Michael Roderick is the CEO of Small Pond Enterprises, a consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals and organizations enhance their professional relationships and brand presence. Through his expertise in networking and messaging, Michael empowers clients to become thought leaders and build referable brands. He also hosts the Access to Anyone podcast, where he shares insights on effective relationship-building strategies.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [4:24] Minimum Viable Insight (MVI) and its role in expanding perspectives
- [7:02] Michael Roderick discusses “windows thinking” and how it applies to marketing strategy
- [09:27] Difference between “doorway thinking” (logical) and “windows thinking” (lateral)
- [12:02] The three components of “windows thinking”: constant, variable, and visual
- [13:27] What is an “actions audit” and how does it reveal hidden patterns?
- [17:40] Positioning as a currency and its impact on opportunities
- [18:43] How ignoring, embracing, or avoiding actions affects business growth
In this episode…
In today’s competitive landscape, many professionals pursue the same opportunities using conventional methods, making it challenging to stand out. How can you discover new perspectives when most follow predetermined paths?
Networking expert Michael Roderick advocates for “windows thinking” as a solution to the challenges of conformity and the limitations of “doorway thinking.” Unlike traditional thinking which relies on familiar paths, “windows thinking” encourages lateral approaches that involve shifting perspectives to uncover opportunities often overlooked by others. By visualizing problems through the “windows three” framework — constant, variable, and visual — you can generate innovative solutions
In this episode of the Timeless Marketing Podcast, Brian Kurtz hosts Michael Roderick, CEO of Small Pond Enterprises, to discuss exploring new perspectives and possibilities beyond conventional thinking. Michael shares actionable strategies for leveraging “windows thinking,” highlights the power of active learning and Minimum Viable Insight (MVI) in innovation, and explores the six business currencies, emphasizing the power of positioning.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Brian Kurtz
- Brian Kurtz on LinkedIn
- Chris Mason on LinkedIn
- Michael Roderick on LinkedIn
- Small Pond Enterprises
- Access to Anyone
Quotable moments:
- “It’s often the unpolished that ends up being the most useful and gives us so much to follow and sort of think about.”
- “Actions, in essence, are an infinite resource, because we can constantly come up with a new way to do an action.”
- “The only difference between whether or not we see our reflection in a window or we see what’s outside of the window, is our perception.”
- “If you stare at one tree, you’ll never know you’re in a forest.”
- “An idea is a different approach to a problem — it’s a different way of looking at things.”
Action steps:
- Practice active learning: Engage with content by noting your minimum viable insights in real time. This approach encourages immediate reflection and sharing, fostering a collective learning environment where diverse perspectives are acknowledged and appreciated.
- Explore “windows thinking”: Diversify your approach by identifying unexplored angles and opportunities. This method challenges conventional “doorway thinking”, opening up innovative pathways and reducing competition by venturing into less crowded spaces.
- Conduct an actions audit: Regularly evaluate actions you are avoiding, embracing, or ignoring. By doing so, you can identify gaps in your strategy and capitalize on underutilized resources, ensuring a more balanced and effective approach to your goals.
- Prioritize mindset, approach, and positioning as currencies: Recognize these often overlooked assets as valuable resources. Leveraging them can enhance problem-solving capabilities and improve how others perceive you, strengthening your influence and reach.
- Use visual aids to enhance understanding: Create visual representations to process complex ideas and uncover new perspectives. Visuals help break down information, making it easier to identify opportunities and devise more comprehensive strategies.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Titans Xcelerator.
Titans Xcelerator is a private mentorship program for direct response marketers.
It is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed.
As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
The bottom line: you don’t have to grow your business alone.
If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help
Episode Transcript
Intro 00:05
Welcome to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Your connection to insights from some of the top direct response marketing minds on the planet.
Brian Kurtz 00:17
Hey, it’s Brian Kurtz here host of the Timeless Marketing Podcast. Today’s episode is a clip from one of the two-hour calls inside Titans Xcelerator, my private mentorship program for direct response marketers. Before we get to that, I have one question for you. Do you have a marketing insurance policy? If you don’t, you need one. And that’s why I created Titans Xcelerator, which is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business. The bottom line, you don’t have to grow your business alone. And you don’t need to spend tens of thousands of dollars either. Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind. I know because I hosted a group that was over $20,000 a year. If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z.net/help.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed. As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one. Again, if you want to see if Titans Xcelerator is a fit for you with no obligation, go to BrianKurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z.net/help. And feel free to email me directly. I respond to every email with questions about this episode or just to say hi, at Brian@BrianKurtz.net. Now onto today’s episode.
Okay. So we still have a speaker, and a wonderful speaker. Michael Roderick, I’m sure everything we’ve talked about has stolen your thunder. And we’ve talked about everything that you’re going to talk about. No, I’m just kidding. Those of you who’ve been in this group for any length of time know that Michael is one of the most thoughtful, I mean, we’re all thoughtful accelerators. I don’t want to single anybody out. But Michael, always, when he shares, he always has gems. He’s always out for, you know, what’s in it for them kind of mentality. He always wants to be helpful, especially, I’ve always noticed there are hot seats. There are certain people in this group and Michael’s one of them who always just is there for the person on the hot seat. And I really appreciate that about you, among other things, Michael. And so I think we were on a hot seat. Michael shared some of his thinking inside the box framing that he’s been working on and I said, you know, let’s do that as a spotlight. And now, you know, here’s your 30-40 minutes of fame, Michael, to show off a little bit, but also to share your genius. So I bring you the Titans Xcelerator prophet Michael Roderick.
Michael Roderick 3:53
Thank you so much Brian for the kind words. And it’s always so fun to sort of dig into these particular concepts. And interestingly enough, as I’ve listened to what everybody has been sharing and sort of talking about, it actually is a very good illustration of what I’m going to be talking about today with windows thinking, and I’m going to be breaking down this concept a little bit more. But one of the things that I am going to also be doing in the education world, when I used to teach high school, one of the things that we learned about was the idea of indirect instruction, where in essence, what you’d be doing is you’d be teaching one lesson, but the students would be doing something and actually learning something in addition. So I will basically give you a way to start to think about the content that I’m about to share.
And it will basically start to get your brain kind of working on this whole sort of windows thinking kind of concept. So the very first idea that I want to share with you is the concept of, you’re all familiar with the concept of active listening, where basically we’re really paying very close attention and sort of looking, you know, listening to what somebody is saying. But one of the things that I find can be very, very useful when there are presentations is the idea of active learning. And I originally sort of landed on this because I was doing two presentations back to back, and one of the things that I found was that in some cases with the first one, there weren’t a lot of moments where people were sort of asking questions or sort of sharing, you know, thoughts. So in the second one, I came up with this concept, and I encourage you to have some fun with it as the presentation goes along. Feel free to use the chat for this, and I refer to it as MVI, and that is a minimum viable insight. Most of the time what tends to happen is when we’re learning something, when something is being presented to us, we try to sort of come up with like, what’s going to be the coolest thing that I’m going to say to, you know, respond to this and, you know, et cetera. And often it’s the unpolished that ends up being kind of the most useful. Right. And gives us so much to follow and sort of think about.
So what I would encourage you to do is, as we’re going through this process, if you have a minimum viable insight, the second something hits for you, just type it in the chat. And what that’s going to do is it’s going to provide two things. One is it’s going to give you the opportunity to get it out there, but it’s going to actually expand the learning for everybody, because everybody’s going to start seeing different perspectives from all the different windows of this room. Right? Every single one of you has a different way to look at this.
And then the final layer I’m going to lay on to this is I’m going to share three examples of windows thinking with you and three tools using windows thinking. And I encourage you to decide for yourself whether you’d like to look at those through the ego system or the ecosystem. So if you’re looking at it through the ego system, you’re really paying attention to this from the standpoint of what am I trying to learn about myself from this? And really, the only difference between whether or not we see our reflection in a window or we see what’s outside of the window, is our perception, right? And what’s actually, you know, what’s actually in front of us. So if you’re looking at it through the lens of the ego system, you’re really using these tools as a way to reflect on yourself. And if you’re looking at it through the ecosystem, you’re asking yourself, how can I use these ideas and these concepts for my content? How can I take these ideas and these things and use them for headlines, for products, for services and things of that nature.
So windows thinking, the subtitle that I gave for this, the kind of fun, kitschy, you know, one is how to find hundreds of new angles for your ads, offers, and even your mindset by thinking inside the box. And I’m going to really kind of break down this, this particular idea.
But the very first thing and I do this all the time when I used to teach high school, this was one of the biggest, really, really important sort of avenues was having an agenda. So you kind of know what we’re going to talk about. So first off we’re going to talk about doorway thinking versus windows thinking. Then we’re going to talk about the idea of creating windows and the things that you need to create them. Then I’m going to take you through three versions of windows thinking using a visual. And that’s going to be the actions audit. We’re going to talk about a currency allocation, and we’re going to talk about a concept of a talent triple threat. And then finally I will break down sort of the windows style fun offer for all of you to kind of play around with. And then whatever time we got left, we can sort of go into more of that Q & A sort of side of things.
So I’ll start with this doorway thinking is when you think logically and windows thinking is when you think laterally. So when we are using doorway thinking, we’re processing in the sort of straightforward model manner that we normally process. We’re thinking, this is the journey, this is the way that something should be, this is the way that everybody else has done it, this is the easiest way, the easiest concept a lot of the time.
And the challenge with doorway thinking is if you imagine it visually and you think about something as simple as basically, I take the example of when I was in the theater world, most actors would basically tell you I am looking to get an agent. And that was how they were planning on sort of making their career work, right? If I find an agent, the agent will get me opportunities and then it will work out. But if you imagine this visually, all of these actors are trying to cram themselves through the same door. So naturally it’s going to be challenging. Naturally, there’s going to be a lot of issues. Whereas there are all these different windows. And what I used to recommend a lot of the time for musical theater people, I’d get a lot of musical theater actors. They wanted to be on Broadway, and they’d say, I need to find an agent. And I’d say, no, you need to find a writer. You need to find a musical theater writer who is on the ground floor of creating something amazing and you need to develop a relationship with them. You need to do a show or a project or a reading with those people, spend your time getting to know those people, and the agents will come because that’s what they’re looking for. That gives them something to do.
So that’s an example of sort of how windows thinking starts to come in. So when you’re using windows thinking, you start to ask yourself, what are all of the different angles that I am not exploring? What are the ways that I am currently not thinking when it comes to this? And the thing is, we all have these doorways, right? Like, we all have these things where we sort of learned what was best practice and we basically said, okay, this is the model, this is the process that I’m going to, you know, that I’m going to go through. And we tie ourselves to that. And windows thinking challenges us to look differently at it.
So how do we create windows? Well, an easy way to remember this is the windows three or C.V.V And that is the constant. So any time you’re dealing with creating a window, you have to ask yourself the constant, which is what is something that is a constant, what is something that’s that we see kind of all the time that sort of is, is, is not going to change in the scenario. And then you need a variable. What could be? What are the things that maybe you’re not thinking about, the directions that you’re not thinking about, the options that you’re not thinking about. And then finally you need a visual, because most of the time we process by seeing everything sort of out in front of us, it’s very hard to basically identify where the opportunities are if we’re really just kind of narrowing everything down and only staring sort of at one thing, right? If you stare at one tree, you’ll never know you’re in a forest, right? It’s that kind of concept.
So a lot of the time when we visually represent something, when we create a visual, it encourages our brains to start working towards all of the different sorts of permutations of a particular idea. So what I’m going to start with is this question, and I’m going to show you a tool to start to think about this particular question and this is, which actions am I avoiding ignoring and which do I embrace? So thinking for yourself, let’s say there’s something you’re trying to accomplish or there’s something you’re trying to do, what are the actions that you’re avoiding? What are the actions that you’re ignoring that you’ve never really kind of done, you know, done before? And then which do I embrace? Now, here’s the very first sort of version of how this is going to manifest itself.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to share with you this. And this is an actions audit. Now, most of the time, kind of the most common way of us looking at our time and sort of how we handle things is through the lens of a time audit. And many of us have basically gotten the advice to sit down and say, how much time did I spend on this task? How much time did I spend on this task, and break that down from a productivity standpoint. But really, when we start to really dig in, what’s actually causing the results that we’re seeking, it’s not really the time. It’s what we’re doing with the time. So it’s the actions. And the thing that I think is so fascinating about actions is that actions, in essence, are an infinite resource, because we can constantly come up with a new way to do an action depending on which lens we’re taking and sort of what we’re looking at.
So just to give you an example of this idea, you look at this chart, you look at this graph and imagine sort of each of these things as windows. And if you look at those windows you can start to explore for yourself. If you’re in the ego system, you can explore for yourself what might be going on with each of those. Now, what you’ll notice is I’ve got avoiding, embracing and ignoring down the side, and then across the top I’ve got six different currencies. And we’re going to talk more about the currencies in the next section when we really kind of dig into that. But basically the currencies that we have that are most common that most of us recognize our time, connection, and money. We have our time. We have our ability to connect with others and the relationships that we have. And we have our money. But what a lot of us forget about is that we have three other very, very powerful currencies that we very, very rarely ever use or address or sort of talk about. One of those currencies is our mindset, our beliefs, the way that we perceive things, the way that the things that are easy for us to believe are not necessarily easy for others to believe. So there are a lot of people who see mindset as a currency. If I can get you to believe something different from what you were believing before, that could be considered as very, very valuable and sort of helpful for you. But another currency that, again, is often forgotten about and in the tech world is kind of thrown to the side is approach because you’ll often hear in sort of tech conversations, the idea is worthless. It is the execution. But the fact of the matter is an idea is a different approach to a problem. It’s a different way of looking at things. And if you are the type of person who has lots of different approaches and angles for something, and you think in this way, then you are a very valuable problem solver and your ideas can actually be considered and seen by others as a currency, as a very, very powerful thing. And then finally, the last currency is positioning. And positioning is how you are perceived by others, how others are seeing you. And that is a currency.
When I worked in Broadway, I had very strong positioning as a currency as a Broadway producer. I could go and see shows for free. I could get invited to readings that most people would not be able to go to because of that fact. So now what you can do with the actions audit for yourself, and you can just choose any window that you want, you can ask yourself a question like what action am I avoiding in terms of my positioning right now? How I want to be positioned or what actions am I embracing? What are the things that I’m currently doing that are really working? And then finally, what am I ignoring? What are the gaps and the silences?
When I was in undergrad, one of the things that we learned, I was an English major. I was a double major in theater and secondary in English. And one of the things that we learned about was Marxist literary criticism. And the thing that was really fascinating about Marxist literary criticism was what you did was you would read pieces and you didn’t read them for the content. You read them specifically for what is missing, what are the gaps and the silences? So you would read a story and then you’d ask yourself, why are there no women in this story? Or why are they in this location versus this location? And what that would do when you kind of went down that rabbit hole was it would tell you a lot about the history of what was actually going on in that time. So as a writer, then you had all these different angles. So again, when you start to think about this from just your own actions and your own sort of journey, when you start to ask yourself what you’re ignoring, there may be something that you haven’t tried yet that you haven’t looked at.
And again, this is just a tiny smattering of sort of what you do in that regard. And again, if you’re looking at this from the ecosystem standpoint, your clients, they also care about these currencies. And they also avoid, embrace, and ignore. So if you are taking the time to sort of help them understand that and breaking that down and coming up with all those different angles, then you’re going to find that you’re going to create really interesting headlines, really interesting content, really interesting products and services, because you’re basically showing them in some cases, you’re using the window as a mirror and you’re showing them who they are. And in some cases, you’re using the window as a lens and you’re showing them what could be, and you’re sort of helping them see kind of those different angles and, and that particular and that particular side of things. So that’s one piece of sort of how to think about this from the actions standpoint.
Outro 21:01
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.