Unlock Innovation & Creativity in Your Company with The Magical Dude, Lee Kitchen
Creativity is a trait that is often associated strictly with subjects like art or music, something you’re born with. However, creativity is a skill that all aspects of business and innovation utilize and can be taught to every part of your team.
Creativity can be taught, but like a muscle it’s a skill that has to be exercised to grow. When your employees think creatively, you can expect your company to be ahead of the competition, for problems to have working solutions, and for employees to be bought into your brand. When your team’s creativity is stifled, innovation and morale suffer.
Some of the biggest lessons that today’s guest has learned while developing some of the strongest marketing campaigns and some of the most memorable visitor experiences at the ‘happiest place on Earth’ is the creativity of your team.
Listen to this episode of Working The Wow with Judd Shaw featuring Lee Kitchen, a.k.a. The “Magical Dude” five star innovation, catalyst, culture change agent, design thinker, trainer explains the process of training your team to think creatively, utilizing design thinking to lead you to innovation, and more!
In this episode:
- [00:47] Judd Shaw welcomes his guest, Lee Kitchen “The Magical Dude.’
- [01:30] Lee elaborates on what makes a Creative and Innovation Catalyst
- [03:19] Lee’s favorite problem solving story at the Walt Disney Parks
- [04:36] How do you train a team to think more creatively?
- [10:10] Common bottlenecks to creativity and innovation that everyone should be aware of
- [14:14] The process of how to measure creativity and innovation to track your success
- [23:59] Exercises you can do to help your team approach a problem with more creativity
- [30:14] How to contact Lee and learn more about design thinking,
Transcript
Judd Shaw:
Hey everybody, I’m Judd Shaw and welcome to the show. I have on today, Lee Kitchen. Hey, Lee.
Lee Kitchen:
What’s up, Judd? How are you doing?
Judd Shaw:
I’m great. Thanks for coming on. For all of you listeners out there, Lee is a five-star innovation catalyst, culture change agent, design thinker, trainer. During your 32 years at the Walt Disney Company, you created some of the most impactful marketing campaigns, some real memorable guest experiences. And now post-Disney, you are the Magical Dude of the Magical Dude Consulting, which serves companies that are really hungry for innovation, internal creativity, fresh thinking. Lee, you’re a creative guy.
Lee Kitchen:
Thanks, buddy. Thanks for that great intro too. I should bring you along to all my gigs, man. That was perfect.
Judd Shaw:
Right, right. Lee, let’s get right to it. So tell me, at Disney for instance, you were, I read, at the Creative and Innovation Catalyst at the Walt Disney Parks and Themes working with a sub-special company called The Creative, Inc, which is really a part of Disney and you’re called in to solve the creative problems. Can you give us an example? What is that?
Lee Kitchen:
First of all, it was a really sexy gig. For 10 years, I got to travel the world.
Judd Shaw:
Sounds sexy.
Lee Kitchen:
It was a great gig. I got to travel the world and basically bring creativity and innovation to all parts of the company. So we actually reported it up into Disney parks and the marketing department there, but we went out into the world to all of our other divisions who needed help with a project or needed their folks to get a common language around creativity. And we trained it, but then we also help them come up with ideas. So I was lucky enough to work with, I went to Paris for 45 days to help my fellow marketing cast members in Disneyland Paris. I went to Hong Kong for three months. Oh, amazing time. I spent some time in Shanghai. I helped ABC News for a summer one year. It was incredible. Got to work on the movie, Solo, the Lucas Film folks. That was amazing. But really, it’s a transferable process that I’m an expert at. So design thinking has been around since about the sixties and we kind of customized it for Disney. And basically, we went in and we were trainers of it, so we would teach people, here’s how you could possibly work more creatively together. And then we would also, like I said, we’d help them solve whatever challenge that they were having. So we are practitioners of it too.
Judd Shaw:
By nature, I find myself to be creative. I really enjoy creative problems. I find them to be energizing, motivating, give me a wall and a whiteboard and some markers and I’m just going at it. So what, in your career there, was one of these creative solution moments that really stand out in your career that you found to be just incredibly energizing for you, passion?
Lee Kitchen:
We had a couple things I’ll say, we had this one marketing campaign for a year that was called, What Will You Celebrate? And basically we had a lot of guest data that told us that people come to Disney World to celebrate moments, to celebrate occasions. And so we thought it would be a great idea to make sure that when people showed up for this event that they might get to win something as they come into the parks and one of the top prizes that they could win was a night at Cinderella’s Castle. Now, that was crazy talk like 20 years ago or 25 years ago because we had binders and binders of the reasons why we couldn’t have a suite inside Cinderella’s Castle. Everybody told us how we shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t do this thing.
Well one year we were like, hey, we need to really come up with something big, so we want to turn this around and say how could we actually do this? And we got the right minds together and we used some creative problem-solving exercise and a year later we’ve got a suite in the Cinderella Castle that is only available if you happen to win it. So pretty amazing thing that nobody said could be done, but you know what, if the idea is good enough, we can do it.
Judd Shaw:
I understand that you can train a team to think more creatively. How do you do that?
Lee Kitchen:
Well, first of all, you have to dispel the rumors that not everybody is creative. So at the very beginning of those sessions, I ask people who thinks they’re creative and who doesn’t. And it’s really kind of sad because only maybe a quarter the folks in the room raise their hand. And as I probe a little bit more, I find out that most of the time it’s because they’ve been told they’re not creative. Oh, there’s a group of people, they do the creative, so let them do the creative thinking. But in actuality, every single role needs to use creativity to figure out challenges. And I’m here to tell you, my finance guy was, he was the most creative person in the world when it came to September and we had to spend that money before the fiscal year in October. He got it done. It wasn’t in his title. Was his title, creative finance manager? No, it’s just inherent. He was definite a creative person. So I do that right off the bat. So I help people understand that we’re all actually creative.
Somehow we made it through college eating Top Ramen. Somehow we got dressed this morning and our laundry might not have been done and all that kind of stuff. So I start there. But one of the things that that’s important is kind of giving it a common language. So we define creativity and innovation in a certain way and then we showcase different tools and also behaviors because you can have a great process, but if people aren’t behaving the way they need to, it’ll all be for nothing. So we talk about some behaviors that are really, really important.
And another thing I like to do is start from the top down. So we train the senior leaders first so they can support everybody else as they go through their creativity journey. And it’s amazing because the main training that I do is actually two full days and I get a lot of nice emails after going, I had no idea I was capable of this. I really pride myself in bringing people out of their creative shell who thought their whole life they weren’t creative. That’s actually the joy of my job when I get those emails and those notes and stuff.
Judd Shaw:
Innovation is so important to companies that are either in a very crowded field, need to be thinking outside the box, constantly challenged by competition. You really just staying ahead and really not only pushing the envelope in innovation, technology, processes and stuff, it’s just so critical to operations. And I wonder if a lot of people, just talking to you, think of creative as something that they make as opposed to, and they think, well that’s going to be the marketing department, that’s going to be illustrators, that’s going to be whatever. But I give the example of there was a member of my team who came up with a certain spreadsheet because we were having a difficult time tracking a certain data and we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose that data, so we came up with a spreadsheet. This was about 10 years ago still being used today, which is unbelievable. But the point of that is, that was creative, that was innovation. It didn’t result in a picture, a logo, a commercial or pretty origami piece of paper. It was a spreadsheet, but that in itself was creative innovation.
Lee Kitchen:
And actually, that’s part of the definition of innovation. Innovation is not just new and novel. Also, it has to be adopted so you can make the biggest invention. Richard Branson, at one time, made a toaster bagel machine that also made coffee. So it was a bagel toaster and a coffee machine. No one bought it. So it was a great invention, but it wasn’t really an innovation. Innovation has to be adopted. So just by making that spreadsheet and everybody adopting it, that was, really, a true innovation. Doesn’t have to be technologically based either, like you said.
Judd Shaw:
When someone contacts the creative dude, the Magical Dude, Magical Dude Consulting. What are the basic projects? What are people looking from help from Lee Kitchen?
Lee Kitchen:
So a couple different things. Mostly they are calling me because they have a challenge and they need to rally a team of people to collaborate in solving that challenge. So one of my specialties is bringing together different people from the organization to all rally around one cause and basically let’s all create ideas together. Because in the end, all those people that are at the session are most likely going to help execute those ideas. So let’s get everybody together in a room to create them together, agree on them together, and then move forward together. So I would say that’s the number one thing people contact me for. I do a lot of workshops, so a lot of times with that I’ll come in and I’ll train them the day before and we’ll just do creativity training to get ready for it. And what we’ll do is we’ll work on kind of a fake project.
So I have everybody create a really good spin on a new kind of movie theater. And so we spend time outside of their realm so they could practice the tools that I talked about and then the next day we use those same tools to come back and solve their challenge. It’s a really successful formula. And again, usually the feedback I get is I didn’t know I was creative. Wow. That’s one. But also we never thought we could get to this point because we were thinking about the challenge so narrowly. So with creative problem-solving, you use a lot of what I call lateral thinking tools. So instead of going straight towards solving, you go on this abstract journey for a while. It’s really weird, it’s really uncomfortable. And I do a couple exercises that help people stay in that realm and then we bring it back around to use that strange abstract stuff to solve the challenge differently. That’s kind of how we get to the different results.
Judd Shaw:
Beyond belief and confidence, what are some of these common bottlenecks to creativity and innovation, in your experience?
Lee Kitchen:
Well, you heard me talk about common language. We all have a different way to express it and talk about it. That’s definitely a bottleneck I see in organizations all the time. I also see leadership, mostly it’s usually leadership blocking it and or not providing the correct environment to flourish it, for example. So in order for ideas to flourish, you have to be comfortable to submit ideas, to talk about ideas and things like that. So those heavy leader-based organizations where it always comes from the top down, it doesn’t allow for the person, the coordinator or the junior associate to really give their thoughts.
On the flip side, one of my biggest clients is a company called Taco Bell. Have you ever heard of them? And the Taco Bell CEO, a guy named Mark King, he believes that innovation comes from anywhere in the organization. He hosts big sessions of big brainstorms and I lead brainstorms for them, he invites people from the stores. So he actually has hourly employees come and join us along with the folks in the office, the operations, the marketing, the food innovation team. And we together come up with ideas because he thinks that the people closest to the product and closest to the customer are going to have the best ideas, and it’s absolutely true.
Judd Shaw:
So true. You may know dear friend of mine and a guy who I count on as my thought partner, Dan Cockerell. You ever hear the name?
Lee Kitchen:
I do, yeah. Dan and I work together a lot. We actually have a creative and leadership class that we teach workshop. He’s a great guy.
Judd Shaw:
And Dan talks about how you’re flying high as leader, 10,000, 35,000 feet up and you sometimes occasionally get back on a tarmac. And I think what the CEO of Taco Bell, what rings true, a lot of that comes from the front line. And so I think this is a man who recognizes that if they’re the ones making the tacos all the time or they’re the ones dealing with the customers all the time, they’re the ones who sometimes have the greatest feedback. The things that lead to the greatest innovations are sometimes when you get down on that tarmac and you can really see what’s going on that front line.
Lee Kitchen:
And if you talk to or if you read about leaders that were pioneers in their field, Walt Disney said the same thing. He’s like, I want an idea from an Imagineer and I want one from the janitor, equally. I think everybody in the organization should do that. Richard Branson is also really big on making sure he gets input from everybody working at the company, which, if you see those companies, their culture really jives together because people feel like their opinion’s being heard. And that’s a big deal because in process improvement can only come from discontent of somebody who’s working in the process, so giving them a voice is really great.
You mentioned something earlier that I wanted to give you feedback on and was, you talked about marketing people being really good at creativity and what I always tell my groups is, I see that a lot too because the marketing folks, they have to create ideas every day. So they’re what I call practice creatives. And so when I get together with engineers and with coders and with accountants, I say, you are doing that too, you just don’t know it. And then when I do this creativity thing and teach that, they kind of realize, oh yeah, I’ve been doing this all along, I just didn’t even realize it. So creativity is a muscle that you have to exercise. If you don’t use it, you’re not that great at it.
And I would say that even those who are great artists, like great guitar players, Eddie Van Halen wasn’t born to be a great guitar player. He got a lot of support and he practiced and he practiced and he became a really great guitar player. So creativity, also a muscle that you have to practice. You have to get out there and you have to do something different and you have to do it differently the next week and the week after that.
Judd Shaw:
A couple days ago, I was in Arizona for this really great mastermind group and a lot of things that were said over and over was what gets measured gets managed. Do you measure creativity and innovation? How do you measure it?
Lee Kitchen:
Absolutely. And it’s usually with ideas that we create. So at the beginning of the process, we set out basically what we’re trying to solve for and we set a list of what I call success criteria. And that helps us not only determine, if we create a hundred ideas, we end up using two of them and it’s based on, hey they really cover what success means. And then we put it out into the world. There’s a whole big process of prototyping where you fail fast and redo and things like that. And then once that’s out, you measure it by the success of what and how people have adopted it. And usually, it’s really successful because if you use that process, because part of the design thinking process is empathy. So it’s walking in your consumer’s shoes to uncover their needs before you go creating something for them.
So the best businesses in the world, Apple’s a great example, just getting the pulse of what a consumer needs before you serve up something for them, it’s so essential because you can make assumptions until you’re blue in the face on what people want. But until you actually talk to them and talk to and kind of understand how they go about the use of your product or the use of your service and things like that, you’ll never really uncover that core need that you’re fulfilling. So most businesses I see that change, if they’re fulfilling that core need, that’s when they’re going to be successful.
Judd Shaw:
Now talking to you, it makes a lot of sense. It’s all connected. I understand now how that goes to the innovation of the product actually being used. If it’s not, it’s just a great idea and that can be done. What about ideas that fail? How do we deal with that?
Lee Kitchen:
I always teach, there’s no bad idea, just bad timing. So I tell people, keep a folder with those ideas because you never know when they might still be applicable. I’ll tell you a funny thing, I worked with a guy named Duncan Wardle, amazing dude, he’s actually does a similar thing as what I do. And Duncan and I were hot on one big idea that we thought everyone was going to love, but it took them forever to love it. It was basically combining the Epcot Food and Wine Festival with an event that we had many years ago at Disney called Star Wars Weekends. And we were going to make the Star Wars Intergalactic Food and Wine Festival and we would go pitch it to this Hollywood Studio’s leadership and they’d go, they’d him and haw and then they wouldn’t take it.
Well, a year later when the leadership changed, we marched right back in there and present it the first time we ever presented, well, we didn’t know that they were building Galaxy’s Edge, that was still top secret information. So they were getting rid of Star Wars Weekends. But man, we pitched that probably six or seven times and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And like I said, if you put that idea away, the timing might work out another year later, another couple years later. So I say failure is important in that because you want to learn from that, but also don’t discard them because there’s something good there. And especially if a lot of people worked on it and it was collaborative, again, it might not be the right timing for your consumer at the right moment or for your company to produce or something, but don’t throw them away.
Judd Shaw:
Design thinking, as you mentioned in the beginning, it’s been around for quite a while and I think it ties in very tightly with strategic thinking.
Lee Kitchen:
Absolutely.
Judd Shaw:
I think they really go well hand-in-hand. Can you tell us more about design thinking?
Lee Kitchen:
Yes. So design thinking has been around since the sixties. It was originally founded by Alex Osborn and Sid Parnes. Alex Osborn is the O and BBD and O. And basically what their claim was is that it’s harder to solve a problem when you’re looking straight at it. So they were the ones that kind of talked about, let’s basically fool the mind by talking abstract for a little bit and let’s bring that abstract journey back to the challenges that we’re trying to solve. And a couple of the tools that I use kind of still follow that same mentality. So I use a tool that’s called Break the Rules, for example. And I use the example of when Disney was trying to improve the main entrance to the Magic Kingdom because it was such a crazy cluster to try to get through there. We made them list all the rules. And the rules were you had to have turnstiles, you had to have cast members, you had to have custodial, you had to have a gift shop nearby, you had to have security.
Judd Shaw:
Right, to tie the risk thing.
Lee Kitchen:
Yeah. So basically what we said is what if there were no turnstiles? And that was an uncomfortable position to talk about. What if there weren’t no turnstiles? The people like Dan, Dan was the operations VP at the time and he was like, no way, there’s never going to be any-
Judd Shaw:
People will charge.
Lee Kitchen:
There’s never not going to be a time that we don’t have turnstiles. Well we said, well let’s just imagine a world where we didn’t have them. What could we have instead? And we did a big brainstorm and at the very end they said, well we could have this wearable technology that you tap a certain place and the light turns green and you walk in. And now if you go to Disney World, there’s no turnstiles to be found. But we had to imagine that world that didn’t exist first. And you know what, for most companies, that’s a really uncomfortable place to be. And that’s basically my job is to get them outside of that place and have them pretend that there’s a new world that they’re creating and then they create those big ideas.
Judd Shaw:
I was talking to somebody who’s really into vision boards and part of the conversation was, imagine yourself not having this job, your current situation, it goes away. Either regulation or the industry is changed, you no longer have that job. What would you do? And the part of that is that I found that exercise helped. Instead of the typical, where do you want yourself in one year, three years, five years? Where do you see yourself? Oftentimes we are going off our current situation, so we see ourselves in the current version of five years from today, but things could be very different. And so what they were suggesting is, and perhaps using some design thinking strategy, which is start with the three concepts, which is one, that job doesn’t exist. What would you do? What would you do if there were no turnstiles? What would you do? What would you do? And then what would you do if this job was the greatest job and lasted all five years?
Lee Kitchen:
Both sides.
Judd Shaw:
The current thing or both sides. And that take on it starts to make you think a little differently because now you’re being pulled into this abstract world.
Lee Kitchen:
Absolutely.
Judd Shaw:
Of not thinking about Judd currently in one year, but all the available options to Judd in one year.
Lee Kitchen:
It’s pretty great. And actually, I go one step further. I actually do two things. One is I have an exercise that’s called Ideas That Will Get You Fired, which is hilarious because people will go to great extent getting themselves fired. But then what I do is I say, Hey, there’s a nugget in there of good stuff, let’s turn it around and add ideas that will get you hired. And then another one I do is I have them brainstorm how to make their competition, put them out of business. And then at the end I’m basically, well there’s a list of things that you need to do to beat your competition. It’s all about framing it and getting people, again, to think differently.
I think one of the things that I really stress at the beginning of any session with any company I do is, you have to be all in and you have to trust the process. I find that companies who don’t, won’t trust the process throughout the way don’t have the as good as an outcome. But if you can trust where we’re going and the fact that we’re actually going to get somewhere, I find that those companies really get the best results. But it’s a difficult process to trust because it does make people feel really uncomfortable. Now, I’m not doing hippie trust falls or holding hands or hugging or anything like that, but basically it’s getting people to think differently. And that’s kind of scary. It’s kind of scary to think about not being in the same place a year from now.
You know what, Judd, I’ll tell you, that’s not just in business, that works in relationships too.
Judd Shaw:
I love that.
Lee Kitchen:
I’ll give you a great example. My wife, we’ve been together for five years, and at the very beginning we did a vision, not a vision board, but we did a Wouldn’t It Be Great If kind of list, which is one of my vision tools that I use in business. And we have this list of 10 things on the refrigerator that was made five years ago and we’ve actually checked off seven of them. We, just by envisioning that future, we have actually come to that future, which is pretty amazing. So it’s really difficult to think about five years from now when you’re putting it, like you said, in today’s terms. But if you just put that aside, go anything is possible and you just write those things down. I don’t know, I’m a fond believer in vision boards and actually one of the other things that I do is I help companies identify their common purpose and so they can set what we call service standards.
So in Disney, the service standards at Disney or safety, show, courtesy, and efficiency. Well, I help other companies kind of come up with what their service standards are so they can be actionable and measurable and they can basically put everybody through those standards in order to judge them, in order to give them raises and give them promotions and things like that. So I use a lot of that visioning style workshop exercises to help people kind of understand what’s their why, why they do what they do, what is their common purpose? And one of the things that I talked about is you can be off task as long as you’re on purpose. So at Disney, their common purpose is I bring happiness, I create happiness. And when you ask the cast member, they’re all going to say something, I create magic, I create joy. They’re really still on purpose when they say that, but sometimes they might have to step away from the end of the line to create a magical moment for a guest. And maybe the line gets a little bit out of control for a second, but they have to come back.
So they’re technically off task, but they’re still creating happiness for that guest that they happen to see kind of thing. So that’s also a difficult one is that everybody’s so focused on keeping everybody on task, it’s like, if we all have the common purpose together and we’re all doing it together, it can work across departments, so good stuff.
Judd Shaw:
Yeah, I love that. And that’s a real good way to tie in core values too, the company’s core values to that purpose and in a very creative way, get some strong buy-in from your team.
Lee Kitchen:
And it’s not just something hanging on the wall. That’s the first thing we go in and tell companies is basically, you have to live this. You can’t just look at it.
Judd Shaw:
Yeah. It’s got to be actionable.
Lee Kitchen:
Absolutely.
Judd Shaw:
And I want to go back to that, because I really love that, is what you said in terms of looking at an alternative way of doing something. And it’s just such a great thing about, I never thought about that when the challenges or competition. And so in asking that question, really, the framing of that, if I ask my team, what is something we can do to put us ahead of our competition right now, you’d have a lot of … But I think that if I asked the question that said, what is somebody doing that can put us out of business? They would come out with that idea. And it is the same question, but it’s framed completely different. And it does draw on creative, innovative thinking because now you’re starting to think, wait, whoa. I think we’re already good, but wait now what about somebody putting us out of business? And that’s a great way to ask that question and to generate some creative thoughts, some ideas.
Lee Kitchen:
Yeah. Another thing I do with that exercise is I have them list all of the things that they do better than us and then all the things that they don’t do as good at us. And I basically have them take that negative list and I have them say, what is it that we do better and have them make that list and what could we do better? And then all of a sudden they’ve got new ideas for making us better and putting the competition out of business.
Judd Shaw:
And so through strategic thinking and design thinking questioning, you’re creating creativity. You’re creating innovation.
Lee Kitchen:
And you’re encouraging people to collaborate while they’re doing it. I think that’s one of the things that I hope that people take from every single thing that I do is, you should not go it alone. And there are so many agencies, creative companies and things like that who hire these innately creative folks that have practiced creativity their whole life and then they work in a silo. And I find that anytime you either pair up or you have a project team or you have a complete innovation project team and the people on the team are from diverse backgrounds and think differently and they have various level of tenure for the company, that’s when the magic happens.
I can’t tell you how many sessions that people have asked me to conduct when they’re only inviting the experts, for example. And I’m like, no, you should invite your brand new intern and you should invite the intern from the other department too. You should have a broad base of people in the room and not just the experts, because the experts will continue to think about their challenge this way. If you bring in these unbiased folks, they’re the ones that are going to kind of infuse some different thinking in there. And it’s been really successful when you get that level of difference in the room, the ideas are pretty spectacular.
Judd Shaw:
Boy, is that so true.
Lee Kitchen:
I love watching it happen.
Judd Shaw:
When you have a frontline worker come to leadership and say, “I have an idea.” That is when the magic happens.
Lee Kitchen:
And then you combine it with the expertise of the people that they tell about the ideas, it’s pretty amazing. Another thing, you haven’t asked me about this, Judd, but I want to say another thing ’cause I’m very passionate about, and that is idea pitching. So another thing that I try to showcase to people is how new ideas sound like garbage no matter how great you think they are. So you have this great new idea in your head and you’re ready to get it out and tell somebody, and most likely all they hear is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don’t hear it as cleanly as you do. And what I find is that a lot of ideas fall off the truck, they fall off the vine, whatever the metaphor you want to use, they don’t make it through that process because people didn’t put the effort in to be able to really bring that idea to life.
And Shark Tank is a great example. The ones that fail, the ones that don’t do a really great presentation to bring it to life for those four people that are judging. So I say to people, if you’re going to commit to not only spending all this time to brainstorm, all this time to walk in your consumer’s shoes and you are now going to pitch an idea to whoever’s going to accept it, your leadership, your stockholders, whoever it is, you better pitch it like you mean it. And you better bring it to life for them so that they can totally see it clearly. And I’d say use metaphors, use examples of things that are relatively close that can really paint a picture of it. And it’s funny because, again, I use ideas like Netflix. When Reed Hastings came up with the idea for Netflix, he went to present it to Blockbuster to sell it to, he presented it to him three times and they turned it down all three times because they just couldn’t see past the end of their nose. And now they’re not here.
And then you think about, I love the movie Bohemian Rhapsody and when they were trying to basically tell the music producer who’s played by Mike Myers that the song Bohemian Rhapsody was going to be the cover song, he said, “No way. There’s no way that the radio station’s going to play a seven minute song. No generation’s going to even like it past this one. Why are you doing that?” Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It’s really hard to see other people’s vision, but if you’re pitching an idea, you better bring that bad boy to life and you better make sure that people can understand it.
Judd Shaw:
So true.
Lee Kitchen:
That’s an important thing to me because, man, I’ve watched art directors just, they start out and they’re like, well this really isn’t the best idea, but we wanted to make sure we presented you something. I’m like, what are you doing? We just worked two months and you just self-deprecated our idea, dude.
Judd Shaw:
There’s the show, Playlist, which is on, I think it’s on Amazon Prime, or Netflix, but it’s about the starting of Spotify and they were bringing this to Sony and they’re bringing this to Sony, everybody, and they’re like, free music, get out of here. No way. This is never going to work.
Lee Kitchen:
Yeah. Like I said, that’s how all ideas sound to people. And one of the things I teach in my class is when somebody brings you an idea, you have to press the pause button on that judgment look because how many times has somebody told you an idea and you’re like, what? That sounds really stupid. What the heck? If you’re in a true collaborative environment, you really should, instead of judging you should remove that judgment and go, well, what else could we add to it? How else could we build to it? Yes. And this, yes and that, that kind of thing.
Judd Shaw:
Well, Lee, I would look forward to talking to you more about the several ideas I have and how to incorporate them in my team. How does anybody else get in touch with you, Lee?
Lee Kitchen:
So my website is magicaldude.com and they can find me on LinkedIn at Lee Kitchen. I also have a monthly innovation show on Twitch, twitch.tv/levyxlt. It’s the first Friday of every month. It’s at 11:30 AM. Anyone’s invited. And we basically showcase six to 10 innovations happening out in the world and we have a little bit of dialogue about it and it’s just to give you some inspiration. So there you have it.
Judd Shaw:
That’s cool. And I think you also have a jam session too, right?
Lee Kitchen:
I do, yeah. Every Friday nights I DJ a virtual DJ party called Beats Party Magic. It’s also on my Twitch channel. It’s from nine to 11:00 PM. It’s basically my creative outlet. So I’ve been a DJ since I was 18 and I stopped doing the whole wedding thing back in the early 2000s, but I never stopped loving music. So during the pandemic, I needed some to do and nobody could go out. So I started DJing a dance party on Friday nights and I just kept it.
Judd Shaw:
What a great idea.
Lee Kitchen:
Have you checked it out? Have you been before?
Judd Shaw:
I’m going to. I’m coming by the party Friday night. I’m coming by. Put me on the list.
Lee Kitchen:
Nice. And actually a lot of people, a lot of the listeners that come, they basically put it on as a radio station while they’re grilling or having a party or-
Judd Shaw:
That’s awesome.
Lee Kitchen:
Something like, that’s awesome. So it’s a lot of fun. My wife is my chat moderator, she’s amazing. She keeps everybody talking in the chat and stuff like that. And usually, we do some theme nights. I do a lot of mashups and you will never hear a radio version of any song, but yet I have some great house versions of Hotel California.
Judd Shaw:
That’s cool.
Lee Kitchen:
And I have some mashups with heavy metal and dance music and it’s crazy. You never know what you’re going to get.
Judd Shaw:
You have to have a Halloween one?
Lee Kitchen:
Oh yeah. It’s already, as a matter of fact, as soon as I’m done here, I’m programming it into my OBS right now. So that’s this Friday, actually.
Judd Shaw:
I look forward to it. Lee, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show. Really amazing. Some great stuff there. And we’re all creative, that’s what we learned today. We are all creative.
Lee Kitchen:
Indeed we are. Thanks, man.
Judd Shaw:
Lee, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Lee Kitchen:
Okay, Judd, thank you.
🎙️ Meet Your Host 🎙️
Name: Judd B. Shaw
What he does: Judd founded Judd Shaw Injury Law (JSIL) and serves as the firm’s Brand Chief. He founded the firm on the premise that clients come first. Over the years, the success he attained for his clients helped JSIL grow significantly. Judd’s clients are not just another number to him or his law firm.
Company: Judd Shaw Injury Law
Words of wisdom: “At Judd Shaw Injury Law, it’s all about high-quality representation and excellence in client service. Our clients are counting on us to win and the stakes are high. Our endless pursuit for awesomeness through our core values, the ability to WOW our clients, is in our DNA.”
🎙️ Featured Guest 🎙️
Name: Lee Kitchen
Short Bio: Lee Kitchen is a 5-star Innovation Catalyst, Workshop Leader, Culture-Change Agent, Design Thinking Trainer and Seasoned Meeting Facilitator. During his 32 years at The Walt Disney Company, he helped create some of their most impactful marketing campaigns, memorable guest experiences, and real-time operational efficiency changes. Now he serves companies hungry for innovation, internal creativity and fresh thinking.
Company: MagicalDudeConsulting.com
Connect: LinkedIn
🔑 Relevant Resources 🔑
- Lessons learned from Disney: Why creativity is essential to your team’s success
- See the secret hotel suite hidden inside Disney World’s Cinderella Castle
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