Crafting Success: From Innovation Storytelling To Entrepreneurial Triumph With Susan Lindner

Brilliant ideas are only half the battle. By weaving together compelling narratives with cutting-edge ideas, innovation storytelling bridges the gap between imagination and implementation, guiding organizations to entrepreneurial triumph. Susan Lindner, the founder and CEO of Innovation Storytellers, joins host Tony Martignetti to delve into her remarkable journey as she shares pivotal moments from her past, including her experiences working in public health in Thailand during the AIDS pandemic and her transition into tech PR during the internet boom. Susan illustrates the power of storytelling in driving change and shares her insights on navigating corporate challenges and building successful businesses.

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Crafting Success: From Innovation Storytelling To Entrepreneurial Triumph With Susan Lindner

Introduction

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Susan Lindner. Susan is the Founder and CEO of Innovation Storytellers, a leading innovation storytelling consulting firm. She's a highly sought-after keynote speaker, workshop leader, messaging strategist, storytelling coach, and the world's leading expert on innovation storytelling. Susan draws from her initial experiences as an anthropologist and an international aid worker in rural Thailand in the 1990s, where she shared stories that helped at-risk populations disproportionately affected by AIDS to slow the virus's spread.

As a communications expert, she is committed to using those same storytelling skills to inspire innovation leaders everywhere to become incredible storytellers and ensure that their innovations get the resources, the runway and recognition they deserve. Susan is the host of Innovation Storytellers, a weekly podcast that takes the mystery out of how to communicate breakthrough ideas to the people who matter most. It is truly a pleasure and an honor to welcome you to The Virtual Campfire, Susan.

Tony, I got my marshmallows, I got my chocolate, I got my graham crackers. I'm so ready for this conversation.

Me, too. As we've gotten to know each other through a few conversations, I feel this sense of warmth from you. You're someone who does tell good stories but also knows people. You get to know people very well and you have a quick rapport-building ability. I know that's not something that everyone has. It's a skill and it's a gift. I'm looking forward to getting to know you on a deeper level and to share you with the readers.

Thank you so much for having me. I am honored to be here.

As we often do in the show, we share your story through what's called flashpoints. These are the points in your story that have ignited your gifts into the world. I'm going to turn over to you in a moment, and I'm going to have you share some of those flashpoint moments that have revealed your gifts. You can start wherever you'd like to start, and we'll pause along the way and see what's coming up and what themes we want to dig into. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Awesome. Let's go.

The Power Of Storytelling

I think one of the most important starting points in my story is 1994, when I worked in a brothel in Northern Thailand. I'm sure many of your guests start their life journey this way. My desire to go to Thailand back then was I had written my undergraduate thesis on AIDS, prostitution, and tourism for my Anthropology degree, and I was fascinated by how this process was still unfolding in the 20th century. Prostitution was not only driving a huge part of the economy but also simultaneously the lives and the disease that was traveling around the world.

This would become way more apparent during COVID, how a pandemic was impacting each of us, but at the time, I wanted to go and work in Thailand as an AIDS educator because 1 in 6 sexually active people in the area where I was living was HIV positive. The red light district that I had been assigned to work in had already gone out of business because most of its customers and sex workers had passed away. With the glories of supply and demand, another red light district had opened up down the block and so the cycle was beginning all over. I desired to figure out a way to slow the spread of HIV in a very fast-moving pandemic.

It's interesting when people forget the fact that this was a pandemic. It wasn't people think of the pandemic that we went through, but they forget that this was a massive pandemic that we all went through. Money was one of the things that was a motivator for a lot of the ways that this followed. When you think about what you described, you're trying to stop the tide of this pandemic, but then there's also a sense of how to stop the motivation to keep it going, which is the economy.

It's no easy task trying to figure out, as we all saw in the pandemic, how to effectively communicate with each other about health concerns. Try to get the message out and make it clear without 1,000 conspiracy theories and without endless questioning about what's right. No one's supposed to question, but at some point, we need to take action that protects the population. It was a fascinating lesson as a communicator.

The lesson that I took away from that is The Ministry of Public Health at the time was using a message, “Get AIDS and die.” That was pretty much it. We were at death's door. That was what every billboard said as you drove down the highway and the only available protection was the condom. Tony, would you guess how old the condom is? How long has the condom been around in human history?

I was going to say at least 70 years, maybe.

Try 10,000 years. Our first evidence of the condom is, of course, in France at the Grotte Tarumel. It is one of those cave paintings. Someone had drawn a condom onto the wall of the cave. That's how ubiquitous this was. I don't know if this was a public health message or if someone was bragging about last night, but needless to say, it's been around for a long time.

They found archeological evidence in the pyramids in ancient Egypt. We know we can time-clock this. Unlike the pandemic where we've experienced these breakthrough vaccines and all different kinds of cures, the only cure I had was this 10,000-year-old bag, it's called a health bag in Thai, to make matters worse. It wasn't like I was bringing some brand new thing that was going to save the day. The message had to be centered around the people who were going to use it, and this is where I realized the benefit of storytelling and how it would change everything in this community.

What shifted was from making people fearful and becoming victims of this potential disease to asking those involved, the mamasans who own the brothels, the customers who came to the brothels, and the sex workers themselves, by repositioning the question, “What would it take to make you the hero of your own story to survive HIV? What would it take to make you the hero?”

The mamasan said, “I want to have the reputation of having the cleanest brothel in town.” The customer told us, “I want to be the protector of my family. I want to make sure that my wife and future kids don't get infected, even if I'm out on a Friday night.” The sex worker said, “I want to be in control of my destiny.” Most of them would be engaged in sex work for about two years, paying off their parents' agricultural debt. If they could find a way through seeing eight clients a night, imagining that is painful.

Imagining how to survive that night after night and saying yes to a condom when that is not a comfortable yes, that could change everything. By helping women start working on their future destinies post-prostitution, we help them become entrepreneurs. We help them learn all the job training skills around chicken, pig, and duck raising, which is precious from a girl from the Bronx. Not to mention secretarial skills, computer skills, and things like that.

It was 1997 by this point. Computers were hitting rural Thailand at the time. By empowering people through stories to see themselves in a new light, we helped lower the infection spread rate in my province by about 26%. Highly effective campaign. It was fueled by the story. It wasn't the innovation. It wasn't some breakthrough. It was helping people to see themselves in a new way and own their futures, as opposed to just a night.

What I love about the story is that it's remarkable. At the core of what I love about anthropologists is that there's this sense of listening very deeply and bringing out something that may be obvious, but we don't see it because we're always looking at the surface. Maybe we’re looking at the ugly part of the story, which is, “Why don't they stop doing what they do?” Why can't the bad people stop what they're doing, too?

Why do they go to the brothels in the first place? All these things, and you think about the initial bias we have to action. The reality is if you listen to understand the underlying stories or ask more questions, and then you can start to see how the story evolves. It has another layer and I think that's what I think anthropologists are beyond communicating. The starting point is to slow down and listen.

Yes, there's an anthropological technique called Appreciative Inquiry. Using appreciative inquiry is one of the mechanisms, along with some ethnographic research, of understanding the folks you're talking to. The beginning of any great storytelling session is great listening. You have to get under the skin of your audience to figure out what matters to them.

Great storytelling begins with great listening. You have to get under the skin of your customers and discover what truly matters to them.

In my practice, we use a lot of empathy mapping to get deep to understand what influences people, what makes them tick, what stories they are hearing from other folks, what would mean prestige for them, what would be both the pain of saying yes to a new idea and the gain they hope to get, not me. What did they hope to get out of it? I would say selfish altruism is the only way things get done, a little bit for me, and a little bit for you.

Yes, you hit a nerve when you said, “About me.” It is because the other part of this is when you're the person who's coming into a situation and you may have a desire to say, “I think I know the story I want to tell.” You have to slow down yourself and start saying, “Wait a minute, I have to get to the truth of the story, not the bias by my judgment of what this is.” You have to take yourself out of the story and get, I guess, unbiased by your judgment.

We also found that fear is a great way to get people engaged. Get AIDS and die with a picture of a scary, hungry ghost that will haunt your relatives after you pass, that's what was painted on these billboards. It was effective in dropping infection rates initially, but then as soon as people realized that they weren't getting HIV, they said, “That's not so scary after all.”

It became the boy who cried wolf, even though it was working. What do most marketers do when they find something that works? They double down on it. They made scarier posters and that worked for a while, too, but mothers and fathers were throwing the kids out of the house who are HIV positive because they were so terrified of getting infected and potential consequences to the rest of the family that they couldn't even live with their family members anymore. There had to be a better way.

Career Transition

That only makes the problem worse. I'm desiring to see where we go next. What is the next big moment? Here you are working on this devastating disease in a place that is a challenging situation. What happened next? What was the next big flash point for you after you left Thailand?

I spent about the next seven years working on HIV in all different healthcare settings, finally finishing up as an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control on a grant that was administered by the New York City Department of Health. I would go around to all the biggest hospitals in New York, talking to people the day after they found out they were HIV positive and offering them a free $20 metro card if they told me about every sex and drug-injecting partner they had had since 1970.

It was my job to chronicle that, elicit that information from them, which is not easy, and then begin to compile the statistics to figure out all the variant and resistant strains of HIV coming to the United States. Fascinating work, but to be honest, I got burnt out. At the advent of online dating, I went on a date with a senior editor at Forbes Magazine who, within fifteen minutes, said, “This isn't going to work for me. There's no chemistry here, but I think you and I are going to be friends for the rest of our lives."

I was like, “I don't think you showered for this date, but okay, let's keep talking.” We became thick as thieves and he started telling me about this thing called the internet. I had a Hotmail account. Clearly, I was already in the know about all things tech. I thought, “I wanted to get in on this tech thing. How do I do that?” He said, “Go to Stanford and get a degree in software engineering.

I was like, “No, Susan doesn't do well with math.” No, that's not going to be good. I said, “Who are these PR people that you're constantly complaining about who are always pitching you story ideas that you can't stand? I think I want to do that.” With that, he introduced me to the PR firm that he hated the least. I wound up getting a job as a tech publicist at the height of the internet boom.

That was an amazing shift and a journey. I loved it instantly. I was working with Silicon Valley startups that were trying to make their mark on the market, get acquired quickly, go public as quickly as possible, make a bazillion dollars, and then right off into the sunset in their Porsche 911 as employee number three of some companies. That was the goal.

I wound up doing that, pitching reporters and being a bit of a tech translator. I took these ideas from very sophisticated technologists and made them accessible to reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the Times, explaining them in ways that not only the journalists but also their readers could understand. Suddenly, I began to see that my role was as a translator of sorts between technical concepts and high-level HIV discussions and in different languages.

I took five languages in high school. I always love speaking to folks and frankly, eavesdropping. I'm a good eavesdropper in different languages. I can suss out what accent I'm hearing even if I don't speak the language. It's I have one skill. That's about it. I was able to be that translator. I'm the daughter of immigrants. I'm a first-generation American. My parents are from Germany. I've always played that role and it felt very comfortable.

When the internet boom went bust, my boss decided to close the agency and said, “Why don't you buy it from me?” I said, “How much?” He said, “$1 million.” I said, “That's interesting, but my paycheck is missing several zeros as a result. Maybe you can help with that.” He said, “Don't worry about it. Pay me $100,000 a year for the next 10 years.” I said, “I can't keep a boyfriend around for more than three months. I don't think I want you in my life with that price tag for another decade. I'm going to pass, but thank you.”

My clients came to me and said, “Why don't you start your agency and we'll follow you?” I thought, “That's probably not me. I can't be an entrepreneur. I've watched all these guys do this thing and that's not me.” Besides, I had been quite a rebel. I was a radical leftist in my younger years. I hitchhiked through Central America, through five countries and two war zones, looking to join the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, a revolutionary. The thought of being a capitalist entrepreneur oppressing my workers was not something that appealed to me. Later, it would appeal to me very much.

The oppressing part, right?

That's the joy of business ownership but I decided to go for it. The internet boom had gone bust, which was a great time to start a tech PR firm. Not so much, not at all. It was in the wake of 9/11. Here in New York, it was a tough time and in fact, the little agency that I was working for, our biggest client was in the plane that hit the World Trade Center. He was the cofounder of one of the brightest lights of the internet boom, a company called Akamai, and he was also my boss's best friend.

My boss closed the agency because he didn't have the heart for it anymore and he had already made millions on the friends and family plan when his friend's company went public. My first task the day after 9/11 was helping to write his obituary for the Wall Street Journal as one of the first casualties of 9/11. This story determines how sometimes destiny throws itself in front of you and asks, “How do I translate this element of my life? How do I make sense of what's happening here?

To some degree, how do I continue a legacy of what I had learned from my boss and Danny Lewin, the cofounder of Akamai, and take those lessons to another generation of startups that would emerge after the boom had gone bust?” I started Lotus Public Relations. That was my first business, and it went well. It eventually evolved into a company called Emerging Media.

It is a social media and branding agency as the media landscape has shifted and has now become this third iteration of Innovation Storytellers, which is helping Fortune 500 companies, their innovation leaders, and those who have an innovation mandate to become the most incredible storytellers so that they get the resources and the runway. Frankly, the recognition they deserve for their big ideas.

You covered a lot of ground. I don't know where to begin, but let's start with the beginning of your story, from leaving Thailand and getting into the world of being epidemiologists. One of the big questions I have for you is, how does one create the dot connection between being the anthropologist, being the person who is in that space, and then being able to pitch the idea to a PR firm saying, “I'm the right person for this.”

I can tell you that pitch. Do you want to hear it?

Please, yes.

I am sitting in a cigar bar on Fifth Avenue with one of the principals of the PR agency. It is a completely male context with humidors all around me and a guy sucking on a giant cigar in front of me. He said, “I've looked at your resume. It's all public health-related. You have no experience with the media whatsoever. Why should we even consider you?” I said, “Tell me what the nuts and bolts of this job are.” He said, “You have to get on the phone with absolute confidence, you have to call journalists who you've never met before who can make or crush your career and you have to pitch them a story idea that they will say yes to in 30 seconds or less.”

I said, “I've never done that before, but if I can convince a customer in a Thai brothel at 2:00 in the morning to put on a condom half-drunk, I think I can convince some tech reporter to write a story about something relatively innocuous and make that go to print.” He extended his hand across the table and said, “You have the job.”

I'm glad I asked that question because that is exactly the boldness that gets you moving in the right direction, puts you into those rooms, and elevates your path to bigger and bolder things. Even the gumption you had to say, “What is this tech thing? What is this internet we're getting into? Continuing to push into new arenas?” Part of it is probably cause you're a curious person at heart.

Instatiably curious, yes.

I think you have to want to say, what is it that wires these people to do what they do and how can I continue to explore? When you stay that way, it continues to push you in this direction of where you're going and where you have gone. To see how this all progressed, even to the point where you've worked with some amazing companies and some amazing leaders to help them tell their stories. It is remarkable what you've created. Even leaning into this idea of being an entrepreneur, which I know a lot of people will say, “I'm a reluctant entrepreneur,” but sometimes that's what you need to do to truly leverage all the gifts that you have is to create something of your own.

I follow the philosophies of Busta Rhymes, the venerable hip-hop artist. It's a simple formula, no plan B and recognizing that you have to have plans, say I'm going to go for it and burn all the boats. You can look at every endeavor and say, “I could always go back to corporate.” The question is, will you be invested in your client's best interests if that's the case?

The only measure of success is whether or not people hire you twice. That's what I think. Did you do such a good job that they would want to continue working with you after that first engagement? Sometimes, but if you go, “I want to figure out what it is to be an ongoing value provider to someone or how can I scale this so other people see it and know they need it?” That's a big shift and it didn't come this last iteration of the business as an innovation storyteller.

It didn't come to me all at once. I was listening to a podcast with this woman who was on the spectrum. She was talking about how she created a YouTube channel. She had gotten a job as an engineer and she was terrified that the projects that she would present at work were going to fail. She thought they would fail miserably or she was afraid. She hoped that they wouldn't, but she was terrified that they would. She started a YouTube channel called I Make Robots That Don't Work. She thought, “If I could make all of my mistakes here, then when I go to work in the morning, I wouldn't be so nervous presenting them.” Her first robot was an automatic toothbrushing machine.

Now that you say that, I think I've seen that before.

It was one of those helmets with the two beers on either side and the straws, but instead, it had a toothbrush and toothpaste. She hooked it up and she was in the mirror and the toothbrush was hitting her in the eye and the toothpaste was sputtering everywhere. It's an utter disaster. Meanwhile, the YouTube channel, at one point, became one of the number one instructional video channels on YouTube.

When asked in an NPR interview, “What made you the number one expert in robots that don't work on the internet?” She said, “The first rule of good marketing is to create the narrowest niche that you can. Step one. Step two, once you do that and people like it, you will be an expert in a field that nobody else wants to be in.”

Once people know you for that thing and nobody else is in your lane, you have no choice but to succeed because even if there are only 100 people who need you, you can charge what you want in that niche because there's no competition around you. I've genuinely found I have one other competitor that does innovation storytelling and names it as such, so that it's been a whole different experience of trying to be a PR person to now to be an innovation storyteller. It's been a 25-year overnight success. You just have to figure it all out.

Challenging Clients

It is amazing when I think about it. What got you here to this point is a remarkable journey, but also being informed by all these amazing things that have informed everything you're doing now, and it's wild. I have some good questions for you. I want to start with one that is going to be a challenging question.

Here we go. Have you ever met an individual throughout your work who has been a challenging client or a person you worked with that you said, “This person is going to put me on my edge and potentially not even be able to work with them?” Can you describe a situation or maybe a quick story that you can share?

You know that you've only fired so many clients in your lifetime because A, it's not good business, but B, you get to a point where it doesn't work anymore. One of the top four consulting firms in the world hired me to write an innovation story for a new line of business that they had launched. I thought it was going to be an absolute dream gig, and I loved it, but I didn't realize that my project was a political football one.

I'm a humble consultant on the outside, but whoever got to own this project and take credit for its success was a king-making project. I didn't know that. First of all, the company had 440,000 employees. It turned out phase one, I learned that there were two other people already hired to do the same job. I had to beat out those two people to keep the contract I had signed.

Step two, this person who I had never heard of, I was suddenly reporting to, was actually in a political move to try to take over the global CMO role. This was going to be his passion project and said, “You don't need to do anything. I'll take over.” Pushed me aside and said, “I'll run the show.” I was like, “Hands off. The check's already cleared, so we're okay.” Three weeks later, he came back and said, “This is hard. Can you come back and do it actually for me? I'll take all the credit, subtitle.”

The project went well. He didn't get to become king. The queen, thankfully, stayed in her role, like any good chess match. Thankfully, that company is still referring me to business, but it was probably one of the most gut-wrenching feelings of being lost at sea with a client. As a company of one, in a company of 440,000, I don't even know where to find my moorings. Political football is maybe why so many people start their businesses. It’s because they don't want to be caught up in corporate politics, but I have a radar now for this that I never had before.

Almost the question that comes to mind for me around what you shared is walking into the client and saying, “What is at stake in this project or in this initiative that I need to be aware of?”

I feel like get that on a set of feedback.

Lessons Learned From Innovation Leaders

Hopefully. A couple more questions, but what have you learned? Maybe a few key lessons you've learned about innovation leaders through your time working with people that you want to share, maybe some key qualities or some key insights that you haven't shared already about the people you work with?

I know I found my tribe. These are my people. Number one, innovators get the shortest shrift in the C-suite. Among senior business leaders, innovation leaders have about a 22-month average lifespan in their roles. The turnover among innovation folks is very high. It's incredibly subjective, almost a CMO. You're rolling out an ad campaign; it's subjective, and it's art.

What's happening for most innovation leaders is that they're in a constant state of failing, as they should be, to figure out what works. It takes a lot of failed experiments to get to winning. The rest of that boardroom table is thinking, “Why do we keep giving this woman money? Everything she does fails.” It's only when something succeeds that it gets passed on to other people to scale, grow, and sell. Those people downstream wind up taking credit for the breakthrough idea.

Number one, I love innovation leaders because they're incredibly creative but recognize their job is to create value. Number two is they're risk takers and they're willing. They seem to have this Teflon personality that, “If it dies, we'll figure it out. We'll move on to the next thing.” It's a level of resilience in the face of risk that I admire so much.

For the most part, they are the most humble folk in the C-suite because they are routinely subjected to failure. As a result, their character is on a whole different level. If failure hones character, then it's the innovation leaders whom I admire. I'm not necessarily talking about the musks in the jobs of the world who had a big healthy dose of ego as their protection mechanisms. They're the target of lots of arrows, I get it. Rank and file innovators are folks who are I guess, like me, inherently curious people who can't wait to see what's next. They read the book's last page first and I love those kinds of people.

Influential Books

Me, too. I love that you shared this. This is brilliant. I could talk about this stuff all day. I want to be respectful of your time and all these insights. We have one last question we have to ask.

Yes, please.

What are one or two books that have had an impact on you and why? I can't wait to hear.

I run a mastermind for the Black National Speakers Association. I'm honored to be able to lead it. It's a legacy project that's been going on for a long time around the book Think and Grow Rich. As a big Tommy Pankow in my twenties, the thought of even growing rich was an anathema and so, I was contrary to anything I might have wanted.

This book, Think and Grow Rich, the first business textbook of the United States written in 1937, has so many lessons about a mindset shift to achieve success as you determine it. It has probably been one of the biggest game changers in my business and my personal life. That's a huge one. I'm grateful to be able to share that work with other great speakers.

That's number one and I think another book is probably one a lot of us read in high school, which was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. It's the first book of Buddhism that most of us ever read. It was a catalyst for me to be a Religion major when I was in college, to become a Buddhist, to go to Thailand, and I guess 30 years in to keep studying Buddhism and the wisdom it has to teach me. It's great. Buddhism, for me, is two sides of a coin of wisdom and compassion.

If I keep acquiring more of those, my life keeps getting better and better. Those are the two books that have had an impact on me. They might sound paradoxical. Buddhism and the pursuit of nothingness, thinking and growing rich, and the pursuit of acquisition all the time. Both of those are very helpful.

First of all, brilliant. These are great books because both of them are brilliant, but it's also, in essence, I always think about the noble path and this idea of finding the right balance between two different things. We have to find and strike that balance between needing one thing, whether it be compassion, and holding people accountable.

What a lot of leaders struggle with is a sense of knowing how to navigate two polarities at the same time. I think Buddhism was one of those great foundational religions that showed that you do need to find that balance. You need to strike that balance, know the context of when to be one versus the other, and hold them at the same time.

Yes, that's why it feels like it balances the work. It feels like a tightrope sometimes in figuring those out. I think that holding those two in both hands is super helpful. I remember Tony Robbins saying once that he thinks the most successful people in the world are those who have been told simultaneously by two different people, that you'll never amount to anything and you can do anything you set your mind to. That is a push-pull that drives almost every entrepreneur I've ever met. Someone said, “No,” and someone said, “Absolutely go for it.”

Balance is the work, a constant act of navigating opposing forces. Holding those two in both hands is super helpful.

It's like I can look at someone pulling you down, but somebody else is pulling you up and you're stuck in the middle of that, “I've got the right tension to keep me in flow but not necessarily feeling like I'm staying still. I'm moving in the right direction.”

That's a polarity of magnets. That's how bikes work. We keep moving. I'm thankful I haven't had a lot of people who didn't tell me the negative, but we all have to remind ourselves about the positive.

We all have to remind ourselves about the positive.

Closing

I'll tell you right now that this has been such a wonderful conversation, and I'm so grateful for everything you shared. I could go for hours with you and maybe we'll have to do a part two at some point because I think there's so much richness in what you can share. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you, Tony. Thank you for all you do. I think this podcast is such a bright light in the world of podcasts and beyond. Thank you.

Before I let you go, of course, I'm going to need to know how people can find you and where the best place to reach out is if they want to learn more and work with you.

I would love to share more with anyone in your readers interested in taking their innovative storytelling to the next level. LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me or InnovationStorytellers.com or you can go to the The Innovation Storytellers Podcast and meet me on my show as well. I'm always looking for great guests in the innovation space. Please feel free to nominate a friend or if you are one of those people, I'd love to have you on my show as well.

Thank you again and thanks to the readers for coming on this journey. I know you're leaving completely blown away and ready to engage in your own set of storytelling here. Let's make sure that we go out and reach out to Susan, give her some love, and get to know more about her. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Tony.

Important Links

• Susan Lindner
• Innovation Storytellers
• The Innovation Storytellers Podcast
• Think and Grow Rich
• Siddhartha

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