Product Lens

My guest today is Mike Girdley ( @girdley on the twitters)

He's started 9 businesses using an approach called Effectuation. It's similar to the Lean Startup but much more effective. He's also started one dumpster fire. A literal Dumpster Fire.

I interviewed oil industry veteran Edward Doucet about his experience building, installing and maintaining equipment on an oi rig.

His equipment recycled drilling mud. That mud is used to lubricate the drilling bit, carry the cuttings away from the bit and counter the pressure when the bit cuts through to pressurized fluid like and oil reservoir.

Long ago, that mud was just dumped into the water. That was wasting $30,000 a day in mud and could pollute the environment.  His device filtered the cuttings out of the mud so it could be reused.  But installing a new device doing a new job on an oil rig dozens or hundreds of miles from a remote part of a remote country can be challenging, to say the least.

Dr. Leland began his career applying fungi to the tips of plant roots to help them absorb more Nitrogen, reducing the need for fertilizer, much of which comes from Petroleum products and often spills over into waterways.

  Fungi create vast networks between plants underground and transport nutrients such as Nitrogen from one area to another. They even use arbitrage, where they will transport one nutrient to the plant that is willing to exchange it for the most of another nutrient.  It's unclear what the Fungi get out of this process. Perhaps, like your credit card company, they take a percentage of each transaction.

We discuss the value of letting team members be themselves and work toward their strengths.

This is a segment I'm calling Origin Story.  My favorite issues of comic books was always the Origin Story.  How (and why) did Peter Parker become Spiderman?

Everyone has an origin story.

Frank X Levy invented at new form of interactive stage play where the entire audience participates. To paraphrase Oprah "You get a part. And YOU get a part. Everyone gets a part."  
He called it Magnificent Theater. He invented it at age 10 and spent the next 60 years perfecting it.  About 15 years ago, he performed this for my daughter's birthday party.  He put on an instant play in my sister's backyard, enlisting 20 soon-to-be actors to put on "Little Red", a raucous version of Little Red Riding hood set in south Louisiana with a woodsman armed with a modern chainsaw.  Luckily no one was injured.  

I recount a conversation I had with Massimo Curatello (@maxcuratella ) about how to have more effective conversations by :

1. Having one person Facilitate, freeing the other(s) to be more creative.
2. When the conversation pivots (or goes down a Rabbit Hole) describe the Pivot in the conversation and try to summarize before pivoting.
3. Edit in the Microphone:   during the conversation, issue editing instructions (for yourself or your Producer).  This is what great movie directors do: they edit in the camera.  You could use something like Descript.com to Search for your instructions. I use

• That's interesting
• That's very interesting
• Let's summarize
• Delete the last  X minutes

I re-edited this episode and reposted it at:

https://anchor.fm/clay-nichols/episodes/S1E2-I-discuss-creating-happier--more-effective-teams-in-Biotech-with-Dr--Jarrod-Leland-e156e5p