From Pioneering Patents to Thinkers360: Nick Evans on the Future of Tech and Thought Leadership

Nick Evans, a world-renowned executive advisor, thought leader, and Founder of Thinkers360, shares insights from his time advising influential organizations like Amazon, NASA, and Intel, highlighting the fun and challenge of diving into different industries as a consultant. He recounts his work with NASA, which involved running hands-on, design thinking-style innovation workshops. The conversation pivots to the fragility of the internet, triggered by a recent massive outage, where Nick stresses the need for businesses to be highly agile and adaptive, like the military’s DEFCON system, to handle constant disruption from new technology and global events.

Nick offers his expert perspective on the current state of AI, discussing the market hype versus the tremendous long-term value, drawing parallels to the internet bubble of 2000. He details how Thinkers360 uses AI for internal operations, including a chatbot and an agent trained on their influencer community, and the development of "AI personas" for thought leaders. Nick also shares a fascinating, albeit painful, story about being one of the original pioneers of the "buy now" concept on the web in the late nineties, but losing out on an estimated $50 million due to bad legal advice not to patent "just a button". He wraps up by discussing his amateur triathlon accomplishments, including two championship finishes, and his preparation for the challenging Ironman 70.3 in Cartagena.

 

Takeaways:

• Prioritize Business Agility and Adaptability: Design your business to be highly agile and adaptive to disruption, whether it's new technology (like AI) or external events (like pandemics and weather). Have a backup plan and an agile approach for when unexpected changes occur.
• Identify and Strengthen the "Weakest Link": Continuously monitor your business vulnerabilities. This could be reliance on a single customer, one supplier, or a single point of failure in your technology infrastructure. Have duplicate systems and backup plans to diversify risk.
• Treat Technology Outages as Inevitable: Accept that major outages, like the Amazon DNS mistake, will happen. Have a plan prepared—don't just assume it's a cyber attack—and be prepared for ripple effects that impact vendors.
• Investigate Intellectual Property (IP) Protection Diligently: If you have a differentiated or unique business idea, talk to an experienced IP attorney to explore patent and trademark protection. Do not rely on one opinion, especially for something that seems simple but involves a complex process (like the "buy now" button).
• Use AI to Amplify Expertise (AI Personas): Explore the use case of creating an AI agent or "digital twin" trained on your personal thought leadership content (books, blogs, videos) to create an accessible, knowledgeable persona for others to interact with.
• Look Beyond the AI Hype: While AI is creating tremendous long-term value, recognize that the market may currently be overhyped and overvalued, similar to the 2000 internet bubble. Focus on finding tangible ROI and practical applications.
• Seek Out Robust Measures of Expertise: When hiring or partnering, look for thought leaders whose credentials are based on "hard to fake" content (like books, executive experience, and media interviews), as platforms like Thinkers360 do, rather than easily gamed metrics (like social media spam).

Quote of the Show:

• "What I say nowadays is, you know, really try and design your business to be highly agile and adaptive, like the military with the DEFCON system... They can jump from [level] two to three or whatever the numbers might be. They don't have to think about how to do it, right? It's already, they're trained, they're rehearsed."

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasdevans/ 
• Website: https://www.thinkers360.com/ 
• Book Link: https://a.co/d/hA3EpAF