of how thinking like your competition can completely revitalize a small business.

Candeloro: Let’s begin by talking about yourself, so our Inc. Small Giants Community members can get to know you better. Could you briefly describe your life journey until you wrote Kill the Company?

Bodell: I’ve always been creative, independent, and entrepreneurial. When I was young, I liked to invent new games and toys. My first business was when I was 7, when I decided to – don’t laugh – paint rocks and sell them door-to-door to my neighbors for a dime; and they were kind enough to spur my “creative” business dreams along. I think I even made a few dollars that summer.

As I got older, I realized I also liked to coach and teach – from coaching kids’ tennis teams, to supporting my college professors, and eventually teaching graduate level courses.

I’ve always been drawn to work that involves a high level of creativity and strategy. So, after college, when I started my career in advertising, it seemed like the perfect fit. I discovered that I had a knack for ideas; not just creative ideas – but unique business ideas. I could easily take ads or product ideas and transform them into business concepts for my clients. And they loved me for it.

However, I found that most agency management preferred that the ideas come from the creative department, not the account services department, where I sat. The clear signal was that ideas outside the creative department weren’t as valuable. I found this ridiculous. I believe that everyone is creative, and can – and should – be allowed to come up with innovative ways to solve problems and transform businesses. So, I left the agency world to start my own business to teach people just that – how to be more creative and innovative to solve problems better, and reach their potential.

I started offering innovation training to help people embrace creativity and change, which is a natural extension of my teaching experience. But while I taught, I noticed that people have many barriers to being more innovative and embracing change, so I started doing a lot of research around corporate culture and change to find out ‘why’? This research led me to many experiences with executives, trying to get them to embrace change – and man, was that hard.

What I found was that in order to get people to start thinking differently, we first have to get rid of the barriers and day-to-day complexities that hold them back from being more effective in the first place. Only then can we have the space for thinking differently. This was the genesis of our Killer exercises that we feature in Kill the Company – killing rules, killing meetings, killing processes, etc.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.