Why Businesses Need A Dreamer’s Magic and A Doer’s Realism: Beth Viner (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Beth Viner’s talk titled “Why Businesses Need A Dreamer’s Magic and A Doer’s Realism” at TED conference.

In this TED talk, culture strategist Beth Viner emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between visionary dreamers and pragmatic doers in the business world. She argues that for organizations to innovate and grow, they must embrace the creative chaos of dreamers and the structured stability of doers.

Viner illustrates this balance through anecdotes and examples, highlighting how dreamers push boundaries to envision new possibilities while doers operationalize these visions into tangible outcomes. She also discusses strategies for bridging the inherent tensions between these two types, such as fostering mutual appreciation, aligning incentives, and creating collaborative environments.

Viner’s insights are drawn from her extensive experience in helping organizations leverage the strengths of both dreamers and doers to achieve breakthroughs and sustainable growth. The talk concludes with a call to action for businesses to not only recognize but actively cultivate and harmonize these diverse talents. Viner’s message underscores the idea that the most successful organizations are those that skillfully blend a dreamer’s magic with a doer’s realism.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Yin and Yang of Relationships

Some of the best relationships in the world are made up of individuals who are the yin to the other’s yang. You’re either the person who stacks the dishwasher with creative, reckless abandon, or you’re the one who correctly thinks of it as a very competitive game of Tetris. And rather than what might be a series of expletives as you restack the plates, it’s the Tetris stacker coming to some appreciation for the haphazard where the tension breaks. And that’s a beautiful thing.

And you might even get a few extra clean plates out of it. This scenario isn’t just true in our personal relationships. It’s true in relationships across institutions and organizations of all types. Bridging this tension, I believe, is the key to organizations continuing to build, grow, and make new and different things.

The Story of Two Different Kinds

This is the story of two different kinds of people coming together: zero-to-one humans and their one-to-n counterparts. Zero-to-one humans, they’re dreamers. I love this about them. They’re founders of companies, creative inventors, they thrive in the fogginess of problems, looking for non-linear solutions. And to their counterparts, they often seem untethered to reality. Which is true. And also how they find new opportunities. It’s why I think they’re really good at what they do, but it is a core tension with those around them.

One-to-n humans, these are the doers. They build companies and ensure their success over long periods of time. They’re the glue that keeps it together. I’ve been a dreamer, but I’ve also been a doer at varying points along my own career journey.

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And in my day job, I help organizations see and harness the value of both kinds of people to build new things. How the zero-to-one dreamers can be just spiky enough that the organization doesn’t reject that entrepreneurial talent, and how the one-to-n doers can support their move-fast-and-break-things counterparts, being their guides to the ins and outs of the organization.

Bridging the Tension

Finding a way to bridge this tension, that’s the key to organizations being able to both keep on keeping on while building and capturing new growth. One of the easiest ways to bridge this tension? It’s to get buy-in. Not with gestures or words. But with cold, hard cash.

I was talking to my friend Alex. She and Jordana, they’re dreamers. They co-founded LOLA, a feminine health reproductive company. And when they launched as a direct-to-consumer, they just had a single product: tampons. And everything they did those first few years was focused on that: developing a product, packaging, marketing, pricing, distribution, building a site, a community, getting investors, hiring an incredible team of start-up talent. And they did that all to build a product that was safer for women to put inside her body.

Building Traction

They got great traction. They found those incredible investors, also some endorsers, influencers who all really liked them. Women really liked them. Somewhere along the way, they realized that in order to have the level of impact that they wanted in the world, they couldn’t just be a single product.

After all, direct-to-consumer, it’s a channel, not a business. They had to figure out how to crack retail, how to get that box of tampons onto the physical and virtual shelves at Amazon, Walmart, Target. And despite having this incredible team of start-up talent, they did not have decades of lived retail sales experience.

They had to hire in those people, the doers from outside. And they definitely did not come from the start-up world, but they absolutely knew how to get that product into that retail store. You can probably see where this is going. So maybe to save you a little bit of anxiety, it didn’t blow up in their faces because Alex and Jordana, well, they’re pretty smart. They did all the things that you and I both know to manage that kind of change in tension, building respect, learning and development, internal communication.

But the thing that made it all work right away between the dreamers and the doers? Money. They tied the compensation, in this case in the form of shares and stock options, of that new retail sales team, not just to their ability to put product in retail stores, but to the full performance of the business, DTC and retail, and vice versa. And that made all the other things — building relationships, cross-business line sharing, internal communications, happen. Just at a much more rapid rate. So make sure to get buy-in and use money.

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The Corporate Mosh Pit

I’m also a fan of a corporate mosh pit. Zero-to-one humans, the dreamers, they tend to move a little bit more quickly than those around them. And it’s often implicit that they are there to break existing norms, processes, and paths to previous success.

But I’ve seen organizations forget that on the other side of those norms, processes, and paths are humans, the doers. They tweak existing products. They probably train whole parts of your organizations in new service protocols.

Building a corporate mosh pit, well, it requires acknowledging those who are explicitly not like you. Be they doers or dreamers, each has vast knowledge and deep expertise, as well as a commitment to the organization’s success.

Just from a different starting point. I love how Marriott has done this. Marriott has a zero-to-one dreamer team and they think about not just what’s next, but what’s five to ten years ahead. And as they’re coming up with these experiences, they build them in physical prototypes to tweak what works, figure out what definitely doesn’t work, understand how much, of course, it’s going to cost, how roles might change and as a result, what training they might need.

And as they’re building these prototypes before they are finished, but explicitly before they are final, I’ve seen them invite in the doers. For Marriott, that’s franchisees and frontline staff who come in to poke and prod and put their mark on changes that will ultimately have a not-small impact on their role in the business.

If you’re a zero-to-one team of dreamers, I want you to go first to your doers and invite them in to your work. Raid their brains and hook their hearts to what you’re doing. Shift it from a happening to me to happening with me. Build your own corporate mosh pit.

The Importance of Celebration

It’s not the only building you should do, though. I think you might want to make a few speed bumps along the way. And here’s why. Your zero-to-one dreamers, well, I hate to tell you, but I think they probably missed the memo about your corporate processes because honestly, it never occurred to them that there are corporate processes they should be concerned with.

And to their doer counterparts, at best, this seems disrespectful and at worst, like they are intentionally dodging the rules. How each group does the work probably makes the other quite uncomfortable. That’s not how we do things here. That’s definitely not how you get to market first.

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On one side, the process is foggy, and on the other, too rigid or prescriptive. Building speed bumps, well, that makes explicit a cadence or a process to an individual or a team. And I believe that that creates better alignment among the humans around you.

But one caution. If you build speed bumps one after another and you’re really in a rush to get to your destination, well, you’re definitely not going to get there on time. Zero-to-one humans, it’s not that they don’t want to abide by your corporate protocols, it’s that they literally, and I’ve seen this firsthand, they literally cannot do the job you’ve tasked them with — building something net new — if they slow down for each and every speed bump along the way.

I’ll never forget how one team tasked with new innovation and growth at a very large consumer products company was also asked to meet with their innovation board on a monthly cadence. Now, if you’re a doer, that probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but here’s how it played out in practice. During the first week, they made the deck. The second week they took that deck, they shopped it around, walked the halls, aligned their stakeholders.

The third week, that was the meeting. Then they had to take the feedback, incorporate it in and change their plans, which left just one week, one week a month to do the work. So build speed bumps. Just don’t build too many.

And one more thing. It’s so easy to celebrate what seems new and shiny in an organization. And trust me, your zero-to-one teams when they are successful, it will seem shinier and newer, worthy of confetti, maybe a little champagne. But I like to step back and remember that all wins, dreamer wins, and doers, but most certainly the wins that are the results of both teams coming together, those absolutely deserve confetti.

And it doesn’t take your boss to make a party. You are there. Stand up, celebrate, acknowledge the humans around you, be they doers or dreamers, for the work that they did to meet you in the middle. To stack that dishwasher with a little bit more joy. So get out your pompoms because everyone needs a cheerleader. Thank you.