Pushing Past "NO"

April 25, 2025

Happy Friday! April showers bring May flowers.  I harvested the most beautiful flowers from the week for you to enjoy.

This week's flowers:

  1. Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom

  2. Pushing past ‘No’

  3. Hitting a bullseye

1. Let 1,000 flowers bloom

The idea of quantity over quality drives innovation.  

I’m sure you heard the story about the photography professor or the pottery instructor who told half the class they would be graded on just their masterpiece and told the other half of the class they would be graded on the quantity they produced. 

Guess which half of the class performed better?  And it wasn’t even close. 

Quantity over quality won in both cases.  Students who focused on quantity learned from their trial and error and produced better pieces by the end of the class than their classmates who focused on perfection from the start. 

Companies like Johnson & Johnson are taking this approach with AI. 

They are creating a flower garden of experimentation for AI use cases to grow. 

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) tried this approach out during their last trip around the sun.  They embarked on a phase of experimentation they called 1,000 flowers.  

They created a space and encouraged employees to plant hundreds AI use cases.  At one point, around 900 AI use cases going simultaneously.  

Their strategy is now shifting from experimentation to focusing and prioritizing.  The CIO of J&J Jim Swanson, said that “80% of the value was coming from about 10% to 15% of the use cases.”

Why does this matter:

  1. Many businesses are thinking about AI and how not to get left behind

  2. An open experimentation is a great pattern to explore.  Because more is better.  Quantity over quality.  

  3. So often, owners overthink and overanalyze just a few use cases and then get frustrated when the results are meeeeh. Leading to AI fatigue for their company.

  4. Encouraging experimentation (planting 1,000 flowers) gets the whole organization excited by AI.  Crowdsources unique ways to benefit from AI.  And makes long-term adoption more likely.   

2. Pushing Past “NO”

Elan Lee, founder and CEO of Exploding Kittens, recently shared his secret to success and “the” trait he sees in most successful founders.

First, there are two reactions when someone hears “No”:

  1.  “damn it” I will move on because ‘no’ is final

  2.  And a rare group of people who think, “I didn’t hear you right.”

I admit, too often I find myself in the No as final bucket. 

Elan said the trait he shares with other successful founders is: 

He never accepts ‘NO’ as final.

Elan told a story about 100,000 shipments of the Exploding Kittens that were frozen because of COVID because warehouses were shutdown.  

He had three semis full of the raw materials that needed to be packed and shipped with no place to do it because the warehouse owner said “no” he can’t by law let him pack the shipments.  

Elan saw the ‘no’ only as a constraint and obstacle in a game he needed to overcome to win. 

So Elan asked a different question: 

if the warehouse was closed and the parking lot was empty, could they just park the semis in the warehouse's empty parking lot and pack the 100,000 games outside? 

Asking a different question led to success! 

Here is my takeaway and reminder to myself when I hear a no:

  • A ‘no’ is rarely final 

  • A ‘no’ is just a constraint, and when reframed as a challenge, it can spark action

  • I'm probably asking the wrong question 

  • I need to have fun with it and think of it like trying to be Contra without the cheat code (Up, Up, Down, Down…) 

Recognize NOs are rarely final and see them as an obstacle to beat in winning the game.

3. Hitting a bullseye

This past weekend, we celebrated Earth Day. 

This is my boy Henryk trying his hand at archery. 

He loved it. 

For archery success, he first had to aim at the right target. 

He quickly adapted his posture, the angle of the bow, and the distance he pulled back the string.  Making adjustments (and ignoring his parents snapping his pic) he eventually hit the bullseye.

I found a little wisdom in Henryk’s archery experience…and it wasn’t just that Meredith and I were embarrassing him with our amateur photography. 

That archery is like closing a deal. First, focus on the right target, the seller's goals. 

Then adjust the different levers to get the best shot at hitting the goal while minimizing the risk of missing.  

Happy Friday ya’ll!

👋 Know a small biz owner who’s thinking of selling in the next 5 years? Hit me up—I’d love to connect.