Lunch With Guy Kawasaki
November 9th, 2007 by Chris Lucas 
Yesterday we had a great opportunity to attend a lunch in downtown Indy in which Guy Kawasaki was the keynote, and gave a presentation about the Art of Innovation. The lunch was part of the Indiana Entrepreneurship Week, presented by TechPoint. Besides the poor job of marketing by the organizers (Guy wasn’t even mentioned on the website!) the event was great. We walked in about ten minutes before the lunch started and sat in the second row, center stage!
I had attended a WebEx a month or two ago and Guy used a similar deck of slides, so I was familiar with parts of his presentation, though the anecdotes and expansion on his thoughts varied from the original presentation, so it was still a captivating presentation.
One of the better points he made was in terms of mantra’s versus mission statements and how corporations go to great lengths (off-site meetings, team building, corporate coaches, etc.) to come up with long business speak mission statements, that really mean very little to what the company does. Instead, Guy says, is to come up with a three or four word mantra of what you do. Something that is focused and really gets to the essence of what you or your company is about. The other great point was his message about”Bozos” or people who tell you that an idea/business can’t or won’t work. He made a reference of how he had turned down an interview for the CEO position at Yahoo, when it was first being started because he didn’t think it would work. He had been a “bozo” because he couldn’t see past his PC days at Apple, and see how the internet was the new curve, the new way to do business - a roughly 2 billion dollar decision on his part, yikes!
I could probably go on and on about the presentation and Guy, but the biggest thing for me was the energy and enthusiasm that he had for his topic. He was sniffling and had a cold, but you could tell that even though he wasn’t feeling well, that he loves to talk about entrepreneurship, and if you/me/your company can harness just a little bit of that passion, feel that way about your company or product, you are going to be one step better towards creating a product that is successful.
