In our early conversations with companies about our new Leverage program, it’s becoming clear we have to shift the conversations into the context of their company quickly. In most cases we’re speaking to the companies founder or exec team. One way to shift into their context is to simply ask…

“what crazy ideas have you not shared with your team?”

Why ask about the ideas they have not shared with their team? Simple, it gets to the core of the tension between leverage and control.

They haven’t shared those ideas with their team because they know their team will likely squash their idea. It’s still in the stage where it’s indistinguishable from a stupid, wasteful idea. As a leader of that business, they demand their team kill these wasteful ideas and focus on their core business.

The role we want to play is to help kill these ideas, in a proactive way. We want to get to work identifying the simple next steps to figure out if this idea has real merit. In the case you really haven’t shared the idea with your team, let’s start there. What will it take for you to share this with your team? Through that process we’ll quickly justify spending more time, more resources on it or we’ll all agree to kill it once and for all!

PS..check out this 15 minute talk about how a company is disrupting the biotech space. I’m not sure the problems they’re solving are truly unique to biotech are they?