This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Ideas Mighty Enough to Impact the World, with Nilofer Merchant, Marketing Expert and Author, The Power of Onlyness
Onlyness
Onlyness: it’s not a word in the English dictionary, but I think it should be because at its simplest it says that each of us standing in that spot in the world only you stand in get to count. It means that quite possibly every one of our ideas matter. In this new hyper connected age those ideas actually have a way to connect and scale. So that’s the “ness” part of the only part, to actually say each of us standing a spot in the world only you stand in now in a connectedness world can actually scale those ideas and have an impact in the world.
I ended up starting Onlyness with the story of me being raised in a very traditional Islamic household and, all my life, from the time I was very young expecting to have an arranged marriage. That was the way I was going to help my mom and sort of contribute to the family. So one day I came home, I was 18 years old, and all of a sudden like the aunties and uncles had filled the house and they were cooking a feast and they were saying, hey, it’s all arranged. And I had gone to my uncle and very quietly said – so somebody has asked him if I can get an education, because that was my only requirement. I had said, “I am totally fine supporting the family, but I also want this thing for me, my needs, my wishes. And if you ask, of course, he’ll say yes.” And my uncle had shaken his head and said, “No, no, no. Your mother won’t allow this conversation to happen,” because you see, she was negotiating for a house and some other things that would help provide stability for her. She was not interested in negotiating for me.
I remember thinking I was being so polite by waiting for my aunties and uncles to leave and then doing this moment of, like, I am the product so you can’t do the deal without me. So I had walked out of the house thinking, with this like five books and one outfit, that she would change her mind. And she never did. And the reason that story matters is because my family was viewing me through the lens of a group: Indian, Islamic, Woman plays this role. They were exactly boxing me in. They weren’t actually noticing the distinct individual of Nilofer and her wishes and dreams.
This is what we do in business. We do this thing where we see this silhouette of the person, you know, are they an admin? Are they a sales person? Are they a CEO? All the different ways in which we see the silhouette of the person. And if we’re going to add more value to the world, we actually need to come from that spot in the world only we come from.
Be the divergent thinker
After I had that experience of walking away from my family—and by the way, they never really forgave me, so what I thought was going to be a day or two of negotiation turned out to be 30 years—and I went on to Apple as one of my first jobs, and I was an admin because I was still going to school, and at one time my team colleagues had said, “Hey, we’re having a brainstorming meeting about X, could you come? Everyone is invited.” And I remember doing the research and reading up and coming with questions and like really ready to engage. And it took me a minute or two or three to kind of realize nobody was making any eye contact with me, and I realized, oh, in this room, what they were looking for were MBA types to participate, not everyone. And then in different rooms that kept happening.
And so in the course of my career what I just kept noticing is, actually, novel ideas can come from any… and actually, in fact they do… innovation is almost always from the edges, not from the core and the people who have been trained the same. And so if I could be that one to either come up with that idea and raise my hand, or be the one to find those ideas on those adjacencies, then maybe we could actually find a way to drive growth. And that’s how my career just kind of kept going from Apple to Autodesk to different places, a combination of me raising my hand and saying, “I might have a completely alternative point of view, let me at least offer that,” to me saying, “You know, let’s at least ask more open ended questions to figure out what kind of divergent thinking we might be able to bring in the room.”