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“We are objective focused, not agenda focused.” – Jason Quint

Join Niiamah Ashong and Jason Quint for a live coaching conversation. Jason’s challenge: he wants every struggling business owner to know there’s a path out, and he needs 12 more clients close to home to build the practice he actually wants.

You’ll walk away with:

• Why the answers are rarely as complicated as we make them
• How to find what you specifically want underneath the mission you serve
• What changes when a two-year goal has to happen this year

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge Live

00:39 – The Game of Business

02:01 – From Corporate CFO to Coaching Leaders

04:26 – Refusing to Settle for Good Enough

07:09 – The Answers Aren’t Complicated

14:31 – Getting the Word Out About EOS

19:21 – What Do You Specifically Want?

22:29 – Two Years, or This Year?

35:17 – Why Most Implementers Don’t Market

37:15 – One Person a Month

Enter Jason Quint’s World:

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“Earn from your mistakes. Don’t just learn from your mistakes.” – Terri Maxwell

Join Niiamah Ashong and Terri Maxwell for a live coaching conversation. Terri’s challenge: she wants the organizations and institutions in her space to collaborate rather than compete, and after six years of knocking on that door, most of it has come back as lip service.

You’ll walk away with:

• Why you have to live your purpose for yourself before you ask anyone else to
• How to stop trying to win over your peers and change the level the conversation happens on
• What changes when you give your mission 25 years instead of one

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge Live

01:33 – A Purposeful Shark Tank

02:40 – What Holds Leaders Back From Doing Good

05:10 – Do Your Purpose for Yourself

07:49 – Earn From Your Mistakes

13:01 – Collaborate Rather Than Compete

21:04 – Six Years Knocking on This Door

27:34 – Changing the Level of the Conversation

34:20 – The Lever Nobody Pulls

36:00 – Borrowing From Another Industry

38:13 – A New Way to Convene the Room

Enter Terri Maxwell’s World:

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“I want every parent out there to rise up and be the best parent they can be.” – Elisabeth Stitt

Join Niiamah Ashong and Elisabeth Stitt for a live coaching conversation. Elisabeth’s challenge: she’s been feeling stuck, and the vision she first thought of in January 2020, Joyful Family Camp, is still waiting for her to go for it.

You’ll walk away with:

• Why the answer to falling short is raising your skills, not lowering your standards
• How the balance you protect can become an accidental ceiling
• The difference between selling yourself the plane flight and selling yourself the vacation

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge Live

01:28 – Veteran Teacher Turned Parenting Coach

08:46 – Raise the Skills, Not Lower the Standards

13:36 – The Purpose of Safety Is to Be Brave

15:44 – Stuck, or Respecting My Own Pace?

17:32 – Measuring Up to Your Own Standards

19:42 – Balance or Ceiling?

30:32 – The Plane Flight or the Vacation

39:58 – Choosing to Become Open

44:24 – Making Coaching and Business the Same Thing

Enter Elisabeth Stitt’s World:

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“Keeping ourselves in that cave for safety and security is a disservice to ourselves, and also possibly people in the other caves as well.” – Christine Blosdale

Join Niiamah Ashong and Christine Blosdale for a live coaching conversation. Christine’s challenge: her business runs on her one-on-one time, and she wants to 10x it without working 10 times as much.

You’ll walk away with:

• Why the person you are now has another 10x in you, and why 100x asks for something fundamentally different
• How to tell whether what you’re protecting yourself from has actually happened
• Why the question you’re asking has to be as big as the game you’re here to play

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge Live

00:54 – Get Seen, Get Trusted, Get Paid

10:08 – Give Yourself a Title Nobody Else Has

19:51 – What If You’re Already Ready?

24:19 – The One Thing That Would Make a World of Difference

28:58 – Protected or Growing?

30:00 – From 10x to 100x

35:28 – The Other Caves

39:21 – Is Your Question Big Enough?

41:21 – 100,000 People a Year

46:54 – Christine’s Biggest Insight

Enter Christine Blosdale’s World:

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“Bobby’s not going to get you the results that you want because Bobby has created this result.” – Niiamah

Join Niiamah Ashong and Bobby Umar for a live coaching conversation. Bobby’s challenge: he knows exactly what to do in one area of his life, and his plans still never happen.

You’ll walk away with:

• Why your plan isn’t the problem, and the identity running it is
• How to bring the ease of your strongest area into the one that’s stuck
• Why consistency you never think about beats intensity you can’t sustain

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge Live

02:43 – A heart bigger than shown

12:47 – Target the emotion, not tribe

16:04 – The real team of three

24:36 – The one area that’s stuck

33:29 – Freedom versus have-to

35:29 – Plans that never happen

36:12 – The identity running the plan

44:11 – Becoming the dancing dad

48:33 – Creating new intersections

Enter Bobby Umar’s World:

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“Your nervous system is the gatekeeper to your skill.” – Rochelle Carrington

Join Niiamah Ashong and Rochelle Carrington for a live coaching conversation. Rochelle’s challenge: scaling performance drag, a new category, and making it recognizable to a million people.

You’ll walk away with:

• Why pressure doesn’t take your skill, it takes your access to it
• Why mindset and technique arrive too late to fix an emotional problem
• Why an idea spreads when people feel it, not when they understand it

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge Live

01:00 – What Is Performance Drag?

02:15 – Successful on Paper, Dragging Inside

05:01 – The Nervous System Gatekeeper

09:11 – Snake or Stick?

12:19 – Working the Wrong End

16:53 – Scaling to a Million People

22:02 – Feel It, Don’t Explain It

28:55 – The Fear of Being Visible

36:17 – Should Drag Ever Disappear?

Enter Rochelle Carrington’s World:

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“You can’t get anywhere without being honest. People can see right through you.” – Tammy Tuckey

Join Niiamah Ashong and Tammy Tuckey for a live coaching conversation. Tammy’s challenge: finding her new normal after loss while torn over who her writing is for.

You’ll walk away with:

• Why the work you make to heal is not the work you make to publish
• How the need to prove your worth hides what you’ve already built
• The difference between listening to someone and simply being present

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge Live

00:36 – Podcasting since age 14

02:29 – Rejection turned into referrals

15:42 – Listening versus being present

19:03 – The perfect first draft trap

19:50 – Process, not perfect

20:31 – Who is it for?

21:07 – Proving myself worthy of others

24:40 – Fifteen years, nothing extraordinary?

26:50 – Finding a new normal

Enter Tammy Tuckey’s World:

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In Episode 1076 of the Outlier’s Edge Podcast, Niiamah Ashong coaches Malcolm De Leo live on air. Malcolm is a 30-year innovation leader, a three-time chief evangelist and the co-founder of GraphIQ AI, and his mission is to keep America’s culture of innovation strong. In 29 minutes, the coaching finds a way to turn the frameworks he publishes into a community that tests them with him.

Episode at a glance

• Guest: Malcolm De Leo, co-founder of GraphIQ AI and author of innovationmuse.io
• Background: chemist by training, 30 years in innovation, three-time chief evangelist, helped build the social analytics market at Clorox
• Host: Niiamah Ashong, coach to outlier leaders
• Show: Outlier’s Edge Podcast, Episode 1076, released October 8, 2026
• Format: live coaching conversation, 29 minutes
• Topics: innovation culture, basic research, evangelism, operational definitions, building a feedback community

What Malcolm brought to the conversation

Malcolm studies how people and companies innovate and turns what he learns into frameworks he calls language models, such as BEVIA (believe, experiment, validate, integrate, adopt) for selling a new idea inside a large organization. He publishes them on innovationmuse.io and LinkedIn. What he wanted from this conversation was feedback: fifty people who read his ideas and talk back, so the ideas get tested and built on.

What shifted

Niiamah named the gap between publishing ideas and getting them tested, and moved the question from “is this useful?” to “how do I make use of this?” Malcolm named the shift himself: “there’s impact I could be having sooner,” by asking now, even if it’s five or ten people, instead of waiting for the bigger stage he’s working toward. The coaching ended with a concrete next step: set a date, pick a few articles, and invite leaders to read and discuss them together.

If you’re a leader ready for this kind of conversation about your own work, here’s where to start: 1:1 with Niiamah | World of Difference, his coaching membership.

Questions this episode answers

What is basic innovation?

Malcolm De Leo, a chemist by training, defines basic research as research for the sake of research: learning how things work before anyone knows what they’re for. Those seeds, like the failed experiment that became the Post-it note, are what later turn into new businesses.

What does an evangelist do inside a company?

In Malcolm’s definition, an evangelist sees a true north in the distance, comes back to today, and takes practical steps toward it while bringing the whole group along, so the vision becomes theirs too.

Why does a movement need an operational definition?

Without a shared definition, people join confused. Malcolm’s example is a definition of innovation he learned from a colleague: creating something better by thinking or acting differently. It’s broad enough to drive a truck through, so cultural, product, process and service innovation all fit.

How does a thought leader turn published ideas into a feedback loop?

Niiamah Ashong’s answer for Malcolm: create the space, then invite the leaders. Pick a date, choose a few articles, ask people to read them and come discuss, so the ideas get tested instead of only published.

What is the difference between the operational and cultural side of a business?

Operations is the ROI, the product and the execution. Culture is how people work together to produce the most innovation. Malcolm’s point is that both reach the bottom line, which is why leaders starting a company should write their culture down.

In their words

“Create the space and then invite the leaders.”

Niiamah Ashong

“I’m not looking to be paid for it. I’m looking to get feedback.”

Malcolm De Leo

“They’ll come in confused.”

Malcolm De Leo, on what happens when a movement has no shared definition

Key moments

00:00 – Welcome to the Outlier’s Edge Podcast

01:12 – America’s culture of innovation

02:49 – What basic innovation means

05:39 – Five degrees off north

13:26 – Language models are listening models

17:41 – Outliers need a definition

20:35 – Fifty people reach out

22:49 – Useful versus make use

25:00 – Impact I could have sooner

28:08 – Create the space, invite leaders

Enter Malcolm De Leo’s world

Malcolm’s ask from this conversation: if his ideas spark something for you, reach out to him on LinkedIn and start the conversation.

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About Niiamah Ashong

Niiamah Ashong is a coach to outlier leaders, host of the Outlier’s Edge Podcast, and founder of the Trailblazer Collective. He coaches leaders who are creating something only they can make: a company, a body of work or a movement. The Outlier’s Edge Podcast is a live coaching show. Make a difference with your difference.

Work with Niiamah: 1:1 with Niiamah | World of Difference, his coaching membership

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