CBI: How did you transition from rugby player to an innovation thought leader?
AIDAN MCCULLEN: I put it down to discipline. Discipline and curiosity. People think I’m joking about this, but I wasn’t the best sports player. The way I got to play in rugby was really interesting. I went to France to learn French, and I read in a paper that a specific town was in crisis because it had lost all its rugby players during this season. Even though they were still division one, all their top players got poached by top clubs.
I thought, “There’s an opportunity,” so I wrote to them, and I ended up going there and playing professional rugby for the year. My motivation was to learn a new brand of rugby and to speak French, and I ended up with this amazing start to a new bend in my life when at first I wasn’t sure where it was going to go.
After I came home, I got offers from three clubs in Ireland, but I was determined to finish my education. I decided I would go the unusual route and study German, French, and business, and then and only then would I play rugby. I didn’t want to do what so many people before me had done where they give all their life to a sport with no backup plan.
But it all came down to discipline. Almost anybody who’s ever played with me will say that they’ve never played with somebody as disciplined as me. That discipline was with me my entire career.
CBI: Where does that discipline come from?
AIDAN MCCULLEN: I definitely think that you can develop it. This goes back to being that kid who was not a very good athlete and was the last picked at school. But I always showed up and, eventually, I started to get good at it. I played multiple sports, often riding the pine at first, and then all of a sudden I started to get picked, and then I became the better player on the team. Then I started training more to improve myself, because it started that positive feedback loop. So there was a little bit of ego, where people were noticing me, and then I put in more effort, more energy, more discipline, and got more out of it. That experience helped me notice things that other people might not, because I’m always learning and looking at different perspectives.
CBI: How did you get into communications?
AIDAN MCCULLEN: I went into a traditional media business—again, this was luck, not by choice. And like most businesses in ‘08, they didn’t have a clue about digital.
I was working for free—I was an unpaid intern at 31—following this guy around, and I realized that he was just learning on the fly. I started to do the exact same thing I did in sport where I showed up, did the work and the research, and learned the job. Eventually this guy gets let go, and I told them I could do the job. Because I wasn’t paid nearly as much as the person I replaced, they gave me a chance.
That set me on a path in digital transformation. I did that for nearly a decade. Then I went into innovation, because I could see that once you have a business digitalized the next thing is actually innovation and trying to bring in new ways of thinking. I did that for another three years.
At some point I realized that you can come up with the best strategy in the world, but if somebody doesn’t do anything with it, it’s going to sit in a desk and it’s just going to be an expensive piece of paper. And I kept seeing people spend a few hundred grand on something and not do anything with it. That’s when I got into leadership and transformation culture. It’s from these experiences that I decided to write my book.
CBI: How did that lead to you becoming a thought leader and to your podcast, The Innovation Show?
AIDAN MCCULLEN: I was headhunted by a national
broadcaster here, probably equivalent to NPR in the U.S., because it’s
funded by the government. They hired me as head of innovation, but I
didn’t actually get to innovate, because my ideas were being blocked. I
was so bored and unfulfilled, so I launched The Innovation Show. It’s
now in its eighth year and I’ve done more than 550 episodes.
This is where the thought leadership piece came from. I have to make
sacrifices here and there. It takes me a hell of a lot of time, but I
read the book of every interview guest. They know I’ve done my homework,
and they always tell me that I’m the first podcaster who’s ever
actually read the book. With many podcasters, the podcast is about the
host, it’s not about the guest. My drive was that I wanted to learn
everything the guest can teach me in this hour and a half that we have
together, and share it with the listener.
CBI: What does your philosophy of “permanent reinvention” mean?
AIDAN MCCULLEN: I
once wrote this article, “The Stem Cell Mindset.” It was about the way
the stem cell works, and how you can make it do whatever you want it to
do. I found out that ant populations have this ability where a worker
ant can be reprogrammed to be a warrior ant or a forager. And foragers
are older ants, and the reason they’re older ants is that it doesn’t
matter if they get killed, because they’ve already contributed towards
the larger population. But they also have more knowledge. I love that as
a metaphor. You have this reprogrammable method within yourself, so you
can unlearn and relearn quickly.
You can learn to let go of that identity that you used to have.
That’s the idea of permanent reinvention.
From a work perspective, you may have established a career for
yourself, but you need to be able to spot when that career is coming to
an end and be proactive about learning new skills before the carpet’s
swept from under your feet.
Because when the rug’s pulled out from under your feet, it’s your
fault for not seeing it coming. If you wait until the crisis, it’s too
late, because you’re going to be in a state of panic, and you’re not
going to have the skills that you could have been developing while you
were enjoying your success of your previous incarnation.
That’s the heart of it. My mission is to encourage people to go for
it. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work out, because you’ll still learn
something from it.