When Frenchwoman Mireille Guiliano was a girl, she spent a year abroad in the United States, during which time she gained so much weight, that her father, upon her return, greeted her by saying she looked like, “un sac de patates,” or, a bag of potatoes. After putting on even more pounds in her first semester of college, a doctor set her on the right path by having her eat seasonal foods in moderation, and to focus on the pleasure of eating.
Later, she became a spokesperson, executive and CEO for champagne maker Clicquot, and people would always ask her how she could make food and wine the center of her life and yet remain thin. The answer — that French women don’t get fat — eventually became the subject of her New York Times number-one bestseller by the same name. That idea also launched her into a new career — a type that John Butman, in his new book, “Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas,” calls the “idea entrepreneur.”
“An idea entrepreneur is an individual who is driven by an idea — a personal, deeply felt idea,” Butman said by phone. “They’re usually content experts and they’re sometimes mavericks with heterodox thinking. And their goal is to influence what people think and affect how they behave with the ideas they have, in order to make some change or improvement to their sphere —their organization, their discipline, their community and or even the world at large. They’re not driven to build big companies or gain power over people to accumulate great wealth or companies they can sell. Their tools are really themselves and their expressions.”
Butman, founder and principal of Idea Platforms, which helps context experts take ideas public, says that though idea entrepreneurs have very old roots dating back to Henry David Thoreau, the trend is accelerating because of what he calls “the ideaplex” — which encompasses social and traditional media, our educational system, networks of conferences and events, think tanks, idea generators, plus informal idea-driven groups like book clubs and professional meet-ups.
From Sheryl Sandberg urging women to lean in, to Reid Hoffman getting people to launch the “startup of you,” to the many people who have put their ideas into the ideaplex through a TED talk, idea entrepreneurs are certainly having a moment. But though the ideaplex makes it easier for ideas to get out there, Butman also warns that it’s also harder to differentiate oneself because there are so many people with ideas now. Here are the main characteristics of idea entrepreneurs, and tips for making it as one.
The Main Components of Idea Entrepreneurship
Idea entrepreneur’s ideas stem from a personal fascination — a deep interest that is inextricably woven into their personal story, not just an academic, philosophical or theoretical interest. “They link the fascination to moments in their lives when it was revealed to them. So they build a personal narrative that is really the development of the idea…. So the person’s story becomes the story of the idea, and more simply, the person becomes the idea.
For instance, Guiliano’s own story of putting own weight as a teen and then finding the solution in French cultural principles were part of her personal narrative and fascination. Butman says that, with Sheryl Sandberg, people are questioning her personal narrative: “She’s advocating for women’s role in business and society, but she’s had a special path, so there’s discord there… because this need for the idea and the person to be one,” he said.
“Everybody has a million ideas, and very few are original,” said Butman, “but the idea entrepreneur is really good at expressing the idea — writing, speaking, creating images. The two major [ones] are writing or speaking. Books, blogging, tweeting, speaking doing conferences, interviews, lectures, webinars, live events, that sort of thing, and videos, of course.”
Though books are the most common forms of expression, some prime examples of non-book forms are the PowerPoint presentation that gave rise to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” information graphics expert Edward Tufte’s one-day course, “Presenting Data and Information,” and Cesar Millan’s television show, “Dog Whisperer.”
The reason why expression is so crucial is that even if no one reads your book (or whatever the most complex expression of your idea is), creating it will force you to articulate your idea, develop its framework and refine the practices you recommend — and it will also provide the inspiration for the other articles, blog posts, talks and events that follow it.
The hardest aspect to control, respiration is when the idea “comes to and breathes on its own, and it’s not just about the idea entrepreneur constantly talking about it,” said Butman. “People take it up…. Part of this is luck and part of it is timing, but the idea entrepreneur can do a lot of things to encourage respiration and keep going.”
How? First, the idea entrepreneur should treat their book or video or initial expression as the beginning of the conversation, not as the culmination of their work. “The idea entrepreneur is there to say, the book is the beginning of the congo line, and I want to continue the congo. They conduct their lives so they’re with their audiences a lot, they have two-way dialogues with audiences, they listen to them and explain and constantly add detail and put things in new ways so audiences can understand the expression better,” he said.
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