In this first part of a two episode interview, I talk with Eric Ries, serial entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

The focus of this interview was to discuss the background of Lean Startup methodology and Eric’s path to write the book. My purpose was to focus on what brought him from the world of technology entrepreneurship to the world of book publishing. His blog Startup Lessons Learned was written anonymously when Eric started but within few months his readers wanted to know who he was. Interest from publishers followed, but Eric says that in Silicon Valley writing books is referred to as “putting the ink on the dead trees.” Putting that stigma aside, he decided that codifying the Lean Startup methodology was important and that a book was the best way to do that.

The Part I of the interview last 28 minutes.

“Entrepreneurship is the management discipline that deals with situations of high uncertainty,” says Ries at the start of the interview. In the second part to this interview, we talk about how this is precisely the world that authors occupy as they launch their own books and we talk about a variety of concepts from The Lean Startup methodology apply directly to book publishing. I will be posting the second part in early January.

In this interview, I talk with Erik Calonius, author of Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries from the Rest of Us.

Erik has worked as an reporter and editor for both The Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine. In Ten Steps Ahead, he looks at the qualities that separates visionaries from everyone else.

The visionary is a pattern hunter. And as the patterns begin to take shape, the visionary paces the hall anxiously, staring out the window. The cognitive dissonance builds between what is and what will be. The visionary’s sense of discomfort grows.

At some point when the thinker, exhausted, has stopped concentrating on the problem at hand, the brain slips into that single-mind immersion that Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously termed the state of “flow.” Whereas we spend most of our lives thinking about the past and the future, the flow puts us into that narrow shaft of time called the present. It’s a place the brain doesn’t take us to very often.

MRIs show that, in the state of flow, the brain is quieting down. The flickering of activity recedes into weak flashes of color. The thinker, at this point, is probably aware of nothing at all. Whether it is intuition, or visualization, or the dawning of an awakening that draws the visionary near, at last the time of inspiration arrives. This is the famous Eureka! moment.

[audio: http://toddsattersten.com/audio/Ten%20Steps%20Ahead%20Interview%20with%20Erik%20Calonius.mp3]

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Interview Length: 24 minutes