Dr. Roland Steele: Ashley, let me ask you something. It's 2007. Sony has a sleek, beautiful e-reader, hailed as the 'iPod of books.' Amazon launches the Kindle—it's clunky, it's beige, and by all accounts, it's a technologically inferior device. Yet, within six hours, it sells out completely and goes on to dominate the market, leaving Sony in the dust. Why?

Ashley Gao: That's a story we talk about a lot in publishing, Roland. It's a classic cautionary tale. On paper, Sony should have won. They had the better hardware, the brand recognition. But they just… didn't.

Dr. Roland Steele: Exactly. And the answer to that 'why' is what we're diving into today. This isn't just a business school case study; it's the perfect entry point into the core idea of our book today, "ALIEN Thinking" by Cyril Bouquet and his co-authors. The book argues that breakthrough creativity isn't a lightning strike; it's a process, a mindset. And that's what we're going to unpack.

Ashley Gao: Which is perfect, because improving creativity is something I'm really focused on right now. It feels like the one skill that's future-proof.

Dr. Roland Steele: I couldn't agree more. So, today, we're going to tackle this from two different angles. First, we'll explore how to fundamentally change the way you the world to uncover hidden opportunities, using what the authors call Attention and Levitation. Then, we'll discuss how to take those observations and make the creative leap, harnessing the power of an outsider's perspective to generate truly breakthrough ideas.

Dr. Roland Steele: So let's start with that first part: changing how you see. The 'A' and 'L' in the ALIEN framework stand for Attention and Levitation. The authors argue that before you can even think of a new idea, you have to notice something no one else has.

Ashley Gao: It’s about finding the signal in the noise. In marketing, we're drowning in data, but real insight—that's rare.

Dr. Roland Steele: Precisely. Let's talk about 'Attention'. The book gives a fantastic example with a company called Stora Enso. This is one of the world's oldest companies, a Scandinavian paper and board maker. By the 2000s, with the rise of digital media, their core business was in decline. The entire executive team, all veterans of the pulp industry, were trying to solve the problem, but they were stuck.

Ashley Gao: I can imagine. When your whole career is built on one way of thinking, it's hard to see another path.

Dr. Roland Steele: Exactly. They all looked at a tree and saw one thing: pulp for paper. Then, their CEO did something brilliant. He hired a chemist from DuPont to join the executive team—a total outsider. This chemist looked at the very same tree and saw something completely different. He saw cellulose, carbon, and sugar. He famously told them, "You folks are only using about 45 percent of the value of the tree."

Ashley Gao: Wow. That's a paradigm shift in a single sentence. It’s not a tree; it’s a portfolio of raw materials.

Dr. Roland Steele: That's it! That single shift in —from seeing a tree as a source of pulp to seeing it as a collection of valuable components—allowed the company to reinvent itself. They became a renewable materials company. That's the power of Attention. It’s about deliberately changing your lens.

Ashley Gao: That resonates so much. In publishing, we can get stuck seeing a book as just 'pages and a cover.' But if we apply that thinking, a book could be a community, a course, a live event, a data source. It's about redefining the asset by changing how you pay attention to it. It also speaks to the need for true diversity on a team—not just in background, but in professional training and thought. You need that chemist in the room.

Dr. Roland Steele: You absolutely do. But seeing things differently is only half the battle. The second part, 'Levitation,' is about what you do with those observations. It’s the act of stepping back to gain perspective. The book uses the incredible story of Bertrand Piccard, the explorer.

Ashley Gao: I'm not familiar with that one.

Dr. Roland Steele: In 1999, he completes the first-ever nonstop hot-air balloon flight around the world. A monumental achievement. But as they're landing, they run low on fuel and get stranded in the Egyptian desert for six hours. He's just achieved his life's goal, but all he can think about is the constant, gnawing stress of nearly running out of fuel.

Ashley Gao: The logistics must have been a nightmare.

Dr. Roland Steele: A total nightmare. But in that forced pause—that moment of 'Levitation' in the quiet of the desert—he has an epiphany. He realizes the problem wasn't fuel. The problem was fuel. And right there, the idea for the Solar Impulse is born: a plane that could fly around the world with no fuel at all.

Ashley Gao: So he reframed the fundamental problem. He didn't try to build a bigger fuel tank; he tried to eliminate the need for one. That's a huge mental leap.

Dr. Roland Steele: It's everything! And it only happened because he was forced to stop and reflect. We rarely get that 'desert moment' in our work lives, do we? It's always 'go, go, go,' meeting to meeting. The book argues that we have to intentionally build in time to levitate, to step back from the daily grind and ask, "Are we even solving the right problem?"

Ashley Gao: It's so true. In a marketing campaign, we obsess over click-through rates and conversion funnels. But Levitation would be asking, "Is this campaign even connecting with people on an emotional level? Are we building a brand or just chasing a metric?" It’s a higher-level question that we often don't have, or make, the time for.

Dr. Roland Steele: Exactly. And once you've seen the problem differently through Attention and Levitation, you need a different way to create a solution. This brings us to the 'I' in ALIEN: Imagination. This is about breaking what psychologists call 'functional fixedness'—the bias that makes you see an object only for its most common use. A box is for holding things, not for being a shelf.

Ashley Gao: The classic candle problem. Using the thumbtack box as a platform for the candle.

Dr. Roland Steele: The very same. To break that, you often need an outsider's imagination. The book has my favorite story on this, about an inventor named Van Phillips. In 1976, he was a 21-year-old medical student who lost his leg in a waterskiing accident. He gets fitted with the standard prosthetic of the day—basically a block of wood and rubber—and it's awful. It gives no energy back. He goes to the experts at Northwestern University, and they tell him, "This is as good as it gets. The technology is limited."

Ashley Gao: So the insiders had already decided what was possible.

Dr. Roland Steele: They were completely trapped by their own expertise. But Phillips wasn't a prosthetics engineer. He was an outsider. He wasn't trying to build a better fake foot; he was trying to solve a problem: how to run again. He asks this radical question: "What if an artificial leg didn't have to like a human leg?"

Ashley Gao: He broke the functional fixedness of what a 'leg' is supposed to be.

Dr. Roland Steele: Completely. And instead of studying human anatomy, he got inspiration from the C-shaped hind leg of a cheetah. He starts experimenting with carbon graphite and creates the Flex-Foot, the C-shaped blade that completely revolutionized prosthetics and allowed amputees to run, jump, and compete at the highest levels. He had the 'outsider advantage.'

Ashley Gao: That's the ultimate 'outsider advantage.' It reminds me so much of what I admire about Serena Williams, an interest of mine. She didn't fit the traditional, delicate mold of a women's tennis player. Her power, her serve, her on-court style—it was an 'alien' way of playing at the time. She didn't just join the tour and adapt to the game; she forced the entire sport to evolve to. She redefined what was possible, just like Van Phillips redefined what a leg could be.

Dr. Roland Steele: That is a perfect, powerful analogy, Ashley. Serena is the embodiment of that principle. She was a 'rebel with a cause,' as the book says. And sometimes the outsider is even more extreme. Take Jorge Odón. He's a car mechanic in Argentina. One night, he sees his staff playing a party trick they saw on YouTube: how to get a cork out of an empty wine bottle by inserting a plastic bag, inflating it, and pulling the cork out.

Ashley Gao: Okay, I think I've seen that video. A clever little trick.

Dr. Roland Steele: Well, that night, Odón, the car mechanic, wakes up at 4 a. m. with an idea. He realizes that same principle could be used to help a baby stuck in the birth canal during a difficult labor. He builds a prototype in his kitchen with a glass jar, his daughter's doll, and a fabric sleeve. He, a man with zero medical training, invents the Odón Device, a potentially life-saving alternative to forceps that is now backed by the WHO. An obstetrician would have tried to improve the forceps. It took a mechanic to see a totally different solution.

Ashley Gao: That's incredible. It's the ultimate testament to the power of cross-disciplinary thinking. His mind wasn't cluttered with a century of medical dogma. He just saw a mechanical problem and a clever mechanical solution. As a marketer, it makes me think we should be reading engineering journals, or biology papers, not just marketing blogs. The real breakthroughs are at the intersections.

Dr. Roland Steele: I think that's the perfect summary of the book's spirit. It's all about the intersections. So we have this beautiful, logical flow, even if the process itself is messy. It starts with to see what's really there, what everyone else is missing. It moves to to step back and truly understand the problem you've just noticed. And finally, it culminates in, where you use that unique perspective to create something entirely new, often by channeling your inner outsider.

Ashley Gao: It feels so much more empowering than just waiting for a 'good idea' to strike. It's a practice. It's a discipline. You can actively work on your ability to pay attention, to levitate, to imagine.

Dr. Roland Steele: That's the core message. It's a muscle you can train. So, Ashley, as we wrap up, what's the one thing you're taking away from this? The one practice you might try?

Ashley Gao: I think it's the idea of actively seeking out the 'outsider.' It's so easy to stay in our professional bubble. So my takeaway, and maybe a challenge for everyone listening, especially in a creative field like marketing, is this: this week, find your 'outsider.' It could be someone from the finance department, a customer you'd never normally talk to, or even just reading an article from a totally unrelated field. Ask them how they see your biggest problem. You might not get a perfect solution, but you might just find your 'cheetah's leg' moment—that one, single, game-changing perspective you never would have found on your own.

Dr. Roland Steele: A fantastic, actionable takeaway. Find your chemist, find your car mechanic. Ashley, this has been a brilliant conversation. Thank you.

Ashley Gao: Thank you, Roland. This was fascinating.