Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And now its time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And for this mornings flashback we are just going to roll back a week and a half ago when our own Erica O'Grady was on the road again in New York at the 140 confernece, also known as the Twitter conference, where she met up with Hank Wasiak, author of Change the Way You See Everything Through Asset-Based Thinking. Check out this cool discussion.

Erica: This is Erica O'Grady, and I'm on the road today here in New York City where I'm attending the 140Conf, which is a conference all about Twitter. And I'm really excited because I got a chance to meet one of my idols-someone who I've actually bought his book two, three years ago, and I give it out to all my friends. And his name is Hank Wasiak, and he is the co-author of Change the Way You See Everything Through Asset-Based Thinking, and one of the principals at The Concept Farm. So Hank, welcome to the show.

Hank: Thanks a lot, and welcome to New York-

Erica: Thank you. It's-

Hank: -my hometown.

Erica: -absolutely wonderful here.

Hank: Great energy in this city right?

Erica: So I'd like to start off by asking you a little bit about your company, The Concept Farm.

Hank: The Concept Farm is a company that was founded nine to ten years ago by my son Greg and three or four of his close friends, and then shortly thereafter expanded to include two other partners. But my kids came to me-these kids-I call them my kids because they're all younger than me, obviously-when I was at McCann Erickson. I was vice-chairman of the largest advertising agency in the world. And they said, "Hank, we've got an idea to start this company that's going to be all about ideas and collaboration, eliminating silos, et cetera. What do you think?" So I said, "You know-it sounds good to me." It's exactly what we're trying to do at a large company and couldn't, so I provided-no pun intended-the seed money for The Concept Farm, and it started and we haven't looked back since then.

Erica: So The Concept Farm is essentially a boutique advertising agency.

Hank: Yeah, it's a boutique advertising agency whose motto is: "Fresh ideas harvested daily", where what they used to call a new-breed communications company, which is it's all about the idea stupid-it's not about the media that it runs in. It's about creating connections with people, and it's very, very democratic and very consumer-focused and what I call passion-focused.

Erica: So who are some of your clients?

Hank: Well, we originally started in the dot-com boom, and that lasted about a year. And so our first client was register.com, actually, and then our second client came in-it's ESPN. And a lot of the work you see on the ESPN network, we've done and have done-they're one of our biggest clients. The Bank of New York Mellon, which is one of the largest banks in the world-handling the TARP money, by the way, which is nice. And then we go from everywhere from the author James Patterson to a tremendous company in the telecom business called Windstream, which is in the rural footprints of America, Estee Lauder, Versus Networks, American Heart Association-we do pro bono work for them-a lot of eclectic group of clients that we do all work from full-on advertising to creating television shows to them and to creating what we call branded content.

Erica: So what kind of advice would you give to companies out there that are looking to hire an advertising or marketing firm today?

Hank: The first thing I'd say is don't hire a company; hire the people that whose eyes you're looking in in the company-someone who you culturally and creatively are comfortable with because if you do your due diligence right as an entrepreneur, you want someone that's going to get you and understand you and feel as passionate about your business as you do. And if the culture fit isn't right between your two companies, no matter how brilliant the creative might be, it won't work-you'll waste time. So that's the first thing I say: Get the culture right and make sure you're looking in the eyes of creative people that you say, "I trust and that they get me and I get them."

Erica: And one of your partners at the concept farm is Kathy Cramer, and the two of you have co-authored a couple books now together, but one of them is called Change the Way You See Everything Through Asset-Based Thinking, and the other one is Change the Way You See Yourself Through Asset-Based Thinking. What is asset-based thinking, and how did you come up with the concept-because you're really the founders of this movement?

Hank: Well, Kathy has her own company called The Cramer Institute in St. Louis, and she's been working with this thing called asset-A-s-s-e-t-we have to be careful because people say "acid-based thinking". But she's been working with that for over 20 years, and she came to The Concept Farm and said, "Hey, I want to do a television show, and I need a branding idea." And instead of just jumping in and doing that, the boys at The Concept Farm said, "You should meet Hank because he's of a like-mind like that." And Kathy and I got together and said, "Before we try to create something in a new media like TV or something like that, let's write a book together," and we started to write this book about asset-based thinking, which is a whole new way to look at the way you live. Rather than the deficit side of life, which most of us come up with-"I've got to fix what's not working. I've got to look at what the issues are, scenario, plan, SWOT analysis, and all those things,"-this flips it. It says, "Spend much, much more time-we use five to one"-on what's working and what the options are-"what's good about what you have."

And a good description of it is when people say, "Oh, that's just the glass is half-full or half-empty," we say, "It's both." And the key to asset-based thinking is realizing that the glass is half-full and half-empty, and the real question is: What's in the water? If you're focused on what's in the water, the glass fills up and fills up and you fill up as a result of it. So we started doing that. We said, "We're going to do a book that's going to be Madison Avenue meets positive psychology." As you've seen the book, it's very graphic, it's very visual, and we said, "We're going to make every page be an ad and a spread so they can take it for that page, and when I add it all up, I've got a tremendous experience." So it's an experience, not a book.

Erica: It's interesting that you say that because one of the reasons that I bought the book in the first place was, first of all, the cover of Change the Way You See Everything is made out of like, material, and it stands out from the other books on the bookshelf. But then when you open it up inside and you flip, each of those pages is standalone. There are ideas-let passion be your power-it's a standalone idea.

Hank: You know-an interesting story about the book-you mentioned the cover, and this is a great lesson for entrepreneurs-trust your gut-don't trust the naysayers. The cover is backwards, so when you look at it, you can't read it; but look at it closely and you can read it. And the publisher came to us with that as a cover option-we had suggested something like that. Kathy and I had a difference of opinion about it. Our agent said, "Don't do it. It'll never work." The bookseller said, "Oh, my god. People are going to think it's a misprint," et cetera, et cetera. And we just stuck to our gut and we went with it. And what we've done is we've created almost a mini-brand out of that look. So we have Change the Way You See Everything, Change the Way You See Yourself-

Erica: And Change the Way You See Yourself-actually, the cover's kind of mirrored, so it's-

Hank: It-yeah, and so the cover is a mirrored kind of cover, so when you're looking at it, you are kind of getting a little sense of yourself there. And the world today is all about listening-listening to what we asset-based thinkers call listening softer, which is where you start-you don't only listen, but you feel and you see and you put yourself in people's shoes. You know-I keep on going back to if you're an entrepreneur-you know-you always hear the terms "listen harder, focus, and dive in". Today, you have to learn how to listen softer and really get to know what's inside people and their motivations and put yourself in their shoes.

Russ: And that concludes the radio broadcast portion of Eric's interview with Hank Wasiak, author of Change the Way You See Everything Through Asset-Based Thinking. But obviously there is more with Erica's discussion with Hank, so just go to thebusinessmakers.com and click on the Hank Wasiak Flashback and then locate teh WebXtra link to then hear more of this cool discussion. And that wraps up this mornings Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And now its time for another Advantage Point so lets welcome Katie Laird.

[Advantage Point]

Russ: Stay tuned for our featured guest segment, a discussion with Harry Flemming, founder and CEO of Acro Energy Technologies, the company that is bringing together the best and brightest independant solar distributors in America. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.