Thoughts from Biz Stone's head

Commentary by Keith Kirkland

I was at a financial industry conference not too long ago, and I had my first opportunity to hear from Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter.  It's not often that we financial types bring in those creative and technology types to offer us some message of wisdom.  That was part of the lure, I think, for me, because I like the not-so-well-known "creative-financial-type" category. What can this young guy tell a roomful of lenders that will inspire us beyond...well...beyond the breakfast that we were eating during his speech?

He offered us some assumptions and statements...things that permeate the culture at Twitter. Things that all of his co-workers should assume to be true as they go about their daily tasks.  I was inspired by these. Not because each one can be specifically applied to the financial industry, or to lenders and other financial types.  I was inspired by these because regardless of what we do in our day-to-day business, we still run a business.  We still strive to build cultures of our own, and motivate employees of our own.  

The following were my favorites:

• There are more smart people outside of our company than inside of our company.  He wasn't saying that we don't have smart people in our companies.  We do.  But based on numbers alone...with hundreds of millions of people in just the US...there are bound to be more smart people out there than in here. It's easy to focus only on our internal knowledge, so don't forget to reach outside your world to those smart people and take advantage of what you can learn from them.

• Creativity is a renewable resource.  You may run out of creative ideas on a particular subject at any given time.  But you never run out of the ability to be creative.  I liked that one a lot, and it ties in with the next one.

• There is a creative answer to every problem.  We tend to solve problems with the same logic and thought processes we've used for ages.  Many times, that works.  But don't you love it when you come up with new ways to solve problems? 

• Opportunity can be manufactured.  Create the environment that generates the opportunity, then take the opportunity.  This one takes some thought, but isn't this exactly what he did with Twitter? Who knew that there was an opportunity to change the world of communication with blasts of 140 character or less?  The underlying message was that we don't have to wait for opportunity to come knocking.  We can create the opportunity ourselves.

Fun stuff to think about while we run our businesses.