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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense: A Leader's Playbook for Perpetual Innovation. This week we talk about some of the key drivers that make companies like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft become perpetual innovators. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Dr. Behnam Tabrizi. He has taught at Stanford University in the executive programs for 25 years. He's the author of 10 books on leading in innovation and transformation, including a newly released book called Going On Offense: A Leader's Playbook of Perpetual Innovation. Welcome to the show.

Behnam Tabrizi: Thank you, Brian. I'm excited about this podcast because it's my first podcast on the book, but incidentally, I just received a copy of the book. And the book is not going to be out till August 22nd, so it was a very nice surprise. Given that your interest is innovation, I think we're going to have a lot of fun.

Brian Ardinger: You spent a lot of time and research digging into companies to try to figure out what makes companies innovative and, and more importantly, which ones continually innovate versus ones that are one hit wonders. So maybe you can give the audience a little bit of background on the research that you did for the book.

Behnam Tabrizi: Sure. Just a little bit of background before the background. Out of the 10 books, two of them are kind of standout. One was The Rapid Transformation I did with Harvard Business Press, which talked about the sociology and structure of how you transform organizations quickly. And this was published in 2007 and in some ways, it was very different than the sequential transformation that was an accepted norm in the world.

And then what I realized, and that book did extremely well, and I realized the biggest challenge to transformation is personal transformation. Leadership transformation. I did the book on. Inside Out Effect, which I'm really proud of, it is about leadership transformation. And it was a conversation with a COO, which I talk about in the book with the COO of a Fortune 50 company where he had sent his people to Stanford. Where I realized, you know, there is a third leg that's missing and that is what's the secret sauce of some of the most innovative perpetual organizations in the world.

And that's something that I've been thinking about. I even thought about a topic before this conversation. And so, this was six, seven years ago, so I deep dived into this. Had a huge survey of over 6,000 people with executives, consumers, academics in terms of what they think are the best, most innovative organizations.

Had an amazing research team where we sorted through data. So, after just looking at all of this, we came up with 26 firms. We wanted to make sure we don't have survivalship bias, which is only looking at successful companies and only talk about successful. So, we also had companies that didn't indeed do well, like Blockbuster, Borders, and others.

So, I talk about those 26 companies, but several actually stand out and those are, they're regular organizations that we know as most innovative, which is like Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon. The book also talks about these and how they're different.

What was surprising is that companies such as Google and Facebook did not make the list. So, I was looking at the secret of Silicon Valley. I found a couple of organizations that were in Seattle. And I also realized there are some organizations in Silicon Valley that they don't fit the bill, and in some ways, it was really a secret of extremely, extremely high performance, perpetual innovative organizations.

Recently, BCG has come up with the most innovative organization, 2023, I believe. Three out of four of my companies were actually top three and the fourth one was like the top five. So that was really nice to kind of know that my research still stands. It was a lot of research. It was a lot of detailed analysis and what the result was, we came up with eight key characteristics that these companies really did that was very different than the rest of the organization.

And as you know, Brian, 90, 95% of organizations around the world, non-tech, high tech, are struggling with this issue. And they want to be more, like a lot of CEOs are asking me, how could I be more like, Apple or Tesla. They don't want to be like them, but more like maybe 10% more of them, 15% more of them. So that's the perennial question that I get asked, and I hope that this book and our conversation would at least uncover some of the issues.

Brian Ardinger: There's plenty of places that we can start. You mentioned briefly the eight drivers that you've categorized that makes a company more perpetual innovation focused. Maybe we should start by going through some of those key characteristics and then tie it into some examples that you've seen.

Behnam Tabrizi: Absolutely. So, I came up with three overarching themes, and then eight, like you said, characteristic that kind of fits with this. One of my favorite movies is Matrix and Trinity is an important figure there. The three key archetype that came out of this research about this organizations is that they were generous. And by generous what I mean is they were generous toward their commitment.

There is a term I use in the book, which is existential purpose. This is not just a mission statement. This is true commitment to what they believe in. It kind of also touched on my earlier book, which is Inside Out Effect. I mean, the question that I always ask is why is it people are willing to die for a cause, but they show up completely uninspired in organizations and completely unengaged. You know, not engaged, disengaged, if you will, disengaged.

The existential purpose of the organization together with the existential purpose of individual in the organization. It really stood out with these organizations. I would hate to use the word cult, defining these organizations, but my colleague Chuck O'Reilly makes the distinctions, and he says, the difference between cult and these type of organizations is that calls disenfranchised people, but these organizations, you can always leave and you can go to other organizations. And if you have an Apple or Amazon, or even Microsoft on your resume, you actually become more employable at the same time, there are very strong value cultures and each one is also very different.

So that's one of the things that stands out. The other thing that I think I also want to mention, and I won't be able to go through all eight, it's the ferocious of these cultures. It's dizzying to walk into this organization because it's chaotic, it's fast paced, fast moving. So, I talk about this tempo.

And what I found is that the tempo is not just always on full throttle. Sometimes they slow down, sometimes they move fast. So that's really another key point. And the final thing, which it's important and it's important to talk about, which is really distinguishes an organization such as Microsoft. I know earlier you told me you saw the HBR article I wrote on this book regarding Microsoft versus Google. It's the courageousness.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about that for a bit. So, Microsoft, you know, obviously they were innovative at early stages with Bill Gates and the, and the founding of the company and that. And then it seemed to wane until Satya came back. And so maybe you can talk about maybe that transition and how Microsoft rediscovered its soul or its focus on innovation.

Behnam Tabrizi: During Steve Balmer, where toward the end we're getting really in trouble, there is a saying by Jeff Bezos looking at his west in Seattle and say, what I don't want you guys to be, and he would tell all his troops, you know, he now has 1.3 million people, don't be like Microsoft. So, he was kind of like, the poster child for this is not who you want to be.

So, Satya took over and he was an insider. So, people were thinking, oh, it's going to be business as usual. The shadow and the ghost of Bill Gates still is alive. Ballmer is alive. This guy's not going to let this guy, well, lo and behold, he took over. Like you said, he discovered the soul of the organization. He completely redefined the purpose of the organization.

He came from cloud, so he doubled down on the cloud business. He made a major restructuring. I mean, these are some of the courageous restructurings and put the engineers on doing the most important work. Engineers were slowly, slowly becoming second class citizen in Microsoft, so he elevated their status. He changed their incentive system. He changed the culture, as we all know, from know it all to learn it all.

Most importantly, he also made some major decision on what not to do and getting out of the Nokia business. I was talking to a Google senior director the other day. That was a very courageous, bold move because they had spent so much money and when you spend so much and you are a high performer, high achiever, you want to make things work, right?

He completely walked away. He said, this is not our business. He wrote it off and he doubled down on cloud. And then, you know, early on he started paying attention to AI and he went on offense. That's why I love the book. It's going on offense because a lot of organizations play defense. You know, let's cut costs, let's play cost shares.

We have a cash flow. You know, windows is a cash flow. Search is a cash flow. Let's not do something crazy. He went on offense, on AI and the HBR article about how Microsoft went innovative. It's really talks about a lot of detail about what it took for Microsoft to do so well.

And just parenthetically, I want to mention this because I love these pairwise comparisons. When you look at Microsoft versus Google, at some point Google had 70% of all the top talent in AI in house, and yet Microsoft stole their thunder. Now, I would not rule out Google's coming back because it has the talent, but the whole point about going on offense is how can you transform your culture, so you unleash the talents in your organization? I mean, that's really the key point, the key nugget of this book.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about the traps or the barriers that companies encounter when trying to be innovative and, and why don't they lean into being more on this ongoing innovation efforts versus, again, trying to protect their moats and the status quo

Behnam Tabrizi: When you're a startup, right? When you join a startup, I always say you kind of feel like you have empowered, you know what to do. It's a small place, you show up. You are visible. As organizations grow and grow, people become invisibles. They become more complicated. They create inertia. Politics becomes rampant.

Just like individuals the cash cow, the cash flow makes people enjoy the, the fruits of it. It takes a lot, Brian, to have the commitment of Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, and Amazon. You have to really lean in. One of my favorite CEOs, David House, who transform Bay Networks, which I talk a lot about it in, in Rapid Transformation book.

He always says, when you go to dysfunctional organization and you meet the executives, they're very happy. They get paid a lot of money and they're not accountable for much, and they're like powerful fiefdoms and so forth. So, It takes a lot. It takes a huge movement to be able to transform it.

The reason I wrote this book is that given my background in transformation, I wasn't interested in, okay, it takes a lot. I wanted to know exactly what is the playbook? What is the step-by-step effort they need to do to transform themselves?

And I wasn't interested in just studying one company because if I only studied Microsoft, Brian, I would've just said, okay, Microsoft did this, then you do this. But because I have so many examples, it's important to kind of juxtapose those together and realize there is no one size fit all.

Brian Ardinger: I agree with that. From reading the book and looking at the particular examples, it, it does seem like there are different ways and approaches, but at the core, it seems to start with a purpose. There's got to be somebody driving this need for consistent change, or at least looking to the future and being okay with failure being okay with trying things. You talk about in the book having this startup mindset even after they've scaled up the company. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Behnam Tabrizi: The startup mindset is actually an interesting one because it was one of those characteristics I talk about in the preface that was added late. But I just love that because the dream to run a large company is to have the size and scale of a large company. And the agility of a startup. Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, and Amazon. I mean, to me, Amazon is amazing. I just wrote a piece that I sent to Fast Company on Amazon.

I don't know Brian if you saw their quarterly report. They just like ran an all eight cylinders. Running 1.83 million people organization and be able to have that startup mindset is truly, truly remarkable. So being able to pivot quickly, being able to move quickly, being able to make decisions. Jeff Bezos talks about day one and day two, and he always says, you know, don't fall into the day two, because day one is that startup mentality.

So, I added that chapter because I felt like this is so critical and that was a missing. Early on I had seven, but this eight one really added to the depth of the work that we were doing.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some more examples. You mentioned Tesla is one of the prime examples, and clearly, they've driven the EV market and there's a lot of people playing catch up in that particular space. What has made Tesla a perpetual, innovative type of company?

Behnam Tabrizi: I just recently wrote a fortune just a few days ago, a fortune piece on Tesla and how it basically won the war in EV, especially Superchargers. I just saw that Mercedes joined them too. It's truly amazing. I remember as a kid, we always used to be cynical, or the grownups made us cynical that there won't be any more, any new car company. And this guy cat came out of nowhere and completely transformed the car business.

What makes Tesla so unique? First of all, I just got to give a little bit of context. Tesla is the most chaotic organization I studied. It's absolutely crazy. It's not for faint of hearts. But one thing they do, which is really, really important is they have extremely high aspirations.

If I may sum up one key learnings that I had by just deep diving Tesla, by talking to a lot of current and former employees versus other organizations, is that when I studied GM and others, they're still using the known methods. The known methods of you gather the data, you'll make decision, the known methods of what kind of organization structure works well.

Tesla doesn't believe in any known methods. In fact, they're very anti known methods. They're like, okay, what's the most rational thing to add at every time? What's the first principle? What is it we need to get done? And then they move in very quickly. So, the speed and ferocity of Tesla is what really surprised me.

The other thing that also surprised me is how aspirational and courageous they were. They would not compromise on thinking big and doing big things. And of course, as someone working there, the amount of commitment people have and how they're just like working day and night and how they're excited about this organization is just truly at another level, if you will.

So those are some of the things I go into a lot of depth because I talk to a lot of people, but the ferocity and also the boldness by which things are done. The other thing that I also, I think in Tesla is very important is that, you know, a lot of people talk about, oh, what's the right organizational structure to do certain things?

Tesla doesn't care about structure. Tesla basically, there is this axiom that whatever you want to get done, find the shortest path. Like I need to talk to Brian. Brian is Senior VP. I'm individual contributor. Email to Brian. I don't need to go get permission. If I get permission from my boss and Elon finds out, or I don't know, whoever finds that, I might even not make it, if you will, because I'm just like doing the known methods of, oh, I need to be polite to my boss. So that I think is fascinating about how things get done.

Brian Ardinger: We've obviously talked about some of the successful companies that are perpetually innovating. Let's give some reasons and some examples of companies that have failed to do that and maybe reasons why

Behnam Tabrizi: One of the pieces I wrote about the book, I talk about how organizations like Borders or you know, Nokia and Blockbuster, especially Blockbuster, they see the change coming.

Oftentimes their response is incremental. The change was so rapid for Blockbuster that it basically pulled the rug underneath them and they weren't able to adapt and so forth. Let me give a current example. Right now, with Google, what we have is their search engine is cash cow. Their search engine potentially with AI could be disrupted.

A 5, 10% cut in their margin could really have a heavy toll on their stock, you know? And so, they need to make tough decisions. They need to cannibalize their own search engine. They need to go to AI. The entire business model is changing. And I'm sure with the founders going back, Larry and Sergei, they are thinking about some of these issues.

These are tough decisions, but being able to be bold, but at the same time, going back to the book, Brian, I really, really believe in this, especially after deep diving in this area for seven years, is that Google, by just being bold is not enough. That's why I have eight characteristics. That's why I believe there is no bullet silver bullet that will resolve it. You need to go all out on this.

Brian Ardinger: If you're bold but don't have the processes in place or the reward, that type of action and things along those lines, it can easily go the wrong way. Yeah, I think we see that a lot with companies. You know, this idea of innovation theater. So, they try to do the things that they see Microsoft or Amazon doing, but they only do a piece of it, and they don't put it into a holistic approach to how they're actually going to redefine the companies in the, in the years to come.

Behnam Tabrizi: That's really a good point. My previous background, I loved math and I studied computer science. At that time, I, when I got my Master's from University of Urbana Champaign University of Illinois. I took a lot of machine learning and ai, but at that time it was algorithm. We couldn't even conceive that one day we'd be here.

We thought it was just kind of fancy things. But when you study engineering, you learn system thinking. I mean, this is just emphasizing what you just said, which is so creative and system thinking is holistic thinking and piecemeal thinking doesn't work. And that system thinking has been a bedrock of my work, starting with rapid transformation.

Which I said, why is it that during the re-engineering in 2000, it took 4, 5, 10 years to transform one area and then go transform another area, then transform another area? Why can't we do all of them at the same time quickly, like the way Microsoft did it later? So that holistic thinking to me is very, very critical. There is no silver bullet.

Brian Ardinger: So, the last question I have is around the individuals that make up the company. Is this something that has to be driven from top down, or are there ways for individual players or teams within the company to take on this perpetual innovation mindset and processes?

Behnam Tabrizi: That's an excellent question. This is a question I get oftentimes in the executive programs I teach at Stanford, right? Not always you get in front of CEOs and present this, right? You get vice president, you get senior managers, you get director. The cynical perception or the maybe usual perception is that unless the CEO wants to do this, nothing's going to happen.

So, there's not much I can do. And there's some truth to that. Let's just not like act like no, there's no truth. One of the things that I learned about this after I wrote the book, Brian, there was an individual Cameron who read my book two or three times and copy edited and find errors that another copy editors didn't find who was supposed to be the best in the field.

So, I think by the time the third time she read the book, she was kind of sick of it. So, I called her, I said, Cameron, what do you think about the book? And she said, you know what I thought there are things I could learn from my own career. Like going bold, you know, having a tempo, having existential purpose.

And I said, wow, I never thought about that. So, I sent the piece to Wall Street Journal about this, that, how can you actually improve your career on this and so forth. And it may end up in other venues like CNBC, but my whole point is you can actually use this book to improve your own career. But also, if, let's say you're a manager of a unit, you can actually change the culture of your unit.

I don't believe there is one underlying culture in organizations, although I talk about it that way, but down deep in my heart, I believe there are subcultures. And as a leader of organization, maybe a piece of this, you can change the subculture. You can, for example, take the eight points, have a conversation and say, how can we improve on these things? What are the things I personally could do to improve on these eight?

And I really do believe it will improve the performance, but more importantly, it will make people happier showing up to work every day, which is the biggest right now problem at work today is disengagement of a large population of workers.

Brian Ardinger: What's the worst you can do is give it a try and see what happens. Right,

Behnam Tabrizi: Exactly and I think this conversation are useful. I mean, with my Rapid Transformation, I had a Paul Taylor from England came to my class when I read the book. I talked to his people. He was running a factory and he called me a year later. He said he transformed the entire factory by just applying this. And I'm like, wow, this is like a best thing I could ever hear.

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Brian Ardinger: Well, I hope people pick up the book. It's called Going On Offense. Thank you Dr. Tabrizi for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Behnam Tabrizi: Well, first of all, I want to thank you, because your questions were right on number two. I just love the inside outside, you know, because I talk a lot about the way organization could succeed if they could connect the inside to the outside world. Yeah. And outside to the inside world. So, you pick the best name, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent, I appreciate that. One last thing, so if people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Behnam Tabrizi: Amazon. Type in Amazon. Going On Offense. You know, you will do that. And fortunately, or unfortunately, I'm all over the web so they can find me.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well again, thank you for being on the show. We'll, we'll talk again soon.

Behnam Tabrizi: Thank you. Take care, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andy Binns to talk about his follow-on book, The Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies. Andy and I talk about what's happening in the world of corporate innovation and offer some insights into what's working and what's not. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Andy Binns, Author of The Corporate Explorer Fieldbook & Co-founder of Change Logic

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, we have somebody who's been on the show before. Andy Binns. Welcome Andy.

Andy Binns: Hey, Brian. Thank you very much for having me back. I'm delighted to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Andy, I'm so glad to have you back. For those who may not have heard you the first time around, you're the Co-founder of Change Logic. And you have authored a new book called Corporate Explorer Field Book as a companion guide, I think, to your first book, which came out about a year and a half ago called Corporate Explorer. So again, welcome to the show.

Andy Binns: Thank you very much. That's right. We have now the Red Book of Corporate Explorer and the Black Book of The Corporate Explorer Field book. Becomes a family of books. The trouble is, I haven't figured out what the third one is, so I need, any, any ideas. I'm totally open to it.

Brian Ardinger: It always needs a trilogy. Right.

Andy Binns: Yeah, exactly. This is the Corporate Explorer Strikes Back. Right.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Let's talk about the second book. Since we spoke in, I think it was March of 2022, so about a year and a half ago, you have been exploring this space of corporate innovation. What has happened? What are some of the key things that you've seen over the last 18 months that have changed or made you want to write a second book?

Andy Binns: It's interesting, isn't it, Brian? This has been such a fascinating 18 months because you have at one side this real pressure on anybody who's doing corporate innovation on budget. Interest rates going up, lots of renewed economic uncertainty.

And at the other side, we have people spending huge amounts of money on AI and putting lots of pressure on corporate innovation to say, what are we gonna do with it? Right? Mm-hmm. It's a tremendous paradox and I think that the interesting thing is that companies are coming round to the understanding that AI is just a technology.

What you really need to understand is the business model. And this is a question of experimentation. So, it's actually playing directly back into the world of the corporate explorer, very directly.

Brian Ardinger: Your first book, it talked a lot about, you know, how do you become a corporate explorer, introducing new ideas and things like this. The field book, the subtitle is How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies. So, talk a little bit about the evolution of the first book to the second book, and what are the key highlights of the second book.

Andy Binns: The thing about the second book is that this represents a movement. Really important to me is that this is not about a guru speaking with the answer. Right? This is about a community actually saying, this is what we do. This is how we're approaching it. So, we have chapters by Bosch, General Motors, Intel.

There are some lesser well-known companies, but important ones, Analog Devices, Unica Insurance, who were in the first book as a case study. Now they're in the book describing some of the things that they've done after that first book, right?

For me, it expresses something really important about how do we solve the issue of corporate innovation, which I just said really important when it comes to, Hey, we've got something dramatic happening in the world. You know, what are we going to do? Well, this is some of the things we actually do that work.

So, it's similar in structure to the first book. You know, firstly, strategic ambition. How do we decide where we're headed? Then innovation disciplines, ideation, incubation, scaling, and then the whole question of the organizational and leadership issues as to how you make arrangements for this to work in corporations, but also how if you are a corporate explorer, you're going to get people on your side.

But again, rather than me pontificating on the topic, it's actually practitioners, each chapter, different way of looking at the problem with tools and advice very practically built in. So, it's an extremely applied book.

Brian Ardinger: It's great to have some of those applied stories because a lot of times I talk to a lot of corporations myself and the first thing they ask is like, well, how do we do this? Yeah. And there's no one silver bullet to make this happen. It, you know, all combines with the talent you have and the technologies you have. And what kind of vision, like you said, that you want to go after.

What are some of the biggest stumbling blocks for companies to even think about this and get moving on the path?

Andy Binns: And I think I've learned more about this in the last year, going around different companies, getting invited to speak places, hearing what people have to say. And the sort of the loudest story is, is yes, what, what I think was always there was this sort of having lots of ideas but no real strategy. No real sense of, well, why would this help create value?

Why would the customers form a habit around the use of your idea or product? And that tends to be weak, particularly if you are in a any kind of technical community. They tend to be a little bit weak on that. So that's still there. And in this book, we've made a big focus on breaking out some of the topics we talk about in Corporate Explorer.

So, I talked to in corporate explorer about hunting zones and the importance of really shaping the markets that you are in. And in this book, I explain, you know, well, how do you define your hunting zone? But we also have this genuine innovation guru, Tony Ulwick, talking about how do you define your hunting zones? With a job to be done. Right. With that whole sort of body of work. So, he brings these two ideas together.

The second thing I think that which has really come loudly to me in the last 12 months is how many innovators in corporations go out to market with a sort of an immature business model. It's solving a customer problem. It's a pretty good idea, but they have no concept of the go to market.

They have no idea how they're going to engage distributors, ecosystem, or any of these kinds of players around them. And you know, it has a fairly predictable trajectory, right? Because, you know, it turns out selling things matters. You, if you're going to want to bring something to market.

Brian Ardinger: Does that happen a lot of times because they are fixed with their existing business models so that they approached it with the same like we know our customers and we know our distribution and that so we'll, we'll go about it the same way versus thinking about it or approaching it with a different lens saying, what if this was a brand new idea.

Andy Binns: I think that's part of it, Brian. I mean, certainly one of the challenges thinking about one client I have right now, a large European company, and their issue is that their existing sales team kind of don't want to know. So, this is definitely a challenge and close to what you're saying. But I actually think that the other issue is that the corporate explorers often lack the understanding.

It's outside of their experience. It's not a problem they've had to tackle. You know, they've come up in a large organization and they may have had a product background or an engineering background or whatever. And the sales problem isn't one that they've encountered, and therefore they make it easier by just ignoring its complexity.

So, I've got one client who's making a move into the insurance industry with a really fabulous offering. And this is a very complicated ecosystem with insurers and reinsurers and agents and different types of agents. And the customers within the people who buy, say corporate insurance, that they're actually quite tied to brokers, not to a company providing the insurance.

And there's a web of personal relationships in this. Walking through that series of complexities is quite, is tough for the innovator. They're like, oh boy, that's harder than I realized. And oh, you think personal relationships plays a role in that? However, are we going to tap into that? That can't be a problem I can solve. Right? So, it just opens up a whole new set of things that they've got to worry about. So, I think that's true. Your explanation's true as well, but it, it's a part of it.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, the idea of holistically thinking about a business model versus my part of the business model oftentimes stops that innovation because you don't have the right people on the team, I suppose.

Andy Binns: That's it. There's a point in these new ventures where you really need to think about diversifying the talent that you have. You know, as you may remember, one of my somewhat counterintuitive views may be controversial views is that when we look at our evidence of what makes for successful corporate explorer, more often than not, they're a 10-year veteran of the company that they're innovating within.

They're not the hired hand with a track record. I'm here in Silicon Valley today. They're not with a track record in startups in Palo Alto. Right. And that's a little counterintuitive, but the interesting thing is there does come a point as the venture matures where you really need to get people from the industry you're selling into. Right. Solving the go-to-market problem is, is tough.

Brian Ardinger: It's very interesting because you, you do have to have that domain expertise to a certain extent, to see the insight that no one else has seen in the industry per perhaps. But also have the guess courage and or ideas enough to then pivot it and execute it in a way that's different than what you normally are used to doing or approaching it.

Andy Binns: Yes, I think that's right. I think that's right.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk more about the book as far as, like you said, it's more of a tactical guide for a corporate explorer trying to build a new venture. What are some of the key insights, like if somebody picks this book off the shelf, what are the some of the key insights they're going to be taking home with them?

Andy Binns: There's a tremendous set of chapters around these ideate, incubate, scale disciplines, right? So, the ideate piece, just generating ideas. We're fortunate. We look both at, you know, just how do you activate people inside the organization to get breakthrough ideas. Kaihan Krippendorffhas written a chapter there, but we also have one on crowdsourcing.

Which is, I think, still underutilized innovators are like out there in the fringes. It has enthusiasts, but the outcomes you can get from doing the crowd or open-source ideation is extraordinary. So, there's chapters on that.

I think probably the most chapters are around Incubate. And this is my colleague from Harvard, Mike Tushman, and I debate is scaling the place where people fall down more often than, or is it incubate? Right? And he's like, all right, it's always scaling. It has to be scaling. I like, no, no, no. Incubate is really hard. And the roots of most of those scaling challenges start in incubate.

So, we really focused on that. How do you design an experiment? How do you do customer validation interviews, just mechanically, what is it that you do, right? And, and understand how to do it well? How do you explore an ecosystem and a tool for mapping out an ecosystem and trying to find out who are the players who might be the blockers in this? And so, the whole 19 chapters are pretty powerful content, but I, I would really zone in on these how to incubate chapters. Mm-hmm. I think they're quite special.

The other thing I, I really enjoy about the book is that we managed to say something also about the question of how do you influence inside? If you are the corporate explorer with the great insight about customers, and you've got a great idea, how do you do this?

And I talk about it in, in the first book and show some great examples of people who are kind of humble and let other people take credit for their ideas and so on. But this time we do two chapters I really think are great.

One chapter is about how do you tell the opportunity story? How do you actually make it so people remember because you don't have very long. If you happen to be in a, in an elevator with a potential senior sponsor, how are you going to use that two minutes so that they remember? And of course, you need a really vivid image. Or a key fact. And what you don't do is sell your idea. What you do is you sell the market problem you're solving. Yes.

Right. You sell the strength of demand that's out there. And I think we give some practical advice how you do that. But then the other chapter I think is special, which was written by a guy I've worked with for many years, Alex Patten, and then one of my colleagues, Kristen Vuknic is on how do you raise the tension?

Because the thing that a corporate explorer faces very often, particularly in budget restrictions, right, is senior managers who know they should carry on funding the innovation. But in the short term, yeah, it's really inconvenient to do.

You can either just let that slide and do the good corporate game. Yeah. Okay. I understand. I'll go back to my job in the mail room or whatever. The other alternative is, is you constructively engage them and really put pressure on them to think about the tradeoff they're making.

And we sort of give some tools to how do you put yourself in a situation with senior leaders where you're going to increase the tension in the conversation so that they have to confront really what they're doing because they don't really want to cut the funding either, right. And this, I think, a few stories about people who've done that well. And I think that may help.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's so interesting. You know, it seems like the success or failure of a lot of corporate innovation efforts relies on developing that culture that supports innovation. And so, what are some of the things that you've learned over the years that help our organization develop a culture that supports innovation?

Andy Binns: So, one of the things I've been doing lately is I did a research project at the beginning of this year, which I might turn into a later book. We'll see. Which was with senior leaders, right? So, we interviewed 20 or so CTOs, and then 10 or 15 CEOs and we ask them, so we've written this book, Corporate Explorer, and what do you think stands in the way of that?

And really what we're probing for is how can they, as CEOs, CTOs, give more of the culture that's needed, which is all about experimentation and risk tolerance and patience to learn, and all of these kinds of things we know. It was quite interesting to get their perspective on some of that. Right.

And what I learned is that from their perspective, those CEOs who weren't really backing corporate explorers at this point is that they feared losing control more than anything else. They were worried that if they gave too much leeway to these efforts, they would never be able to stop them, and they would not be clear about whether they were really fulfilling a strategic need.

And so, there's something there where I think corporate explorers need to hear that and think about how can they have a story about the discipline that they can apply in pursuing the opportunities, right?

Because just because you need to be fast moving, experimental, focused on learning, doesn't mean you have to be ill disciplined. And not offer up decision points and also not be obsessed about your idea. If you portray yourself as somebody who's obsessed with your idea, no one wants to get themselves in a position where they're going to have to tell you one day that it's ugly.

So, this is where, you know, sort of being really driven by evidence, I think, puts you in a position where CEOs, CTOs, others who might back you are going to feel more confident about doing it.

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about in the book this idea of customer-led innovation and going back to the customer for those insights and for that evidence and that, can you talk a little bit more about how companies fall down when it comes to customer-led?

And I have my own examples of, you know, companies who think they know their customers. But don't necessarily apply that into a new field or that, but can you talk a little bit about what customer-led innovation is to you and what you've seen around that topic?

Andy Binns: It's probably the most critical underpinning of the whole philosophy, right? Is that, and your title of your podcast, you know, illustrates this little, the inside out outside in paradox, right.

And there is a very strong view in many firms, particularly technology led firms. I've been doing a lot of work in Japan this year and this, this is really strong in Japan, right? That the key thing you should do is focus on developing the technological capabilities and delivering fabulous solutions that customers don't know they need.

And you know, that can work, but it's just pretty high risk. Right, right. And that, I think our strong perspective is that you start from a stance of curiosity. The curiosity about, well, how do customers view this? How do they want to do things? And I think that even in quite innovative companies, innovative individuals were the tendency to want to fall into, oh, I already know the answer to this.

I want to get into the product design, or I want to get into the technology design, rather than the obsession that you need around, well, how does the customer really view this? And the thing is, the earlier you do, you investigate it, the more powerful that knowledge is to you later on.

I'm here in California with, it's a large Japanese firm that, that has invested in a, a sort of a, a new business creation unit. And the CEO of this group has done, you know, two years’ worth of in-depth research into customer problems. And so, she just starts from a position where she understands how consumers think about managing their home, which is the, the sort of space they want to be in. Sort of how you can improve family wellness and family functioning with different tools.

And she just understands this deeply and that that's a totally different view than the person who's got a technology and they're trying to find out where are people who might want it.

Brian Ardinger: Or they go about it in a way where it's assumed that the person will want this particular solution set and they'll ask the question, well, wouldn't it be great if you know this existed? And the customer would say, yes. You build it, you come back, and they don't buy it. It's like, well, why not? It's, well, that was number 700 on my list of problems I wanted to solve as a customer. And so, you mismatch from that perspective as well?

Andy Binns: Yes, and I think one of the challenges I've found is that, particularly in technical audiences, but also you see this elsewhere, particularly the technologists where they be, you know, engineers or actuaries, it's a deep, deep technical. They feel that it's inappropriate to go to customers without content. The naive question. That would elicit the 699 problems is not where they start. Feels like imbalance.

That's the piece that, you know, if there's engineers listening to this is like learn how to just be able to ask questions and that, as I said, there's a chapter, it's a great chapter on this in the book as to how you can be that naive question and learning.

And being ready to find out stuff that you didn't anticipate. And, you know, I've recently posted this thing, I wrote an article in on forbes.com, but then I posted in LinkedIn, it's caused a little controversy because I, I pointed out how BMW have developed this multicolored car. Can change color. Now what customer problem does that solve Brian really?

I can't find a BMW that's competitive in electric vehicle range, but I could change its color. Just seems to me to be a failure to really understand or be committed to understanding what your customers care about.

Brian Ardinger: It's very much innovation theater at that point. It's more done for the PR or the essence of, of innovation versus solving a core need. That's right. The other issue I think a lot of companies fall into is the idea they think that this idea of customer discovery, and that is one and done type of event versus trying to build it into your culture of constantly understanding.

What do your customer's need and how can you, you know, solve those future needs as well? Yeah. Versus like, this is what I have to do. Oh, I did my 10 interviews, now I can go on to building or something like that.

Andy Binns: Yeah. Yeah. We are working with one large American company where they're developing this new capability and there's pressure from the sales leader. We need to be done with experimentation and onto execution. I'm like, no. You, you, you're done with experimentation when you've eliminated the risks, right. And you never stop. If you are trying to do something new, you watch how you experiment. The scale of your experiments might change, but that's your experiment. It never changes because you always need to be learning if you're doing something new.

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Brian Ardinger: Constantly exploring. Right. Andy, I, I want to thank you for coming on the, the show again and giving us some more insights into what you're seeing out there in the world. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Andy Binns: The corporateexplorer.com remains the URLfor both Red Book and Black. But the, the Black Book comes out August 29th. And I would love to get feedback from people. And you can find me on LinkedIn, at Andrew Binns, Binns and, and I'd love to turn to dialogue with people about the book and its content and ideas for the third book.

Brian Ardinger: Yes, we'll look forward to the trilogy as well. Andy, again, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, we look forward to speaking to you in the future as well.

Andy Binns: Thanks, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo's first ever Chief Design Officer and author of the new book, The Human Side of Innovation. Mauro and I talk about the human aspects of innovation and the importance of love in the innovation process. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo's Chief Design Officer and author of The Human Side of Innovation

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Mauro Porcini. He is PepsiCo's first ever Chief Design Officer, and author of the new book, The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People. Welcome to the show.

Mauro Porcini: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure.

Brian Ardinger: I am super excited to have you on the show. I'm big fan of PepsiCo and your work prior at 3M, and you've got this new book out and I wanted to have a conversation about some of the things that you've seen in this world of innovation. How do you define innovation?

Mauro Porcini: That's a good question. Every time you touch, you start score, every time you take something, anything, it could be a product, it could be an experience, it could be an institution, anything in your life. You try to change. And now this change could be directed in a positive way. It could go in a negative way. It could be a major change. Destructive but true as we call those kind changes in innovation world. It could be very incremental, very minimum, but anything you do, the change, the status quo is innovation by definition.

Brian Ardinger: I like that definition because you know, I think a lot of people get hung up on the fact that innovation, they think it has to be the biggest change in the world. It's I've got to come up with the next flying car. But you talk about in your book, innovation is not just about that. It's about incremental improvements. It's just creating value in change.

Mauro Porcini: This point we are both making right now, I think is extremely important because often people out there, media, opinion leaders, are looking at companies investing in innovation, and if they don't produce the next iPhone, they're like, well, they're failing. They're not really extracting the value that they should from that innovation team, that design team, whatever is the form shape of that innovation organization.

And instead, in many situations that innovation is more in the genetic code of the company. Is happening so many different ways in the way you serve a customer. In the way you build experiences. In the way you promote your brands, or you build new ones. Or eventually also in some small incremental products that make your portfolio more meaningful, more relevant. Or financially more interesting for you and your shareholders or more strategic for your company.

So, it's very, very important to make this point. I read a few articles recently. They were attacking and challenging companies that were not producing the next iPhone after these loud investments in the innovation machine. And the reality, many of those companies are actually different companies today than today than what they were in the past. Thanks to that innovation culture that they built.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. I heard you talk about design and that great design comes from this earnest desire to make other people happy. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Mauro Porcini: That's how everything started. Thousands of years ago when the first act of innovation or design, because for me, are exactly the same thing happened. When the historic man or woman. Who knows if it was a man or if it was a woman, for the first time, took something that was available in nature, a stone, and modified that to give it a different destination of use. To use the stone as a more effective hunting tool. Or a tool to prepare the food. Or later on to decorate your body. Or later on to celebrate your gods.

By the way, just mentioned, three different dimensions of the Maslow Pyramid. You know, the bottom of the pyramid that is about survival and is safety and is your physiological needs. The center is about self-expression, the connection with others. And then the top that is about something that transcend yourself is bigger than you.

Yeah. And so already those utensils made out of stones were serving specific needs. They were all about reaching your happiness. Because the Maslow Pyramid, at the end of the day, the needs Pyramid is all about reaching what we call today happiness. If you work in all these dimensions. So already back innovation or design was an of love. This is how I start. Also, the book, innovation is an act of love.

An act of love towards yourself. If you were creating this for yourself, but obviously already back then, we were organized in little communities. We have people around us. We wouldn't have the concept of family yet, but you were creating these products also for the people around you. It was an act of love for them as well. And then you started to create more and more product by yourself. At a certain point, there were so many products. You needed help. You needed to start delegating the creation of those products to other people.

And then over there, hundreds of years and thousands of years, we started to organize ourselves in different communities. We invented the idea of work. We invented companies. Then later on brands. And so, what happened when that started to happen is that essentially you start to put scale. Literally scale between you innovator and the people that you love and that you are serving.

The scale plays the distance between the two of you and the love started to get lost in translation in the scale. And instead of love, you started to change love with profit and financial revenue and other things. And so, in the name of profit, eventually you could create products that eventually were not ideal for the people you wanted to serve.

But products that eventually you could extract as much financial value as possible out of. And so, this is what has been happening for hundreds of years, more recently. That we are surrounded by so many mediocre products and services and brands and experiences because they were created in the name of profit instead of the name of love.

What is changing today is that we live in a world, where if you don't create the ideal extraordinary, excellent solution for people needs and wants, the solution could be once again, a product, service, a brand, or experience. Somebody else will do it on your behalf. Why this was not happening 20 years ago, 30 years ago was simply because if you were a big company, you could protect your product. With big barrier to entry. Made of scale of production, of distribution, and communication.

Today. Instead, anybody out there can come up with an idea, get easy access to funding through kickstarter.com or their proliferation investment funds that are hunting for the next startup. The custom manufacturing is going down driven by new technologies and globalization.

You can go straight to your end users through the digital platforms to sell them stuff through e-commerce channels and to promote your products through social media. In these areas, these companies, the big ones, were building their barriers to end. It was impossible for the men and woman in the street to go compete with them

Today they can, and therefore the big and the small, they're left with just one possible solution. They need to really focus on people and really create something extraordinary for them. You may have the best product, the best brand. Very bad service. Your competitor will create the best product, the best brand, and eventually something with a better service.

Or you may have all of them, but your product is not sustainable enough. Or is not healthy enough. That's exactly where competition will come. Thank God we live in a world where the big and small need to do just one thing to create excellence for people. There is no space for mediocrity anymore. You cannot protect the mediocrity with your old barriers to entry anymore.

Brian Ardinger: I love that concept and coming back to the idea of innovation is love, if you think about one of the best acts of love is solving a problem for somebody. And at the end of the day, that's what innovation is. It's finding a problem and solving that problem for yourself or whoever's having that problem.

Mauro Porcini: And going maybe a little bit further, you know, many years ago, around 18 years ago, I was working at 3M. And 3M named that year, the year of customer satisfaction. The idea was, let's focus on the customer. Let's really celebrate and please the customer. This year more than ever. So was thinking about customer satisfaction and the etymology of the world satisfaction and the meaning of the word. And at a certain point, I realized that as a designer, as an innovator, I didn't care at all about satisfying the customer.

I really didn't care at all about satisfying the customers. I wanted to love the customer. What is the big difference between satisfaction and love? Satisfaction is all about identifying a need and fulfilling the specific need. But if you love somebody could be your children, it could be your wife or husband, or your parents and your friends. You try to do more; you try to do the magic. Then expect to go above and beyond. To really surprise them. And this is what innovators, the real innovators do. They want to surprise. They want to do the magic.

And you know that to surprise them, do the magic, you need an extra effort. You need to really change things. You need to do things that people do not expect. Not just the people you serve, but unfortunately, and this is the difficulty of doing innovation also, the people surrounding your boss. Your investors. Your colleague. There is a subtle difference between satisfaction and love, and I think love is really the word synthesized for innovation.

Brian Ardinger: That's a great. You talk about in the book how you have to go after and find these, what you define as unicorn employees. The employees that possess a lot of these key talents that you're talking about. Can you expand on what a unicorn employee is and why it's so important to have them in your innovation space?

Mauro Porcini: Well, the first definition that is also the subtitle of the book is There are People in Love with People. So, until now, we talked about how important it is to refocus everything on people. That's the second people in the sentence. We briefly talk about love that synthesizes essentially everything. The first people I started to focus on, the first people of the sentence that are innovators, entrepreneurs, the leaders of the world, the designers.

Many years ago, for a very practical reason, you know, everything is in the book comes from the practical needs that I faced in my professional journey. Who was this need? Well, I was building design teams in 3M, and I was hiring people, and I had a series of technical skills. They needed to be the best possible designers.

They also needed to be business savvy. They needed to have also you know, a series of characteristics that were very clear to me. And then I was giving more, less an idea of the soft skills that these people needed to have. And very soon I realized that it was so difficult to find the kind of talents that I wanted.

They had all the technical skills there, the business skills, but they were missing when something was important to move projects forward. Something else happened in part. I was there to introduce design thinking and design driven innovation, or as we call that kind of innovation, human center innovation in 3M.

And I was studying every other company, what they were doing, how they were applying innovation, big companies, small companies. And one of the trendy words of the time was Design Thinking. And of course, as a designer, I would introduce that idea inside the company. And they started to introduce the tools, the processes, the ways of working of Design Thinking.

This is what you were reading in books, listening, hearing, conferences, and what the, the consultant out there were selling to these companies. And so here I am. I started to run dozens and then hundreds of projects with this methodology. And some of them were succeeding and some of them were miserably failing.

And then you start to look at them. You start to analyze them. And then at the beginning I was thinking, okay, maybe the process is not the right one. I need to tweak it and evolve it and I need to change the way of working and some of the tools. And you do all of this and still some succeed in some not. And at that point you try to find what is the root cause of this. What are the common themes?

And you're right to want conclusions. That is pretty obvious if you say, but the reality in the companies, people don't talk enough about this when they talk about innovation. The difference was made by the people driving the projects. And there were people with certain kind of characteristics and people with others. Mindset, ability to observe reality and take certain kind of decisions, extract certain kind of insights and learnings, courage to drive things forward to face roadblocks, ability to take orders with you.

I mean, there are a series of skills that back then when I was hunting for all these people to join my teams at 3M, I listed literally in the list for my HR department. Because I needed these people to have this kind of characteristic. Then the list became a paper for the Design Management Institute Review. It became something that will share in conferences. And it became something very public for a simple reason because I wanted everybody out there that was interested to join my teams, to know what kind of people I was looking for.

And so, in the past 17 years. I've been tweaking and evolving the list. And two-thirds of this book is about characteristics and the way these unicorns think and behave. And some of them are more obvious than others, like the ability to dream and think big when you talk about leaders and innovation, obviously you need to think big.

It's not that easy though. You know, we think big, and we dream when we are children and then society try to convince us that is not okay. That that's a childish kind of activity. Because society wants to normalize people. They don't want people to dream too much because people need to be a feature and be stable, you know. Within the society that we have today.

Instead, we need to find ways to protect those dreams and we need to understand that when we dream, we'll face people that will push back on us. They, they will stop us from dreaming because that's what they believe in. You shouldn't dream or you need to be practical. You need to be pragmatic. The problem is that then even if you succeed in dreaming, that's not enough.

There are many people that dream, there are great visionaries, but are unable to make things happen. They stay up there in the dimension of dreaming. That is also very comfortable dimension because to make things happen is tough. So, you know the balance between dreaming and execution is very important.

Now, this is something that you hear about when you talk about innovation. You talk about leadership; you talk about design. But there are other characteristics that are less obvious. For instance, kindness, optimism, curiosity. How many times you heard the CEO or a business leader or a hiring manager asking, is this person a kind person or is this person curious or optimistic and, and there are many others. Again, there are 24 traits of these innovators.

And in my, again, journey, I found that these characteristics are what made the difference in my teams. At the beginning, even before I started to create this list, they were kind of intuitive. People love to be surrounded by people that are similar to them, so. I grew up in this family of kind people and optimistic people. I mean, it was just the way we were.

I wish all Italians were like this. Actually Italy, we have the opposite. Yeah, kind maybe. I don't know. But is the opposite. I think the problem of Italy today is that we're not optimistic at all today. Unfortunately.

At the second point, I realized with full awareness, the power of something like this. For instance, curiosity is what drives you to talk with others. To get out of your comfort zone and embrace people that think differently than you. Curious people usually love diversity because they see diversity, diversity of thinking and background, the precious gift of knowledge.

They know that people that are different than them have something to offer to them and they can learn from. And it doesn't mean that the other point of view is better than yours. It means that through dialogue and therefore respect to other characteristics of the unicorns, ability to create a dialogue and respect. To dialogue and respect, you can build a bridge with these other perspectives and your perspective.

Perspective number one, combine with perspective number two of the other person. Create a third or regional perspective, that is the novel perspective, is what drives innovation. Curiosity makes you read books and travel from one place to the other without just stopping at the meeting room where you're going because of the business commitment that you have. But going out in the city and getting lost in the city and observe people and falling in love with, you know, the way they talk, they behave, they dress, they eat, they drink, they read anything they do. Curiosity make you grow every single day.

Brian Ardinger: So, I'm curious to know, so you talk about these particular traits and that. Do you think they can be trained and taught to folks that are already on your team. Or is this something you have to go out and hire for and is it, is it in fact a unicorn from the standpoint of it's a mythical creature that doesn't always exist and is hard to come by.

Mauro Porcini: Yeah, exactly. First of all, as you mention it, the unicorn doesn't exist. The person that embodies, to the extreme, the 24 skills of the unicorn doesn't exist. And this is what the unicorn is about. Plato will place the unicorn in the world of ideas up there.

The Unicorn is an idea you strive to for the rest of your life. You want to keep seeing your life as a never-ending opportunity that will end with your death eventually, depending on what you believe in. And opportunity to keep learning. And so that's what the unicorn is about. And therefore, is implicit in the very idea of the unicorn that you need to learn, that you can grow. You can improve, you can become a better unicorn than you were when you were born.

So, I think there are two dimensions to the idea of the unicorn. On one side, there are talents you are born with, like you play soccer, and you are Maradona or Tennis, Serena Williams or you run and Usain Bolt. Those are people who are born with those talents, but they need to train also, Maradona, Serena Williams or Usain Bolt need to train that talent. We move people with goals.

At the beginning, even just building awareness. Realizing that I am Maradona. You know how many amazing potential baseball player or tennis player are out there. And there are maybe employees in a company or doing other things because they never became aware on an amazing talent because they never happened to play baseball for example. They just, you know, they didn't do sport and they ended up, or they were swimming.

And so the first role of education is build awareness about specific characteristics. And again, now we're talking about sports. But understanding the power of curiosity. Understanding the power of optimism. The power of humbleness. You know, a series of traits that can make the difference in your innovation journey.

The second goal is that once you're aware, you want to practice so that you can take it to the next level. The third one is that you want to, when you right to a certain level, you know, a professional kind of level, you think that you are done, because you are there. You're up there, you've been successful. You did amazing innovation projects.

You are Maradona. Somebody stopped learning, somebody stopped growing. And this is a big mistake driven by the opposite of one of the characteristics of the unicorn that is evidence. And the characteristic is that humbleness combined with confidence. So short answer, partially is natural talent, partially training. You may be born with less of a natural talent as a unicorn than somebody else. But you may become a better unicorn than a natural talent if you practice and if you get that kind of education.

Brian Ardinger: You brought up the fact that you got to be a natural learner and continually prime that pump. How do you stay fresh and current and connected to new ideas and that?

Mauro Porcini: Look, I practice that idea of curiosity I was describing also earlier. But while in the past was kind of random. Like I was just curious by nature. But it was very in efficient. Sometimes I was more curious, sometimes I was less. Today I force myself to be extra learner.

And really, you know, for instance, you may already understand from this conversation between the two of us that I love a lot to talk and you put me in a room, we start to talk and I start, and then I learn over the years, when you are in the room and you meet people, people you know, but especially people you don't know, that if I was talking too much, I was wasting the opportunity to learn from others.

So, one of the things I learned to do is to stop and list theme. Listen is so, so important. And also, not doing that just in a casual occasion, but also during a business meeting. During a design or innovation meeting. And this is so important because often people, for lack of confidence are there in those rooms feeling the gap of their, of the silence.

We justify their presence there, to build their credibility, even if what they're saying is not really meaningful to the conversation. It's not really adding value. There are so many of these people and to them, almost bothered by that because I feel it in my skin, like a waste of time and lack of efficiency in that kind of conversation.

I think we should talk when we add value to bring to the conversation, and we shouldn't when we don't. By the way, this value doesn't need to be just intellectual value. Maybe there is a moment that we need a joke or some irony. You know, to create a different vibe in the conversation. So, I'm talking about that.

But this is something important I think, and we need to always keep in mind. And then finally, a little trick, again, very spontaneously for me, I am very, very active in social media. Especially in Instagram, in LinkedIn. And I post every day in Instagram especially. And so, posting every day, you always want to have interesting content to post.

And so, this force you to walk the streets of life and be curious and see people around you and always hungry for an interesting thing that happens. So that you can snap that picture, that could become content. And it's not just the picture, but it's the story behind that picture.

So, you need to observe, you need to understand what's going on, and then you need to give an angle, a perspective that is your unique, that helps so much being alert and looking around and always observe what's going on around you.

Brian Ardinger: What it also allows you to do is to make mistakes. Like you can try things and you get better as you try things. I imagine the first time you posted a picture of your shoes, was maybe not the first best conversation piece, but I know that you do it on a regular basis and having the ability to learn and grow and change as you experience and do things, that's probably important trait as well.

Mauro Porcini: Yeah. You, you, you say two things that I think are very important here. One is consistency. You may do things at the beginning, look weird, but if you do it consistently because in a consistent way, then it becomes part of your brand. Or you may do things that people perceive as not authentic because they're like, ah, that's not really him, you know, or her in your social media or at work in, you know, in what you do every day, your company.

So, at the beginning, there will be this uncomfortable situation. People want to know, you know, why you're doing certain things. But if you keep doing that sooner or later, they will understand that you really believe in what you're doing. So, consistency is very powerful, but it requires a little bit of courage and getting out of your comfort zone at the beginning. When you disrupt, you do things differently.

Brian Ardinger: So obviously you work at a company like PepsiCo that's always doing some amazing things out there in the consumers world and headspace. What are some of the trends that you're seeing or that you're excited about?

Mauro Porcini: Well, there are three with an overarching platform that could be codified as an additional fourth trend. In our industry, but they're common also, many other industries. Sustainability, health and wellness, personalization, enabled by technology. Technology could attach itself to all of this dimension and really change the game. Sometimes people ask me, well, you've been 10 years at PepsiCo.

You were 20 years earlier in 3M, where do you see yourself in the future? The first part of the answer is that you never know, right? I was not planning to leave 3M and then it happened. But I'm not planning to, to leave PepsiCo anytime soon. And one of the reasons why, since 10 years I'm doing exactly the same job. And I could keep doing a job eventually for 20 more years, is that it's exactly these four challenges that I just made.

We're working in a industry that is in evolution. Is changing. And companies like PepsiCo give people like me, the platform to reach everyday billions of people. Billions of people. So even the incremental changes that eventually the media don't notice because they're not the next iPhone, who generate a positive impact, for instance, in sustainability, in health wellness.

That is exponentially bigger than anything a small company is, can do, and is doing today. The impact what we're doing today, with a variety of different activities that human center design driven is unbelievable. So, it's so exciting to work on these four dimensions today in an industry like this, with a company to give you this kind of access and resources as well.

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Brian Ardinger: It's exciting times we're living in for sure, and I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to kind of share your thoughts. I'm really excited about the book coming out. For folks who want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Mauro Porcini: If you follow me, my Instagram, Mauro Porcini and my LinkedIn. Mauro Porcini as well. I'm pretty active there. And then there is the possibility eventually even to communicate directly. So probably are the best two platforms.

Brian Ardinger: Well Mauro, thank you again for coming on the program. Very excited to continue the conversation in the years to come and appreciate your time.

Mauro Porcini: Thank you. Thank you, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lorraine Marchand. Lorraine is the author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset. She and I discuss how innovation starts, how you can build your muscle of innovation through exploration and experimentation, and much more. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best in the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Lorraine Marchand, Author of The Innovation Mindset

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lorraine Marchand. She is executive managing director of Merative, which is formerly IBM Watson Health. And she's author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry. Welcome to the show, Lorraine.

Lorraine Marchand: Thank you, Brian. Really happy to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. You have been in this space for a while. For the past three decades, you have been in product development, working with companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and Covance, and Cognizant. How did you get involved in the realm of innovation?

Lorraine Marchand: Well, it started when I was actually pretty young. I was reared by my dad, who was an inventor. And when I was growing up around the house, he would always challenge my brother and me, to find three solutions to every problem, usually problems that he would identify. And one summer morning, he really brought that point close to home. And he took us to a local diner called the Hot Shops Cafeteria in Wheaton, Maryland.

And our job was to determine what was slowing down table turnover. So we sat in the big red vinyl booths eating our breakfast of scrambled eggs and orange juice. And after three days of using our stopwatches and writing down notes, and even interviewing waitresses and bus boys, we determined that the culprit was sugar packets. People were spewing them all over the place.

True to his tenant that we had to find three solutions we did. And we ended up taking one to an MVP, minimal viable prototype. And that was the sugar cube. And we ended up selling it to the Hot Shops cafeteria that summer, and pretty soon it was distributed throughout the Baltimore Washington area.

So early on, I learned that problem solving was fun and lucrative. And fast forward throughout my career, whether it was at the National Institutes of Health or Bristol Myers Squibb, or founding my own startups and the diagnostics and ophthalmology area, I found that I really did love this idea of being able to clearly define a problem, and then as my dad had taught me kind of systematically evaluate and choose solutions.

And to me, the heart of the innovation mindset that I write about is an insatiable curiosity, a passion for problem solving, and embracing change. And so I have found myself, whether in large corporations or in startups, desiring to be that agent of change and bringing that problem solving methodology that I learned so early at the age of 13 with me in all of my career endeavors.

Brian Ardinger: I love that story and I love, you have this in the book that one of the key mindset essential steps is this innovation starts with at least three ideas. Can you talk a little bit more about why it takes more than one idea to get something going and that process?

Lorraine Marchand: You know, I like to say that first of all, your first two ideas, one of them is probably a solution that you've already been mulling over before you even confirmed that you had a problem. Because I find that we, as human beings, love to go into solutioning mode before we've really carefully defined the problem.

So, if you are making your way around a problem, you probably have a bias in terms of what one of the solutions is. The second solution is always to do nothing, right? The competition is always the default, the status quo, I'm not going to change.

So right there, you already have number one and two. So you have to be true to the problem solving discipline and this idea of brainstorming and coming up with the three solutions, because it could be that third one that is the winner. If you go a little bit beyond the three, I'm okay with that, but I don't allow my students or any of the individuals I coach to cheat and come up with fewer than three. That you can't do

Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. Like you said, you've been in this space for a long time and you've, you've helped create products, you've helped create companies and that. What are some of the biggest maybe obstacles or misconceptions that people have about innovation and starting this particular process.

Lorraine Marchand: I think a lot of people are intimidated that they think that innovation has to be at the hands of some of the quintessential greats like Edison and Jobs and Musk and Gates, etc. And so, the first thing I like to do is educate and inform individuals that not all forms of innovation are disruptive. They're not all big hunt.

And it is absolutely honorable, and it could be your style of innovation to create incremental improvements. To do more renovation, retooling something for another type of use case. To be optimizing, which actually my story about the Hot Shops Cafeteria, truly if I'm honest about it, it's more about optimizing than truly innovating.

But I'm okay with that because like you, I'm very passionate about just encouraging more people to access the freedom, the excitement, the job satisfaction that comes from innovating. And I'm okay to use a broader set of terminology in order to attract more people to just find ways to get started. So that's the first thing. I think people are really put off by that.

And then I think that a lot of innovators find that it's very difficult to do customer research. Where do I find the customer? How do I talk to them? Do they want to talk to me? How do I really write a question guide that doesn't bias them toward my solution? So that's one that is very difficult to do, and I find that a lot of individuals will gloss over it.

You know, I, I say you have to talk to a hundred customers. And my students look at me with their eyes crossed going, I can't possibly do that. I can't even find five. And I say, well, how are you going to sell your product if you can only find five people to talk to about it? Okay. Right there.

And then I would say the other area is pivot. I'm a real fan of pivoting you never fail. Some people will argue with me, but I like to say, you don't fail if you're constantly adjusting your strategy based on the data, based on the market dynamics, and you're moving in the direction where you keep learning and improving what you're doing and moving it closer to the customer. We don't fail, we pivot. But a lot of founders, fail to see the warning signs. That maybe things aren't taking off the way they thought. And so pivoting too late can be pretty dangerous.

Brian Ardinger: You spent some time both in bigger corporations as well as a startup entrepreneur. Do you see any differences about how those types, either early-stage startups innovate versus bigger companies, and what are the differences and similarities?

Lorraine Marchand: I think that one of the big challenges in a corporation is, number one, the corporation exists in order to systematize, routinize, and scale. So, by its very nature, it's not really incented to be an innovative type of organism because innovation is the opposite. Innovation is about experimentation. It's got to create a safe environment for you to try something and fail. The only time I'll use the word fail.

You have to be able to experiment and know that it's not gonna move forward. And as we both know, so often corporations living quarter by quarter, they just don't have a lot of patience for investing time, money, and important talent and resources in creating new ideas that might not make it to market.

So that's one of the biggest challenges, and I tell my corporate colleagues who wanna innovate or even head up innovation, how important it is to embed it in the culture. And one of the first tips that I give them is you have to create an environment where experimentation is encouraged, and failure feels safe.

And failure is also even encouraged and incentivized. And I do like the way Jeff Bezos positioned that within Amazon. So, he had try, fail, learn. And if I had to reiterate a mantra to my friends in the corporate world, it would be you have to create that kind of environment. And if he did it, with a logistics company, surely you can do it too.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. It's interesting to talk a little bit about that. You know, you mentioned earlier about how you define innovation. And I think that's so important in that early-stage process to get people comfortable with the fact that I can be an innovator even though I'm not a Steve Jobs.

The idea that just taking an idea and creating value around that idea, that's how I define innovation. You know, being able to take your idea and move it forward to create value from it. That alone gives the individual person on the line permission to see a problem and say, I can fix that. And that is innovation and appreciate that particular type of approach.

It also then allows you to start building that muscle. To take on maybe bigger things down the road, bigger, more adjacent or transformational types of innovation. As you kind of learn about the process and learn that anybody can go through the part of taking an idea and creating value from it.

Lorraine Marchand: I really love that, Brian. In fact, I love that metaphor of the muscle. I was talking with one of the innovators that I profiled in the book, Sarah Apgar, who invented a piece of fitness equipment called the Fit Fighter. She's just phenomenal. It's a nationally recognized business and brand now, and so we use that metaphor when we were talking about Fit Fighter and innovation that it’s like a muscle.

I might have a goal of doing a half marathon. And I go out in day one, I've never run before. But I'm going to run half a mile and then the next week I'm going to run another half a mile and I'm going to build up to it. Because building a muscle, practicing is what makes you the half marathon runner. And building the muscle and practicing is what makes you good at innovating.

Brian Ardinger: So, you mentioned one of the stories that is in your book, but the book is packed full with a variety of different case studies and and things that you've seen along the lines. Can you tell us some of the success stories that you highlight in the book?

Lorraine Marchand: You know, one that I don't often get an opportunity to talk about. So, thank you for letting me choose one of my favorites. I had a fantastic opportunity when I was a professor of entrepreneurship at Princeton, to judge a business pitch contest at a prison in a local New Jersey County. And so that day I drove out to the prison not really knowing what to expect. And it was just the most enlightening and humbling experiences that I had.

The inmates had really worked hard over the 12 weeks in the entrepreneurship program. And they had studiously written their business plans down on loose leaf paper with pencils. And so, when I came in, I read the plans and then they had an opportunity to present their ideas and to pitch their ideas to me. And they were so engaged in the feedback. So responsive and receptive to it, and they really just wanted to learn and get better. And you could just feel the energy in the room.

But the best part of the story was three of those gentlemen went on to found the businesses that we had discussed in the session that day. And even though I couldn't stay in touch with them because of rules around these sorts of engagements, I was able to get information from the warden later that they had been successful. And really not too many stories have warmed my heart like that one.

Brian Ardinger: It's excellent to see that again pretty much anybody from anywhere can find problems to solve, and if you go through a process to make that happen, you can actually create value and change lives, so that's amazing. The other thing I like about your book, you have a section in there talking about women innovators and some of the unique challenges that they face. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Lorraine Marchand: My focus on women is around increasing awareness and raising women up and encouraging them to step up and stand out and give innovation a try. And I just think that for a lot of women, it's not something that they naturally think about being entrepreneurs or innovators.

And we do find that the data indicates that even among venture capital firms, there's still only about 2 to 3% of them that have women partners. And when we look at investments in women founded companies, it's also still hovering at around 2 to 3%. And I'm just such a fan of innovation for all the reasons that we've talked about because I think it can be so satisfying to take an idea, to take a problem that you've personally observed and bring it to life, bring it to market as we've been discussing.

I think that's tremendously satisfying. And I also think that it can be economically satisfying and help women find economic freedom. And a sustainability of their economic freedom and status. So I want to get the word out. I really encourage women in STEM. I encourage women to figure out ways to access capital. And I have a resource guide to help women with that.

And then very importantly, I like to help women think a little differently about their own networking. And the truth of the matter is you have to be comfortable networking with accountants and attorneys and investors, and maybe not those folks that are in your social circles on a day-to-day basis, but you have to get out there and be able to have those conversations and pull those people into your network. So those are some of the tips that I give to women.

Brian Ardinger: They're great tips and they apply to everyone as far as that ability to build a network. I think a lot of people think of innovation as this sport that you do in your garage and the tinkerer who figures things out on their own. But like you said, there are so many different components that have to come together to create that value, whether it's the accountants or the lawyers or the other people that can help build the product, whatever the case may be. Collaborative nature of innovation is so important. How do you stay fresh and current and connected with the new things that are going on in your world, and how do you stay on the top of, of your game?

Lorraine Marchand: Well, I am always reaching out to new innovators. I get so much inspiration from the students that I teach at a graduate level. Or I'll be going to the Philadelphia Venture Fair later this week. And so, I'll get to talk to the early-stage entrepreneurs there. And share ideas and explore and create with them.

So, I need to put myself in an environment where I'm around innovators too and entrepreneurs and I feed off of their energy. So that really is what does it for me, is just staying out there with other people, with ideas that want to create and grow. And by linking arms, we move this whole movement forward and it keeps me fresh too.

Brian Ardinger: It's always important to keep in touch with where those new ideas are coming from and that. Do you see any new trends or things that you're excited about?

Lorraine Marchand: I think the area of AI is absolutely fascinating. You know, I was recently reading a report that AI innovation about a 1.1 billion cagr, but the fastest growing area, even though it's very much focused on manufacturing, automation, automobiles, for example, the fastest growing sector is in healthcare. And I just think that's incredibly exciting if you think about the ability to use artificial intelligence on information about a patient's cancer tumor, have it diagnosed earlier, precision medicine in terms of knowing how to treat it.

Or even being able to develop the sensors that can go into devices and help to measure and monitor pain or someone's activity around the house. So, I definitely love the healthcare applications of AI, one of those areas that I'm particularly passionate about.

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Brian Ardinger: I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to kind of share your insights and that. Look forward to having the conversation again in the future as we talk more about some of the crazy things that are happening in the world. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about your book, what's the best way to do that?

Lorraine Marchand: I'm on LinkedIn, so I'd love for you to connect with me, Lorraine Marchand on LinkedIn. And if you would like a copy of the book, it's on Amazon, The Innovation Mindset with my name. You can buy a copy there and you can also go to the Columbia University Press website, and you can also purchase the book through Columbia.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Lorraine, thanks again for being on the show. Appreciate the time and looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Lorraine Marchand: Thank you, Brian, and continued good luck with all of your fabulous endeavors as well.

Brian Ardinger: Thank you. That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%. We talk about Kevin's experiences creating products in the biomedical space, as well as his background as the founder of Uchi, a social app designed to strengthen relationships and behaviors. We also talk about the importance of both mental and physical health in the innovation process. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Kevin Strauss. He is the author of Innovate The 1%: Seven Areas to Nurture for Success. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

Kevin Strauss: Thanks a lot, Brian. I'm glad to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. You are a innovator, an author, emotional health and wellness expert. Founder. How did you get involved and excited about this whole innovation space.

Kevin Strauss: I think it's a combination of a few things. And I really have to bring it back to my father. As a kid, and for the first 18 years of my life, I would just follow him around and be his little helper and we would just get into every kind of project around the house possible.

And that led to the engineering degree and just problem solving. And not only problem solving, but coming up with other ideas, because my dad would do that a lot. Where he would just want to do something in the house. It wasn't solving a problem, but it was just creating something that he wanted to see, you know, in the home.

So, I think that's where it really got started.

Brian Ardinger: You have a little bit different career. You're not in the software space per se. And you spent a lot of time in the health tech space. So, give us a little background on how you went from engineering to where you are now.

Kevin Strauss: It started with engineering. He always loved the mechanical side of things, but I've always been fascinated with the human body and like how it all works and everything. That's when I went straight to a biomedical engineering degree, and I just love all that. Ended up getting like a dream job out of graduate school designing total hip replacement. So that launched me into medical device.

But then there was a time that I was working at a company, where we were doing a lot of grant research. And these grants were funded by NIH. And we would come up with ideas, whatever they happen to be, and propose them. And if we won the grant, we'd do the research with the ultimate hope of bringing it to US society as a product, as a company.

And in that time, I was thinking a lot about my dating life, which wasn't working out so well back then. And I was trying to figure out why my dating life wasn't working out. You know, I boil it all down to self-esteem of the people I was dating, but then 15 years later, figuring out it was my own self-esteem issues. That was also part of the problem.

And it's putting all of that together and understanding why people do what they do. In 2001, it really boiled to the top where I had an epiphany that it seemed to me that most arguments occurred because people weren't sharing their true thoughts and feelings. Right.

And that really took me into this other direction. We were doing some human behavior modification work at that company with the grant research. But I just kept pursuing that on my own. And with the work I was doing at the office. And trying to understand why people do what they do. Why do I do what I do?

Where's all this behavior coming from? And that led me down a 20-year rabbit hole, which is understanding human behavior, which I really attributed to emotional health. It sent me down that path of emotional health and relationships and connection, and that's what's really driving behavior, and that's what led to the Uchi App, which is a tool to help strengthen relationships.

Brian Ardinger: Your background again, you've been in product development. You have 80 patents to your name, I believe. And peer reviewed in a variety of different areas. And so, you've been at the forefront of taking an early stage idea and creating products around it. It's interesting to see the pivot that you've made into the human side of that. And it's not just about figuring out what feature to build or whatever, but it's about the team and it's about other things. So maybe talk a little bit about the book, Innovate the 1%, and some of those areas that we need to nurture, whether we're developing a product or developing a dating life.

Kevin Strauss: The book became this like 20 years, 30 years of my career and everything that I've learned in, solving problems, and bringing products solutions to fruition. But when I actually sat down to finally write the book, I ended up writing the book in 39 days because it was just dumping, like brain dumping everything down. So, when you have an idea and you start executing on it, that actually happens to be chapter seven of the book, which is Strike While the Iron is Hot.

If you've got an idea, write it down. Talk it out with people. Play with it. You know, don't let it just, oh, I'll remember that later. I can't tell you how many ideas I've had, you know, in the middle of the night or driving, and I'm like, oh, I'll definitely remember this. This is amazing. And then I completely have no idea what that idea was.

But you know, the first chapter is where it gets started, which is identify the problem first. Until you identify the true root problem, you're not going to actually solve it. And so often what we're doing in society is we think we know the problem, but it's actually just the symptom. And that's what behaviors are. Behaviors are only symptoms of a deeper problem. And what I learned in my career is once you identify the true root problem, the solutions are usually shockingly simple. And that's how I've been able to come up with like 80 patents.

Brian Ardinger: Can you gimme some examples of how you go through that particular process to pull away the onion and figure out what is that core root problem?

Kevin Strauss: So, asking why. And I think there's like different schools of thought, like three whys or seven whys. I probably ask like 50 whys. You know, like I just don't ever stop. Like, is this really what we're trying to get to and talk to the right people about it. You know, I mean, for a lot of these medical devices, it's not just about talking to the surgeon, right? The orthopedic or neurosurgeon when it comes to all these spinal implants and all. It's talking to the scrub tech, the nursing staff.

You know, we would have meetings with the central supply at a hospital because central supply is the one who cleans the instruments. And if they can't clean the instrument properly, you know, you could transmit infection and that's terrible.

You have to dig into all these different areas and keep asking why and find out what is really the problem that you're dealing with that needs to be overcome. And again, so often we are looking for these shiny, flashy solutions that look really cool like implants. You know, it takes like a hundred instruments to get that one implant into the body. That's a lot of questioning and thinking and experimenting and failing. Oh my God, I mean tons and tons of failing in order to get to the solution.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point too. I think a lot of times, and it's probably even more so in, in your industry, where this idea of failure, especially in a big corporation and that, people don't like to fail. And that's why a lot of people don't innovate. Talk about the difference of how the perception of failure and the execution of what you do after failure in a, like a medical device type of environment where if you fail, lives are on the line, potentially. Talk about that and the perceptions in that industry around failure. And how do people get over it to actually innovate.

Kevin Strauss: We talk about fear of failure, right? Like fear. To me, the fear, well, for one, it's justified like we fear, but what are we actually fearing? Are we fearing failure? Are we fearing an idea that just doesn't work? It's not about the idea. The real fear that I think we're struggling with, especially in the workplace, is shame, judgment, degradation, or neglect.

You know, we're afraid that if we come up with a bad idea, and again, like 99% of ideas suck really. We're so afraid that we're going to be judged or shamed. And I do talk about this in the book. If we're going to be judged or shamed, well, you only need a couple of examples of being judged and shamed and it hurts, right?

And like, oh, I'm not going near that pain again. That emotional pain. So, I'm just not even going to try. And we just take it out of kids, even in like kindergarten and first grade. We already start to teach them to fear failure because we judge and shame them for their failure. And it's even worse in the workplace because then your job is tied to it and your salary and earning a living and putting a roof over your head and food on the table, and taking care of those that you love.

You know, we're fearing these things because we've been trained as little children. That's one of the big things that needs to change in the workplace so that you don't fear the failure because you're going to fail. I can't tell you how many times that we've failed. You don't come up with 80 ideas and get 80 patents. Like that just doesn't happen. And you know, remember I didn't do all these patents by myself, right? It's a team.

In the workplace, it needs to be acceptable to fail. Like you're not going to hit a home run every single time you have an idea. And it's through these bad ideas and there are bad ideas. And I hate this idea, they're like, oh, there's no bad idea. Well, that's completely false. Most ideas are bad. But what do you do with that? Where can you go with that? Because there are so many times when a bad idea, I mean an awful idea, gets flipped around from someone else's perspective and they turn it into a rockstar innovation.

And the only way that you not having this fear, this emotional pain, the fear of judgment and shame and being degraded or losing your job is by having strong relationships. If you value each other for just the human being that you are and for your skill set. Because your skillset's different than my skillset, but when we bring it together, that's when the magic happens. And it's okay to have a terrible idea, but you're not a terrible person, right? It's just a terrible idea. And that's okay.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned your 80 patents and that. Innovation is a collaborative sport, and nobody can, you know, build everything by themselves. So how do you foster that team environment that is safe for failure and safe for experimentation?

Kevin Strauss: Leading by example. Sucking myself. You know, I mean, I remember one time I was driving to work, and I had like a 75 minute commute to the office, you know. So, I had a lot of time in the car. So, I'm thinking and thinking and I'm, there's this one time I was coming to work and I had this amazing idea and I was working it all through. I was like figuring out the details and, oh, and it can be manufactured this way and it, and it'll be no problem with regulatory affairs. You know, the FDA like, oh, this is amazing. This is amazing.

So, I got to work and I was so excited to tell one of my team members who, you know, I'm his boss, right? But I was so excited to tell him I didn't even take my coat off. I'm drawn on the white board and I'm diagramming this whole thing out. Beautiful drawing. And my teammate Larry, and he's looking at it and he's thinking, and he, all right, cool, cool. Well, what about this over here? What's going on with that? Because I'm not sure. I don't think that works with this. And I'm like, man, you're right. It totally doesn't work. This is terrible.

So, I just erased the whole thing off the board and we just went about our work day. He felt comfortable to tell me his boss, right? That my idea sucks. But he said it nicely, you know? And I didn't take it personally. Because ultimately, we're working on the same mission.

We're trying to solve these, you know, whatever the problems happen to be or the goals that we're trying to achieve in the company. Trying to help the surgeons. Trying to help the surgeons treat the patient right, and the pathology. It's okay that as a boss, I come up with terrible ideas too, and it's okay for you to tell me that, and I'm not going to yell at you for it or fire you for it.

Brian Ardinger: You spent a lot of your life as a biomedical engineer, and now you're a founder of a software company, a social app, you know dedicated to strengthening relationships and that. Talk a little bit about your journey to Uchi. How did it come about and, and where are you at in that journey?

Kevin Strauss: Man, Uchi you know, it is a labor of love. I mean, I, I really do love it, but I love how it's so simple. In fact, it's almost too simple. And I think a lot of people think it won't work because it's so simple. Those are some of the best inventions that I've had are the ones that are so simple and address the exact need that the surgeon has.

So back to those days when we were doing the grant research and I had this epiphany about why so many arguments and conflict occur. And I started digging into the research and that's where I learned about high-risk behaviors by teenagers. You know, like drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, depression, suicide, you know, the CDC actually, you know, has a list of these high-risk behaviors.

And I was digging in and digging in. And so, what happened was we ended up putting a proposal together. And again, I had to dig into the research to see what's really going on here to submit a proposal to NIH and then it didn't get funded, right? So, there's a failure. It didn't get funded. And I was like, you know, instead of going through the whole process of reapplying, which is going to, you know, the next deadline's like six months later. And then waiting six months to hear if we get the grant. And then doing a phase one feasibility, which is like a, you know, nine month or one year feasibility.

And then going on to building a bigger model, you know, a bigger system to do a two-year study. I'm like, this is going to take so long. I can just build a website to do this. Now originally the whole idea was meant for a Palm Pilot. You remember those? Yeah. Because smartphones didn't exist back in 2001, 2003. So, with the permission of the company, I built a website.

I hired a consultant, paid my own money. We built a website. It was called Family E Journal, but it was just a matter of, you know, answering questions. And we post questions, you answer them, and you trade the answers with like your family members. And that's really where it got started, out of a failure from NIH. Do it myself. Hire a programmer and get it out into the world.

And it went live January of 2003, which is before Facebook and before My Space actually. And of course, it didn't take off because most people had never heard of Family E Journal. But that's how it got started. And then just, you know, inch by inch, little by little. Growing it and you know, I always had a day job, so it wasn't until like 2012 when I really put more effort into it, and then it wasn't until. 2018 that I actually started to transition from a web-based platform to a dedicated app, which is what, and I rebranded as Uchi and it just so happens Uchi in Japanese means in group or inner circle is exactly the point of the whole platform ever since 2001. It's all about connecting with the people who matter most to you.

And those are the relationships that have the greatest influence on us. So, if we can help people feel heard and understood and not feel shamed or judged, then we can strengthen relationships, which strengthens emotional health, which drives behaviors

Brian Ardinger: Are you finding teams and that are using the app. Tell me a little bit about the users and the experience they have.

Kevin Strauss: I'll be honest, you know, it's still a challenge. Because It's not a quick fix and it's not flashy. It's not like Instagram. It's not like TikTok, you know. It's not this candy that those platforms are. We've worked with schools, we've worked with universities, we've worked with public high schools, and they notice behavioral changes in less than two weeks’ time.

Tell me a platform that is so scalable, right? Because it's an app, so you know, thousands of people can instantly download it and use it. And within less than two weeks’ time, begin to see positive constructive behavior changes. So that's what can happen when you address the emotional health. When you address the root pain, the root problem, then behaviors change fast.

Brian Ardinger: It's very interesting. We just talked a little bit about the emotional side of innovation and that, but I also know that you're an award-winning ballroom dancer, an Ironman triathlete and that. So, I'm curious to understand your thoughts on how the physical side of the world and physical health plays into innovation as well.

Kevin Strauss: I've been a triathlete for 21 years now. You know, from Sprint Triathlon all the way up to Ironman triathlon, and I also coach Triathletes. And in that whole process, it's all about learning and problem solving. Like why am I bonking right or hitting the wall? Why is that happening? How do I prevent injury? Because that's one of the most important things.

What kind of nutrition works for me? How does my body react to heat or humidity or dehydration? And I'm proud to say that I'm a 21-year injury free ironman triathlete. I've never missed a season or even a race that I signed up for because of injury. That doesn't happen by chance.

I mean, my dad’s been using a walker for 20 years. It's not because I have some incredible genetics. It's because I figured out the root problem to like joint pain and to most injuries, like plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis, knee pain, hip pain. I figured out the root cause or what I truly believe is the root cause. I've put it into action, and I'm 21 years injury free.

So, when you solve the root problem, you don't have these ailments that plague so many athletes. You know, I've helped so many of my athletes and so many friends. Just this weekend I was helping a couple friends learn how to foam roll properly because of injuries that they've had. If I can just help make your life a little easier so you can be a little happier, that's what I want to do. And whether it's with physical health or emotional health, whatever it is, if I figured something out that works for me and it seems to apply to most all humans, I just want to share it.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights and that. And if people want to find out more about the book or Uchi what's the best way to do that?

Kevin Strauss: Yeah, well Innovate The 1% is on Amazon, you know, in the eBook or paperback. To find me, LinkedIn is a great place. You can find me, Kevin Strauss or Kevinrstrauss.com is my personal website, and uchiconnection.com is the Uchi App website.

Brian Ardinger: Kevin, thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation as the world of innovation continues to move forward.

Kevin Strauss: Thank you so much, Brian.

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INNOVATE THE 1%: 7 Areas To Nurture For Success

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Hussain Almossawi, author of the Innovator's Handbook. Hussain and I talk about the common misconceptions about innovation and how some of the best brands in the world approach design and the creative process let's get started.

Don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated Sept 19-20, 2022 - Lincoln, NEInside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Hussain Almossawi, Author of the Innovator's Handbook

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Hussain Almossawi. He is the author of a new book called The Innovator's Handbook: A Short Guide to Unleashing your Creative mindset. Welcome Hussain.

Hussain Almossawi: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: You are an award-winning designer, creative director, consultant. You work with companies like Nike and Apple and Google and, and many other well-known brands. I think I'd love to start the conversation with are these companies that you've worked with, that we know as creative and innovative as we think they are. Or do they struggle with innovation, like the rest of us?

Hussain Almossawi: Innovation is a process. And it's all about the mindset. What I really saw in these companies was we do see this big and huge brands with maybe like thousands of employees that work for them. The reality is that it's all made up of small teams. And these small teams are made up of five or six people.

And that's where like innovation happens at the core of those companies. What I really saw in these companies was failure after failure, after failure. Trying to reach to a vision that was set. And then throughout that process and throughout that journey being flexible and going from point A to B to C. And having that flexibility to move forward and push things forward. And that's really where innovation happens.

Brian Ardinger: It's pretty interesting. And we'll maybe dig into some of the examples and that, from what you've seen, that works and that. But you've got a new book out. Same time as my book, it's called the Innovator's Handbook. I love the design of it. It's a square book. Which is kind of unique to the marketplace and that. So, you spent a lot of time and care in the design and creativity of the book. So, I really appreciate that. But I wanted to dig into the content. Talk us through why somebody should pick up a book on innovation when there's so many out there. What makes this one different?

Hussain Almossawi: Sure. So, so for me as a designer and like growing up as an aspiring designer, I always looked at innovation as just like everybody else as something that really wows you. And is something that's amazing.

And you want to take parts in it and you want to innovate and become an innovator. But at the same time, you kind of feel lost and don't know how to do it. So, it just feels very overwhelming, especially when you're first starting out. Throughout my career, working with these different companies, working with amazing teams and brilliant minds.

What I wanted to do was to kind of break it down into simple insights that help shift your mindset when you're innovating. And innovation isn't supposed to be complex or difficult or hard. There are small things that you can do or understand that will allow you to, to think outside the box. For example, I'm speaking about myself, from my perspective. When I was designing and trying to innovate growing up, I always wanted to reinvent the wheel.

I always wanted to do things very different, but that's not the case with innovation. With innovation, you can take things that already exist, see how you can evolve them. Take two different products that exist in the market. See how you can bring them together. There's always room for improvement. So this idea and concept of doing something that is groundbreaking and never done before, that's not really true with innovation. But it seems that way, especially for young designers.

I mean, my book is geared towards young designers and aspiring designers, fresh out of college. And I want to share those perspectives and things that I saw that I wish I knew like 15 years ago. So that's like one thing. Do you evolve a product? Do you act or do you react. Do I come up with a groundbreaking product or do I create something that I'm building on something that's out there? That's like one point.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's one of the, the most important points that when I talk to folks, when it comes to innovation is getting a clear definition of what innovation means. I think a lot of us immediately jump to, I've got to come up with the, the new flying car kind of concept. When you're saying that innovation starts a lot of times at just incremental improvements and optimizing and looking at things slightly differently.

And I, I think that's such a great way to approach innovation because it does open it up to anybody who has opportunity to make those types of changes. You don't have to be, you know, the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musk of the world to actually innovate.

Hussain Almossawi: Absolutely. I mean, even like with successful brands, like Apple and automotive companies and all those, if you look at the products that they've done the past 10, 20 years, it's always incremental changes and it's always improving one thing after the other.

And I saw that a lot, like being in the footwear industry, with the different brands. It was year after year, we had the same story. Like for example, it was a shoe about lightweight. In 2020, what does lightweight look like? 2021, it looks a bit different because the technology is different. We failed a bit. We've learned a bit from the past, from the things we did in 2020

So now 2021, we have a better shoe. 2022 is a better shoe and so on. So, there's always room for improvement and technology's always growing. There are new materials. There's new process. Collaboration. The idea of collaboration is huge in innovation. You meet new people, you get different perspectives, you learn new stuff. And you bring all those back into the process and into the design of the product.

One interesting thing that we did like in the footwear industry, and it's done in different industries. For example, in footwear, let's say we were talking about a good shoe. What we would do is like, look at the, how are seat belts made? Look at the automotive industry. Look at the aerospace industry. Then look at things that really have nothing to do with footwear, but bring those ideas back into footwear and build something out of it. And that really leads to us asking better questions, understanding the process better, and coming up with innovative and groundbreaking ideas.

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting topic because I think a lot of times, we do get stuck in our own bubble, whether it's our own industry or own competitors. And we're constantly looking at those folks to find inspiration when you're saying a lot of times that core inspiration can come from outside. From different places that you wouldn't necessarily put two and two together. Can you talk a little bit about the biggest misconceptions that you've seen when it comes to innovation? What are some of the mistakes or barriers that hold people back from innovating?

Hussain Almossawi: I think the first one that we already discussed that feels overwhelming. The thing is that we see the end result. We don't really see the process of what happens behind closed doors and companies. And we're all wowed by the amazing final product. But in reality, it really started with a small idea and many times, if not all the times there is an idea, but like you want to get from point A to B. But you really land on point C and that's where innovation happens.

Right? So that flexibility it's huge. And that flexibility also has to do with learning to fail. And being open to failing. And the idea of failing actually is a really good idea because actually now, you know what not to do versus like getting stuck into the same trap again. And again. And it's just lessons like one after the other, where you can grow and improve and improve. So that idea, I think, of, of being overwhelmed and thinking that you can't innovate. I don't think it's really true.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about, you mentioned failure. And I think that's where a lot of people get hung up when it comes to innovating. They don't want to fail. But yet failure's an inherent process or part of the process of innovating. You know, are there things that you've seen in your work that can help people mitigate that self-talk of failures bad and be able to make mistakes. You know, positive mistakes to move forward?

Hussain Almossawi: Well, we see it all around us, not just in innovation. I mean, if you look at Thomas Edison's story, if you look at Einstein, if you look at all the great innovators. They failed hundreds and thousands of times, and it was always the willingness to try and get back up that allowed them to reach the end goal.

And we see that in sports as well. Like I'm really into sports and I work with different sports companies. If you look at Michael Jordan, if you look at LeBron James, you look at all these superstars, they failed over and over and over. They missed shot after shot, after shot. And that's really what built these superstars and these names that we know today.

I mean, it's all about understanding that failure. It's just bringing you one step closer to the end result and having that mindset. At least what I saw from the inside and also working with different students. That's really what always pushes to bring you closer to success. Let's say.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, you've been successful and had a lot of work working with creative teams and that. I'd love your insight and your perspective on how do you go about finding and hiring innovative talent.

Hussain Almossawi: So, talent is one thing. Like as a designer, how good of a designer are they? What are their skills like? What's their craft? Like what programs do they use? So that's, I mean, that's one part of it. The second part of it is really how diverse of a team I can build and put together. The more different mine is, the more diverse my team is. The more I have different perspectives that surround me. That really leads and pushes to, to a stronger team that outputs innovative ideas.

So, and when I'm talking about diversity, I'm talking about culture. I'm talking about religion. I'm talking about language. I'm talking about geographical location and there's lots of different things. And the bigger, my combination can be, the more interesting my results could be because they push me and allow me to think in a different way that I would never have thought by myself.

So, so that's one, that's a second part of it. And then positivity would definitely be a third one. One thing that I saw, I mean, especially when I started out interning at Nike, it was just this positive energy.

Again, it goes back to the team that you work with. But if I'm working with someone, collaborating with someone that shoots down every idea in a negative way, I don't think you're going to see success at the end of the tunnel. But having a positive vibe, even if somebody shoots down an idea, I mean, there's something called the power of and. I could hate your idea, but I could build your idea.

Yeah, and we could do this, and we could do that. Rather than let's not do this. Let's do that. So, I actually, I've seen both. I've seen the negative side of things in the industry and the positive sides and definitely the teams that were positive. That's where I saw the most innovation happen.

Brian Ardinger: Having the ability to ask the what if questions rather than, you know, the negative side of, well, that's never going to work or, or whatever, being able to at least push through that seems to be one of the traits that I've seen as well.

I guess the last kind of core topic I want to talk about is this idea of how do you rep a team that maybe wants to have a more of a creative spark and that? Are there particular things that you can do to get folks more engaged in innovation. Start thinking about it and spark their creative juices.

Hussain Almossawi: There were cool workshops that we did. And I also give, like, when I give talks and different creativity conferences, I do also like different kind of workshops for people in different industries. One really cool thing that we do is let's say we're designing a footwear. So, I'd go to Home Depot. Any DIY store. I'd buy random stuff, stuff that has nothing to do with footwear.

I'd go to the dollar store, buy random stuff and put them all on the table. And then I'd give the team a brief, a task. All right let's do a shoe that is super comfortable. Let's do a shoe that flies. Let's do a shoe that is this or that. And that really pushes your imagination to take these things that have nothing to do with a shoe or with each other, and then start to think outside the box.

Okay. What if, if I use these ping pong balls and use them as the cushion of the shoe because of the shape, because of the lightweight. It could do this or that. So, first of all, opening room for imagination. And then second of all there's no right or wrong. I think that's really important in innovation. At least in the process, there's no right or wrong. There are no stupid questions. Everything is possible.

And then as we like an idea, as we get excited about an idea, we can start to look at reality how things can be done. How things can be manufactured processed. And then bring it closer to reality and start to tweak it and adjust it and refine it. So, so that's definitely I'd say the best exercise I've seen working with different people and teams.

Brian Ardinger: That's a great little exercise. I'll put in my bag of tools as well. So, appreciate that. Last question I have is where do you go for inspiration? What are the, the resources or the things that you look at that keep you on top of this game?

Hussain Almossawi: One of the things that's actually mentioned in the book, it's being a curious sponge. So just being open to everything and accepting everything. And you know, when you see things around, you look at the colors, look at the texture. When you hear conversations, get interested in things that don't really interest you.

So just being a sponge and that's something that Tinker Hatfieldat Nike told me. Just be a curious sponge. And that really allows you to soak things in. Then another thing is just being inspired by greatness. You know, by excellent around you. Whether it's through other artists, whether it's through sports, through books.

I love reading. And reading is the number one source of being inspired. You know, it’s just different kinds of information from different kinds of people. So that's another thing. And it all gets back to being a curious sponge. Whether I'm reading. Whether I'm looking at art. Whether I'm talking to people. Just being curious and interested at all times.

And as kids, we were always curious, asking questions. Asking lots of amazing questions. And we saw that with Leonard de DaVinci. He always asked lots of questions in his notebooks. Why is the sky blue? What does a Woodpecker’s tongue look like? But as we grow up, we kind of are taught to not ask any stupid questions and to just play it safe. And that really leads to, I'd say, taking a step back from innovation, which is unfortunate.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: It's an amazing topic. I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your insights and that. And if people are curious about where to find out more about your book and more about yourself, what's the best way to do that.

Hussain Almossawi: So, the Innovator's Handbook comes out September 6th. The best way is through Instagram, through my website, LinkedIn. Yeah. Just type my name in you'll find me.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Husain, thanks again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation and appreciate your time.

Hussain Almossawi: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLS

You can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.

For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.

Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFS. Doug and I talk about some of the trends in office design, the importance of developing workspaces that foster creativity, and some resources that you can use to plan both your work and your home environment. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFS

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. And I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. We have another amazing guest was always. Today we have Doug Shapiro. He is the VP of Research and Insights at OFS, which is a sustainable office furniture manufacturer. And also, the host of a podcast called Imagine a Place. So welcome to the show, Doug.

Doug Shapiro: Hey, thanks. Super excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because you know oftentimes on our show, we talk a lot about innovation and talk about product design. And I'm fascinated by your background in this idea of place design. And designing environments that can be innovative or creative and spur that. So, I wanted to have you on the show on that. I think I wanted to start with the first question, how has the idea of place and especially the workplace changed over the years that you've worked in this space?

Doug Shapiro: Well, the idea of place has evolved as we've kind of taken in also new data around not just an understanding of what place does first. But even new data around how place affects us from a health standpoint. From a mental standpoint, we understand the impact of biophilia on our brains and things like that, that we really haven't understood as deeply in the past.

So, there's some scientific evolution and then there's also cultural evolution of really understanding the purpose of place and what it means for our workforce. I mean, we've all kind of gone through that here recently, where it just used to be this thing you had to go to every day to get your work done.

And of course, that's evolved into being much more of a, of a center for collaboration and creativity. That's the part that I'm super passionate about is how does place support creativity. So, I'd love to get into that today with you.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that. So, you know, in the past, you hear a lot about open office complex and, and this idea of collaboration and that. And you seem to have folks that really enjoy that particular way of working. And now you are seeing people, you know, working at their homes and that. What are some of the things that really make a place work for somebody?

Doug Shapiro: The most important word I would say is choice. Because, you know, if you track your activities throughout a day, it's rare that you're gonna spend an entire day engaged in one part of your brain doing that same activity over and over again, right.

If that's the case, you don't really need a lot of choices, but the reality is there's moments where you need peace and quiet. There are moments where you need energy. There are moments where you need to be with others. And then we also have our own neurodiversity about us. I mean, some people are very hyposensitive. And they need high energy environments. And other people are hypersensitive, and they need to be in places that are more relaxed to do their best work.

So, the key is choice. I think that's the way you make environments work for people today. I'm really drawn to this evolution away from knowledge work into creative work. And I think that's a major change we're seeing in workplace today. I think it's really heavily driven by AI and the impact of AI on our jobs. So that's something I'd love to kind of get in with you and explore and see how we're moving from knowledge work to creative work.

Brian Ardinger: So, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing with the clients that you're working with. And the things that you design to make it effective in that particular environment.

Doug Shapiro: I think it's really, almost like a, a major cultural change to embrace maybe how far we have to go to be great at creative work. I actually, I've thought about this. Knowledge work. That phrase has been around since the fifties. Peter Drucker coined it. And what we're going through today, in fact, I heard this really cool statistic from Workplace Economic Forum, that 40% of people, office workers, feel that their jobs will become irrelevant in the next five years.

That's a huge number. And so, the way I thought about looking at it is it's really not that 40% of jobs will be irrelevant, but 40% of the way you do your job right now will become irrelevant in five years. Meaning, so in, in 10 years, we're probably not going to do the jobs that we do now, the same way we do them. Right. It'll evolve. And I think AI is at the, is the undercurrent kind of shifting that.

Brian Ardinger: Obviously the pandemic and, and COVID and the move to work at home has currently changed that. And I think if you would've had that question posed, you know, three years ago, how much your work would've changed. You know, most people are now very comfortable on zoom and, and all this kind of stuff. And all of that is accelerated and changed the way we work. I hear what you're saying when it comes to that, and I can see it even evolving faster over the years to come.

Doug Shapiro: I agree. I think the pace will increase. So, you know, how does an environment respond to that sort of pace? Agility is, is that the key of that, you know. Investing less in physical structures that are anchored and permanent. But more in tools and structures that have the ability to keep pace with change. So, we're seeing that. We're seeing this sort of phrase soft architecture kind of emerge where people are investing in forms of separation and space creation that are more mobile and easier to manipulate. Really even from a day-to-day standpoint.

So that's one way space is, is evolving. I feel like our biggest challenge is how do we get as good at creative work as we've become at knowledge work? That's the big, big shift I'm thinking about. Because I feel like our whole office system, our culture, it was based on efficiency, recording, passing, storing information. Using logic to make decisions like that was what the office culture was built on. And that is key to being great at knowledge work being great at creative work is a whole different animal and requires, I mean, it's really a sea change we're looking at.

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you phrase it that way because it very much maps to why corporates are typically not very good at innovation. You know, they've developed systems and that in place for exploitation. You know, they figured out a business model that works. They optimize for it. They hire for it. They do all that. And innovation is very much the opposite.

Very much like you said, the creative side of things where you're in this exploration mode. Where you don't all have all the answers and you have to try things and experiment and fail and do things differently than you have done in the past. Are you seeing particular industries or clients or, or folks that you work with that are approaching this way and see the sea change, or what are you seeing from the, the marketplace?

Doug Shapiro: What I've seen generally is an understanding that we have to be more casual in our interactions. And that's showing up in the way we're designing place too. We're bringing more humor even into the way we physically represent our company in an office. Right. And I think that casualization, that humor, has been a key evolution I've seen in, in, in some of my clients.

Even the formalities of choosing workplace and the process we go through for that I think has involved HR. Where in the past HR was, you know, it was maybe more of a function of the CFO and, and the real estate. And those two parts of a company. But now they're bringing in HR. Right. And I think I've seen that evolution in clients. And I think that's really encouraging because they are understanding that this is really for people.

So that's a great first step. I do think that this idea, just, we'll latch onto humor just for a second here. Yeah. I think humor is one of those elements of creativity. I mean, humor surprises and delights. Right. You know, when you laugh, it's a show of vulnerability. So, it's encouraging those around you to share ideas and open up.

And I'm thinking, okay, you know, my apple watch tracks my steps. I really wish it would track laughter. Because I actually think laughter I mean, what a key indicator that would be in the workplace. If you could say how often your employees are laughing. Right. And that's a good show of health. It's a good show of culture. And I think it's a good show of a creative climate.

I'm kind of looking like, all right, well, if you're tracking laughter as a key metric. Which I think is, is not just for fun sake, like that's a, I think a key indicator. How would that change the decision-making process around the office? How would it change the environment, the physical environment you. If laughter was an important metric, which I believe it is.

I think it also indicates employee retention. I mean, you're 10 times more likely to stay in a job if you have friends. You're 10 times more likely to have friends if you're laughing together. I mean, it's, it's a totally different thing. I'm interested in that just as one little idea of how we have to revolutionize our thinking of what work is. And how do we make it more human.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing examples in what you're developing or what you've seen out there in the marketplace for how to either track that, or encourage that, or infuse that level of play or creativity into a workspace.

Doug Shapiro: I will say that the idea of a formal boardroom. You know, of some of the more formal spaces, even a formal reception area, right. Those are changing. In fact, you know, an idea of how we. Humanize work and workplace interactions. One representation of it is even the Green Wall. You know that the entry lobby was to create a big, open, beautiful space for people to walk in. And there was always that big green wall right behind the reception desk, and then all the work was happening behind it.

And none, none of that good stuff was there. And so now, I mean, we've moved the green wall into how do we bring green into just the everyday interactions of people in the office so that's just one example of, I think how we've created more casual nature inspired environments. Which should there in turn support more creative energy and human interaction.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into the fact, obviously corporations are now reevaluating a lot of this. How much office space they should have. This flow between work at office work at home. What are you seeing when it comes to that trend? And you know, people going back to the office what's changed. What's not going to change. And what do you see the, the future from that perspective?

Doug Shapiro: Well, I think it's very personalized and nuanced based on each company. The nature of their work. You know, a lot of people were already working hybrid. It's hard to draw a conclusion that's general, right. And I think most people are feeling that right now.

There was a great quote I heard on a recent workplace round table where a company was describing their policy. Which was we care, you decide. You're empowered as an employee to make the decision to do the best work. You know, to be in the place that you need to do to do the best work. But we care that that place is supporting your physical health, your mental health, and helping you be the most productive.

You know, and I think that's the key is there's a lot of boxes to check, right? And to think that one place all the time is going to check all those boxes is probably unrealistic. You know, if you think you're super productive in your basement every day, you know, with no windows, you know, maybe you're going to get some work done, but eventually that's going to be draining. Right. I mean, you're going to have to go somewhere else and get some sunlight and some human interaction to be healthy. You know, just for your own sustainability as a person.

So, I do think that there's a lot of variety and it's incredibly nuanced per person. I do think the culture around change is increasing dramatically though. I think companies are positioning themselves to adapt. So, we're seeing investments in technologies that allow that to happen. Investments in furniture and space that allow that to happen. Shorter leases. Things like that.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing that, that carry over to helping employees develop and design their at home workspaces as well?

Doug Shapiro: Yeah. There's been a variety of ideas around that too. You know, allowances, things like that. Again, we haven't really seen a, a whole one thing repeat itself over and over again there. The key is if you are working from home, you have to, it's not selfish of you to take ample time. And create a place that's great for you.

You need to have a plant, you know, even if it's a little plant, you need to have something green in your homework space. You need to have some sunlight. If you don't have it, you got to find ways to create it. Pay attention to your lighting. You know, I think that's really key. And you got to have ergonomically correct workplaces.

These aren't things that are just like, oh, well, I'll get around to it. Take an entire day, if you have to and do it. Your investment in yourself will pay it forward to your work.

Brian Ardinger: So, you host a podcast called Imagine A Place where you talk to designers and developers and, and all sorts of folks in that space. What are you talking to them about? What are some of the cool trends or topics that are popping up in the podcast that you'd like to share with us?

Doug Shapiro: Sure. Well, I have a personal interest around creativity. And so, I always ask for creative advice. I ask about being creative. And so, I've collected little tidbits of insights from my guests around that because they are in the design field. And creativity is a huge part of their work.

And so, it's been kind of fun. And I think one of the things that consistently comes up is judgment. And how judgment is the ultimate killer of creativity. And so even when we design spaces. Is this a space that will create a sense of judgment? You know, if you, if you picture your old boardroom, it's just dripping with judgment.

I was most creative when I would tell stories to my kids at night. I'd sit at the end of their bed and there was no, there was no advantage to playing it safe. You know, you were supposed to be outlandish, right? With the stories you would tell. Well, it's hard to have that same attitude in a workplace, but how do we, how do we do that?

How do we get there? And so that's been a fun conversation to explore with guests. And then even like this idea of steppingstones has been a good one where I had a guest share with me that some of the, the best ideas happen when people share their bad ideas. Because it's a steppingstone to the next good idea.

And so, the workplace culture that I think we try to create in the design field is one where people are psychologically safe. Where they really feel like they can share anything. And it'll maybe lead to the next big idea.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned your kids. And I was going to ask a question about how do you stay creative? I understand you wrote a children's book called The Frocks. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about that and how, how that played out in your own development of your own creativity?

Doug Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I would tell these stories to my kids at night, and it was almost like a practice for me. Because you go through the day as an adult and you have so many decisions to make. You're almost forced to stay kind of left-brained through most of that day. Right. Right. And then at the end of the day, you get to sit down, and you're exhausted, and the kids ask for a story and it's like, oh gosh, you know, you're too tired. But I started to embrace it like, oh, this is like doing pushups.

You know, like I'm going to do this to, to work on my creativity. And so, I would find something in the room that would inspire an idea, but then I started preparing myself. I knew I was going to have to tell this story at night. So, I would look for things during the day and thought, you know, like, well, what if that was a little more interesting or a little more magical?

You know, like if I found a Firefly, how could I tell a story about a Firefly, right. And that would lead to something crazy. So that's just one example which eventually led to this book that I wrote about a kid who has got a hole in a sock, end up that there's a little animal in his sock drawer that's been eating holes in his socks, right.

Right. It's cute and fun. I think one of the big things I took away as I started to understand why was I more creative at night? It wasn't just the setting. The setting was important. This idea that there's no judgment there, right? So, you can be yourself and you can say silly things, but also the time of day.

So, this leads to something. If you think about like, there's that matrix of urgency and importance. And so often we're always in the urgent and important space. And then after the urgent and important space, we usually go down to things that are urgent and not important. And we don't spend enough time in the important non-urgent world.

And at the end of the day, I was kind of done with my emails. You know, I kind of checked all the urgent boxes and it allowed me to be more creative. And I was thinking, you know, we don't have to wait till the end of the day when our work is done to think creatively. We just need to figure out how to shift into that non-urgent important world, on demand. And so that's what I'm trying to train my brain to do differently now is how do I get to that mindset, but do it during the day?

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Hopefully we can all find those little moments in time, whether it's running or in the shower or whatever, to prime or help us stay creative and that when it's such a changing, accelerating world that we're living in.

Doug Shapiro: What is it for you? Where's your place?

Brian Ardinger: I go for a walk every day with my wife, and before that was running. You know, I find different moments. It's changed over the years, obviously with COVID and that when we were kind of locked in the house that was different than, you know, the, the commute to work, where I listen to podcasts.

But like you said, it's almost like you have to schedule some time to let the, the imagination go or be open to that creativity. So literally scheduling your senses. Saying, okay, this week I'm going to be focused on this. And want to, you know, explore creativity around that. Those are some things that I do.

Doug Shapiro: I heard this funny quote speaking of like scheduling time, which is design and innovation is easy. You just stare at a computer screen until little drops of blood form on your forehead. Right? Exactly. And so, it is one of those things where it's like, it can't be forced. It's like a, I related it to a Chinese finger trap. You know, if you try to pull creativity out of you, right. You're just going to be stuck.

So, you kind of have to find those moments where you can relax yourself into it. If you're good enough to schedule time to do it. And you're disciplined enough to say, you know, I'm going to get into that head space. I think it's very doable.

Brian Ardinger: So, the last question I want to ask is for all the audience out there that maybe wants to dig into this topic a little bit more, learn a bit more about how they can develop their own office space or their home space and that. What resources, should they be following or, or places where they can go to find out more?

Doug Shapiro: Well, it depends on the scale that you're looking for. You know, if you're really looking to reinvent your office, the interior design community at large is deep into this space. They're following, you know, not only the things that you might kind of classically relate to interior design, but they're also understanding the psychology of the workforce today.

Some of the greatest challenges ahead, they're understanding the importance of creating agile environments and meeting business objectives. And so, I would say starting with the interior design community as, as kind of a general consultant through that process of reinventing your office is a great place to start.

When it comes to the home office what I would say is that you want to build in some mobility, whether you like to stand or not having a height adjustable desk, right, is important because not all desks are the right height for you either. So it's not always just about sitting and standing. It's about finding the perfect level for you. So I would say, you know, you want to build in mobility, you want to bring in plant life, you want to bring in sunlight.

And in terms of resources for you, you know, I would encourage you to stay away from the cheap stuff on Amazon or whatever it might be. Because also you want to make a decision where it's not doing harm to the environment. I think that's what's key too. This stuff will eventually, if you buy junk, it's going to end up in the landfill in five years. And it's the incredible how much furniture ends up in the landfill. And that's a big area of work for our industry is to say, how do we create things that are meaningful for decades and don't end up in the landfill.

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Brian Ardinger: That's great stuff. And Doug, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to kind of share your thoughts on this particular topic. It's fascinating and, and I think so important for folks to have in their back pocket, some of these core concepts and that. So, thank you for coming on and sharing. If people want to find out more about yourself or about OFS, what are some ways to do that?

Doug Shapiro: Well, you can check out our podcast, Imagine A Place. It's on anywhere you'd find a podcast. And then we're on ofs.com, is where you can see and understand furniture. And we have a great new platform called U plus on there. So, if you look up OFS U plus, you'll find great resources on how you might think about your workplace differently.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. I'll check that out. Thanks, Doug, for coming on the show. And look forward to a continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Doug Shapiro: Real honor, Brian. Thank you so much.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maddy Grant, Cofounder of Propel. Maddie and I talk about the changing dynamics of workplace culture and what companies need to be doing to navigate the new future of work. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Maddy Grant. Co-founder of Propel

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Maddie Grant. She is the Co-founder of Propel, which focuses on helping organizations prosper through cultural change. Welcome to the show Maddie.

Maddie Grant: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. There's a lot going on when it comes to workplace culture and the future of work. For those in our audience who may not have run into your work yet, you're also in addition to working at Propel, you're an author of several books, including Humanize, When Millennials Take Over, and I think your most recent book is The Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement.

You know, this whole concept of work culture, work culture is being disrupted. You know, we hear about the great resignation or the great reassessment or the great return to work. Whatever the next great thing seems to be out there. You know, what are the biggest challenges and changes that you're seeing when it comes to the world of work?

Maddie Grant: What's interesting is I've been kind of researching culture change in the workplace for quite a long time. For a couple of decades. So long before the pandemic, the workplace was changing in terms of needing to be more digital. You know, advent of social media changed a lot of stuff about managing and leading in the workplace, not just, you know, marketing and communicating with your customers.

So, it all started with basically the digital age. And my particular interest is actually on organizations that need to transition from the old way to the new way. Right. So, I'm not so much about startups who could basically create their own culture from the get-go. What I'm interested in is how do you take like a hundred-year-old museum and change, you know, and get them like up to the digital age.

And then the pandemic happened. Right? So, a lot of the things that I was exploring in my books and my research basically happened really quickly overnight. And the big disruptor beyond of course the pandemic itself was to me, the idea that all of a sudden there was a really good reason to change how we work. Right. Right.

Because if you didn't, people might lose their lives, literally. So in that respect, you're going to go remote. Like, even if you said that you couldn't or only, you know, very special VIP people could take like one half afternoon off of work on a Friday. Well, all of a sudden everybody's working from home and oh, guess what? It's actually working pretty well.

It's actually, you know, people are doing their jobs and they're, they're managing, you know, what they need to manage. And they've got kids, dogs, all the rest of it at home. So, there's all these new external factors coming into it. But the work is still getting done.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about we're in a weird space now, because for lack of a better term, a lot of the pandemic's talk has, has gone by the wayside and people are returning to work. And you're seeing this push again to trying to go back to the old normal. What are you seeing when it comes to that push and pull and, and that desire to go back to the way things were and what's working, or what's not working when it comes to that?

Maddie Grant: What we're seeing is that the people who want things to go back to the way they were, are almost always senior level people. So those are the people who got to where they are in the old system. And those are the ones who are very, very keen to go back to how it was. But like my partner Jamie Nadder likes to say the toothpaste is out of the tube now. So, there's some things that just cannot go back.

So for example, saying that people can't do their work, can't achieve their goals or their project targets or whatever from home, you can't say that anymore because there's so much data that people were completely able to do that, you know, for the past two years. However, what I think is really interesting is there is actually value to coming back to the workplace. But that value, you know, everybody talks about, you know, the water cooler conversations and, and building relationships.

And, you know, seeing people in person is better than online. You know, all of these kinds of things. But they're not defining why those things are important. Like why do we care about water cooler conversations? And in fact, water cooler conversations are actually not an equitable way of building relationships or coming up with random ideas that turn into that next multimillion dollar revenue source, because not everybody has access to the water cooler, right?

Some people are not supposed to get up out of their desks for X number of hours. So that's just one example, but I think some of the most interesting work that we're doing right now is actually around the hybrid workplace. And so we wrote this eBook that was basically the four culture decisions that you need to consider when returning to the workplace.

And the four are Customizing the Employee Experience. Like how much are you willing to customize? Second one is What is the Value of the Workplace, the physical workplace. Third one is Defining Collaboration and the fourth one is Supervision and Accountability. Like, so you know, that people have been able to achieve their work from home. So how does that change, how you supervise and hold them accountable in the future?

And these four things are all very interrelated. But the idea is that really smart organizations will take this opportunity to rethink actually what's important about bringing people together. And they will redesign their workplace, for that purpose. And it could be multiple purposes.

But you might have a group of people inside your organization who really need the workplace for quiet time. So, it's actually not about collaborating. It's about having time away from the dog and the three-year-old. For other people, it's about collaborating, but in larger brainstorming teams. So, you know, collaborating with people outside of your department. So not your regular work with your team but getting together with others that you don't normally get together with.

Sometimes it might be actually very social. Like what if the workplace was now like the big cafeteria where people came in literally to eat and have coffee, and that's where you start to, you know, run into people randomly, that kind of thing.

For all of those things, the reason it works or doesn't work is that you've defined that that is the reason you want people to be interacting in person. You know, so just having that thoughtfulness about why you care about getting people back to the workplace. It's not just to sit in a cubicle and be on your laptop on Zoom. Right. But now possibly with a mask on depending where you live. That doesn't make sense to anybody.

And it doesn't make sense, and a lot of C-suite people will see this very quickly if they don't already, to drive like an hour into town for your meeting and then lose another hour, getting back home to get back on Zoom for your other meetings. It's so inefficient compared to what it used to be.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about, I've had a conversation with a lot of companies and some of the challenges revolve around existing managers, not having the tools, resources, or training to really know how to interact or deal with remote employees.

Again, a lot of people were just dumped into this and were never given an opportunity to learn new ways of connecting and communicating and collaborating in a remote kind of environment. Do you have any tips or tricks or things that you've seen that can help manage that transition better?

Maddie Grant: There's technologies available for all of the above. Two minutes on Google and you can find tools and platforms for online meetings and for all kinds of different whiteboards and you know, whatever your needs might be. So it's not the technology, that's the issue.

I think it literally just goes back to really defining why are you meeting. For what purpose is each meeting. And what are the different formats that they need to be. And how do you build relationships throughout the year through these different kind of connection points. And when is it better for it to be a one-on-one meeting versus a group? And when do you have your camera on or your camera off? Right?

These are all very nuanced things and they're all culture things. But once you sit down to really just audit all of the meetings that you do and really define which kinds of meetings are for what purpose that enables all kinds of people, both on the management side and, you know, the individual practitioner side, contributor side, to really, you know, be on the same page about what these meetings are for.

Brian Ardinger: Have you seen any examples of companies doing this well and, or different ways that if I'm thinking about this, should this be top ground driven, thinking about like how do we actually calculate the meetings and figure this out. Should be done from the bottom-up team by team? What are some of the best practices you've seen out there?

Maddie Grant: I don't believe in best practices. I am a culture person who believes that every organization has the right culture for them. And that may be very different than for your competitor who does exactly the same work in the same market. But it's just a different company. So, for me, it's about that blueprint that works for you as an organization. The ability to define what the guidelines are for you.

And this is going back to what I was saying about defining collaboration, for example. You know, if you really understand as a company, why you want people to get together and have kind of a guiding principle that literally writes out, you know, we value collaboration because X, Y, Z, then those kinds of statements, which is similar to core values, right, but they're just a bit more granular. But the point of them is that anybody in the company should be able to get behind that and to understand it, no matter where sit.

So, yes, it's top down. And yes, it's bottom up. Like it's got to go both ways. I will say it will not work if it's only bottom up. Like the power of the CEO, you know, no matter what the CEO might say, the core values are, or the culture is if their actions don't match with other words, they can destroy a culture really easily. But they can also really set the tone. And they have a lot of power to model the behavior that they're looking for.

And I think the really fascinating thing about this whole great reshuffling is that there are people out there who fit every kind of culture. So, for example, we were talking to a lobbying firm. They need people, their lobbyists to be in person, because they go and meet with politicians. And if there's three people on zoom and three people in the room with the politician, you know, guess who's going to get the most attention. They just cannot do their jobs equally well on Zoom versus not.

So, for a company like that, then yes, they have a really good reason for wanting everybody to be in the office. I don't at all believe that everybody should be remote or anything like that. But the idea is just to really kind of understand and specifically define what those guiding principles are. You know, we do our work better because X.

Brian Ardinger: Tactically, how do you start breaking that apart? Is this something that the C-suite should sit down and think through this. Should every team be thinking through and mapping this out on a board saying here's how we work best together. And here are the rules of engagement. And talk to me, tactically, how that can be done.

Maddie Grant: The simplest way to start is with a culture assessment. It'll just help you break down into categories the, the different topics for discussion. And any culture assessment will do. Obviously, we created one that I like the best, but whatever. The point is just starting the conversation. But just as an example, our assessment measures things like agility and innovation and inclusion, transparency, collaboration, solutions which is like employee focus versus customer focus. And a couple more.

So, there's eight markers and they're pretty legit from the standpoint of eight big topic areas that you can talk about. And when you start having those conversations and it is literally what you just said, like, how do we do innovation here, for example.

What we've seen in our data is some really, really fascinating results. So, for innovation, I have to tell you this one, because of this podcast topic. For innovation, there's what we call a culture pattern, which appears across many, many different companies. It is where the scores for the concepts of innovation, so things like creativity, passion, and purpose, like learning, you know, ability to bring in resources for learning.

All these kinds of things tend to score high. But the structural pieces of innovation tend to score low. So, these are things like risk taking, experimentation, right? So, it's like, we like to talk about innovation, right. But we don't necessarily have the structures in place in our company where it's okay to innovate. And to take risks. And to measure.

We're not measuring the experiments that we're trying. So that's a pattern that comes out in this kind of data that you can immediately start to fix. If your goal is to be much more innovative as an organization, literally the data tells you every single department needs to have a way to measure how many experiments per month you're doing. And not just the results, but how many you tried. Like the failures are as important as the ones that worked, because if you're not failing enough, with trying things then you're not trying enough things.

Brian Ardinger: Yes. Great insight there. And I think that's very true. I think a lot of companies have a lot of innovation theater where they like to think they're innovative, but when it comes down to like you said, the actions don't necessarily match up with the reality of that.

All these changes are obviously affecting every company out there. And this war for talent is becoming now global. Used to be where you could find your talent in your backyard. And now everybody's competing for every job around the world. What can companies do to better position themselves for attracting and finding the best talent today?

Maddie Grant: Yeah. So, I think that your differentiator is your culture. And of course, I'm a culture consultant. So, culture hammer, everything is a culture nail, right. But I do think there's a great lack of good description of what your culture is. Like good authentic description. And for every company that is losing people because of whatever their culture is, there are other people leaving cultures that are the opposite because there's so many different companies with different cultures.

Being able to really accurately describe what it is, what it feels like to work there. You know, how people collaborate there. How much people are expected to integrate their external life into the workplace. You're a startup and you want people to live and breathe the startup life. Cool. If, if I'm, you know, 25 and my parents pay my rent. Like, yay, I'll go do that.

But I'm 50. Can't do that anymore. But the point is there are people out there that will actually gravitate to your culture no matter what it is. So being able to really understand it and describe it to me is the key. Absolute key. And all the rest of it falls to the wayside. The salaries, benefits, all that stuff is almost irrelevant to me.

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about how you customize the employee experience for employees to do their best work. Can you talk a little bit more about how do you customize an employee experience?

Maddie Grant: Yeah. So just an example, based on what we've been talking about, the whole, you know, remote working. So, we worked with a group that owns their own building, a beautiful building. So of course, they were very insistent on trying to get everybody back in. And what they did was they said, okay, everybody needs to come in twice a week. And then each department gets to pick which two days. Like that sounds fabulous.

Okay, cool. But in actual fact, within every department, there are people who want to come in five days to get the quiet or to, you know, because they miss everybody. There are people who want to come in, never like you couldn't pay me enough to come back in because I do my work really well from home.

And then there's a lot of people somewhere in the middle, like, I'll come in two days, if you want, but I really don't want to come in Mondays or Fridays. Right. But now everybody comes in Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays. So the traffic is absolutely horrible. So, you know what, actually I'd rather work from home.

So, you know, if you get down to like the people's real lives, it's about the ability to really kind of gather everybody together. And balance a collective need or an organizational need for, in person collaboration with individual needs. People who want to be in all the time are out all the time or somewhere in the middle. You know, some people moved away and so they can't actually come in. Right. That's definitely happened a lot.

The idea of customizing, it's all about the best way to do your best work. And so literally just asking the question of everybody, of how they best prefer to work. But it's also not just, we're trying to appeal to everybody's individual needs. There's also an organizational piece to it.

And if we've defined, you know, that collaboration is important to this organization because it helps us build relationships long term, which helps us do better work you know, in these other ways, you have to get all those inputs and then design the experience of your employees in a way that balances both. Like you'll never please, everybody. That's not what you're trying to do.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's very much mosaic that you have to put together to make it look good on all fronts. Both for the employee and for the company itself.

Maddie Grant: It might also really change your ultimate plan. So, this organization we worked with, they wanted everybody in two days a week, but it turns out that what they really, really wanted was those opportunities to build relationships and to run into people.

Brian Ardinger: Right. So, can you do that in other ways?

Maddie Grant: Right. Having random people in two days a week was actually not the way to do it. Instead, it was having everybody in for like a social day. Yeah. Like twice a month. And that they would bring in food trucks and they would bring in maybe a speaker or two and have some activities. But also just have some open time where people could just hang out.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: It's definitely a fascinating topic. If people want to find out more about yourself or the books or the company, what's the best way to do that?

Maddie Grant: Yeah. So, my company's called Propel. The URL is propelnow.co. And all my books are on Amazon. So, When Millennials Take Over is probably the easiest one to Google for.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Maddie, I really do appreciate your time coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights on the world of work. I'm sure we'll have you back on because the world is changing quite fast.

Maddie Grant: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Thank you very much.

That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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You can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.

For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.

Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center. Clive and I talk about the intersection of arts and innovation and how people in organizations can embrace new ideas, experiments, and new audiences to create new opportunities and experiences. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Clive Chang. Clive is the Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center, which is the world's largest and best-known cultural venue in the world. Housing things like the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, American ballet Theater, and the list goes on and on and on. So, Clive thank you for coming on the show.

Clive Chang: Thanks so much for having me great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm so excited to have you on this show because the arts and innovation are not a topic that's often covered. And you've got such an interesting background and, and role when it comes to this space.

From my understanding your background, you're a musician, you're a composer, you're a businessperson. You used to work at Disney, and now you lead Lincoln Center's innovation efforts. How did you get interested in this innovation space and helping companies and organizations innovate better?

Clive Chang: Thanks for asking. You know, I am a classically trained musician. I come from a long history of being an artist. And I also come from sort of a multitude of different forces and influences in my life. One of them being strict Asian parents, who forbade me from studying music in college for fear that it would never lead me to a fruitful career. And so, I was also rooted in very practical sort of traditions growing up.

And really serendipitously found this intersection of business and art through pursuing studies in both fields. I will say also that as I was in my formative years and college and shortly thereafter, I was also seeing a lot of arts institutions financially flailing, right? Orchestras going bankrupt, et cetera. So that really piqued my interest.

And I saw this opportunity that somebody who was trained from the ground up both on the creative side and on the business side could really fill for the world. And that was really helping creative and artistic organizations thrive. And I sort of found that niche quite early on and fueled my further training onward to really pursue that.

And innovation, I think really is something opportunistic that I ran into. Right. And you don't get very many nonprofit art CEOs that say outwardly that innovation is their top priority. Right. And so, coming across Henry Timms, his appointment and his not only external commitment to innovation, but also his track record of having done it in the sector prior to coming to Lincoln Center was just too good to be true. And so, I very happily came on and have been really enjoying working with him to really reimagine some things in the sector.

Brian Ardinger: It is pretty interesting when you think about artists and creatives, you automatically think of them as innovative type of spirits. Where, you know, they're constantly doing new and interesting kind of things, but oftentimes that doesn't seem to apply to the organizations themselves.

Most arts organizations have been around for, you know, years or even centuries with similar business models and similar ways of displaying the arts and that. Why is it so important for institutions to level up today and think more about innovation as a core competency?

Clive Chang: Yeah, you are so right. It's almost astounding that organizations that house so many brilliant creative outside of the box talents fail to really make full use of them in an institutional and organizational context.

I would consider organizations like Lincoln Center legacy institutions. And while Lincoln Center is only about 60 years old, a lot of the art that's presented on this campus is centuries old, right? Very much rooted in tradition. And I think that's probably one keyword that ends up being a bit of a fallback or a crutch, that many arts organizations use, especially ones that present classical art.

I always joke that the performing arts are one of the very, very few things in the world that we still as humans experience in the exact same way as we did like 200 years ago. Right. How many things in the world, can you say that about? When you think about it, we still file into a specific venue on a specific date. At a specific time. We sit for two hours, three hours, four hours. I mean, in the case of opera, it could be, you know, eight, 8 million hours.

We passively watch other humans perform. We clap. We exit. The only difference today is we turn off our cell phones. Right? Because we have cell phones. So, another force I think that makes it important for us to really lean into the idea of innovating is that we're cyclical.

The typical performing arts company operates in this sort of annual seasonal cycle, right? So, you have a typical fall season. You have a spring season. In our case at Lincoln Center, we have a robust summer season, where we take advantage of warm weather and we take advantage of one of our greatest assets, which is outdoor space. Which not everyone in Manhattan has obviously.

So, being able to really take advantage of that, but the problem with the tradition and the annual cycles put together is that if we don't execute with the intention of breaking out of the tradition in the cycles, it just leads to same old, same old, same old, right. And that's the kind of, I think unintended inertia that really takes hold in legacy organizations, especially in the performing arts field like ours, if we don't actively push back against it and continuously challenge it. Right.

Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things that may have happened, obviously over the last couple years with the pandemic, it's forced a lot of these organizations to rethink not only in the arts, but everywhere. But so, talk a little bit about how the pandemic and made Lincoln Center adapt or think differently about what they do.

Clive Chang: Right. Sometimes it does take an inciting incident, right? Or like this moment of crisis, like COVID 19 to rattle us and create that urgency to really approach things differently. In our case, I would actually frame it as to encourage us to accelerate the change. And I say that because Henry Timms, who took the reins in 2019, the year before the pandemic, you know, was very clear about innovation and institutional change as key priorities when he set his vision coming in.

But you're right. What drew me back to Lincoln Center, I rejoined. I was here a decade ago and came back a month into the lockdown. And like, it's kind of an odd time to jump right back into an institution where theoretically all the venues and the stages have just shuttered. Right. But it was really, to have that opportunity to capitalize on this moment, where we essentially were freed from all the shackles of tradition or the annual cycle you couldn't perform anyway.

Nobody knew how things would play out. There were no rules anymore. You could sort of wipe it clean. And so, the opportunity to jump back in to help reimagine is really, really powerful. And when I say reimagine, I think about things like reimagine whose voices we present on our stages. Whether they're physical stages of digital stages, right? What audiences we'd like to reach and on through what channels and what platforms.

I do think I would dare say if our sector had to been more innovative and imaginative in the years leading up, we might have found ourselves in a better fortified state for the moment when COVID 19 hit. Right. But for the most part, performing arts organizations kind of shut down, hunkered down and waited out the storm.

And one of the things we did was really take advantage of that time and try to build some new things and invest in some experimentation. And I fear that not enough organizations in our sector actually took advantage of that time and space to reflect and reset and reimagine.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some of those initiatives that were reimagined coming out of the pandemic. I know you have some interesting things around The Green, and can you talk about that? And some of the other initiatives that came place.

Clive Chang: I might even start with one that's sort of less obvious and less sort of visible on our campus. One real marquee initiative that we're very proud of in the pandemic era, is one that you might not immediately think about when you think about arts and innovation, right. I think a lot of people's minds go to technology and how technology helps fuel the arts.

But one shared challenge that we all have in the nonprofit arts industry, and maybe not just arts industry, just nonprofits in general is that we are all looking for younger, more diverse board members. And we spend a lot of time bemoaning the fact that very few such people actually ever come our way. And you know, our boards will never be diverse. We'll never get young people.

And for us, we just sort of flipped it around and said, okay. So, if they're not coming to us, how do we go out and look for these young diverse people? Right. And that's what led to this wonderful program called Lincoln Center Leadership Fellows. And in that program, we just go out and actively seek out the next generation of civic leaders and philanthropists.

Our internal frame for this is they are stars today and they're superstars tomorrow. These are the folks that in three to five years, every board in town will be knocking on their doors. Right? Right. But we went out. We found them first. We brought them in. We created a supercharged two-year program that gives them an accelerated bootcamp of what it means to serve as an active and engaged and contributing board member of a major cultural institution.

And at the end of these two years, they quote unquote, graduate onto one of the boards on the Lincoln Center Campus or better yet they go off and they join another cultural and nonprofit board in New York City or beyond. And create impact there. It's so funny because the innovation here, I don't think of as so much of as the program itself or even of the execution of the program, but it's actually the longstanding impact that we hope this program creates right.

Over time, if you imagine multiple cycles of this program going on, we're talking about radically changing the critical mass of who serves on the governing bodies. The most significant mission driven organizations of our country. And ultimately hoping that that governing body also trickles down into a way, into how executive leadership manifests and how then staff level will manifest. And then ultimately how everyone who's working on the programs and the delivery of those programs will change over time. And it becomes this wonderful cycle.

Brian Ardinger: So as a person in the midst, trying to make these changes within an organization, what are some of the, either roadblocks or challenges that you hit and then what are some of the things that you did to kind of overcome the traditional things that you were talking about?

Clive Chang: I've been reflecting on like how we actually do this and how you create the conditions to actually help it thrive. You know, at the risk of overly simplifying it. I actually don't think it's that complicated. I think that in general, most organizations, and leaders I think, would like to think of themselves as very open to the possibility of re-imagination.

And that's about where it ends. And the difference I think here is we are actively searching for opportunities and we're actively trying to connect to those opportunities to our existing work. And potentially also newfound work, instead of just passively sitting back and waiting for it to happen.

Another challenge I think is really making space and resource and safety for experimentation. Which I do think potentially nonprofit organizations have a bit of an aversion to, because of the way our operating model works. Right. Your in a nonprofit. You work very hard every year to just balance your budget, which means you have to raise enough revenue to cover all of your operating expenses.

It's just so much harder to prove out the impact metrics of experiments with unknown outcomes, right than pure program deployment, where you can say, and this will lead to X many more diverse young students being able to learn math or whatever. It's for both organizations and for funders who fund nonprofits. I think it's also about making room for such experiments and embracing the spirit of experimentation. In a smart way. Right? As long as it, these don't have catastrophic implications to the organization, if they require 2, 3 versions of, of iteration.

Brian Ardinger: Do you have any experience with having these conversations on the donor side and getting donors more open to this concept of experimentation and not knowing exactly the outcomes of the work that the foundation or the organization is doing? Do you have any examples or ways to bring a donor class, I guess, along this journey?

Clive Chang: Absolutely. I have been so pleasantly surprised at how receptive and inspired donors are to the idea of creating R and D capacity in a field like the performing arts. You know, I think you do have to approach it with a level of rigor and research.

We scan to the field when the pandemic took hold and really got a lot of data points of validation, right. That one thing that consistently is lacking in the performing arts field is any space for R and D. Like, it just doesn't exist. We're all busy planning the next season. And nobody has time or energy or money to think about creating space for experiments.

And so, I think carefully crafting, you know, the case for, for what, what wide ranging and long term impact, not only for the organization, but for the field at large. And that is a role we take very seriously at Lincoln Center, as sort of the self-professed leader in this field, right. It's on us to help create some new models that ultimately can be scaled and can sort of help the sector at large to grow.

And so, especially the big foundations out there right now, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation are really, really supportive and enthusiastic about this kind of work in particular. Especially against the backdrop of the pandemic and what the havoc that it reeked on the performing arts sector. And so, thinking about it as investments in fortifying for the future, you know, funders have more imagination than you would think.

Brian Ardinger: And that's great to hear because, you know, again, oftentimes you think about the creative class and, and what's going on from that perspective. And you like to think that the organizations around that could keep up as well. You mentioned technology as one of the things that people think of when they think about innovation. What are some of maybe the resources or tools or technologies that you've seen or used that have changed the game in this space?

Clive Chang: Yeah, surprisingly, it's actually not as much technology. I think technology will always be a part of the conversation in some ways I think of it as maybe even less of a tool and more of a lubricant, right.

The innovation comes in the conceptual ideas. And then, you know, much like celery is the delivery mechanism for peanut butter, like technology, you know, is that sort of the instrument of delivery. It's always at play, but I think too often we think about arts and innovation and technology always being the answer. Well, that's just the delivery mechanism, right. Like, well, what's the idea.

One tool that has proven surprisingly helpful is really convening. And we did a lot of that in, in the couple of years of the pandemic. Not that the pandemic is over or anything, but we invested quite a bit in bringing together creators and perspectives and that otherwise may not have the opportunity to intersect, right.

So, this is actually a perfect moment to sort of go to how The Green actually came to be. Right. So, if we rewind to the beginning of 2021. So, this is pre-vaccine. It's like cold and dark out. Everyone's like, oh my god, give us the warm weather again. We took a hard look and said, what does the world really need right now?

And then of course you map that against one of our greatest assets, which is 16 acres of space. A lot of which is usable outdoor space. That was the moment where we really doubled down on our role as a civic pillar of New York City and opened up that space to the city and to the community. And that's what gave birth to Restart Stages, which was our huge outdoor performing arts center that we built 10 different venues, performance spaces, rehearsal spaces, studio spaces.

We had this wonderful outdoor reading room. We cast a call out across the five boroughs of New York city, asking all community partners who didn't have space to come and perform. Curate a night, present a night, just come use this infrastructure. And one of the key things to solve in that equation was if you know Lincoln Center, you probably know the iconic center piece that is the main plaza. It's called Josie Robertson Plaza with a gorgeous fountain at the center.

It is absolutely beautiful, but it's also generally a pretty transient space. You know, you come, you take a selfie with the fountain, then you go off inside to your performance, wherever you're going. So, the exercise here was how do we find a way to create a whole radical welcome, right?

Something that's very different. Some mechanism to welcome people to this campus in any way. And that's when we convened and we thought, you know what, let's not try to solve this ourselves. So, we brought together a group of just thinkers, right? Urban planners, architects, community, activists, designers, et cetera, to help us reimagine what the space would be.

And one really simple idea that a set designer came up with, ended up being the game changer, right? She literally, she just said, what if we laid grass out. We just laid grass out on Plaza. And from there, this beautiful artistic installation called The Green was born.

And of course, this just not just any old designer. This is the genius that is Mimi Lien. She is a MacArthur Genius. She's a Tony award-winning set designer. Right? So, you know, no schmuck, right. So of course, she ended up creating the most beautiful and also sustainable artistic installation that became the centerpiece of our Plaza.

It was biodegradable, soy based artificial turf. And she created this just beautiful grassy oasis. And over the summer, a quarter million people came, with their dogs. With their kids. And they experienced Lincoln Center in a brand-new way. Talk about impact metrics. We did exit polling on The Green. Nearly a quarter of the people who visited The Green were first time visitors at the Lincoln Center.

And there's the proof is in the pudding, right? Like you talk about attracting new audiences. You create a radically new context for them to do it. And here you go, through that serendipity, you end up getting a beautiful idea, like The Green, that really changed the game. And so that's just one example of how we've used convening, across a variety of context, to help stoke new energy and ideas.

If you sort of lift out from that a little bit. Mimi Lien is actually part of a collective. So, talk about R and D. One of the things that we stealth mode did during the pandemic was launch the pilot of a lab, an R and D lab. So, it was premised on this concept of bringing together interdisciplinary minds without real definition of what they were meant to create.

It was come and collide with each other. And that's this lab is actually called the Collider. Collide and make some beautiful magic happen. And so, you have in this pilot program, you have a Mimi Lien the set designer colliding with an opera singer, with a science educator, with a disabilities advocate. And the list kind of goes on. And this is a program that we're continuing to refine, but we really actually believe in the power of that R and D infrastructure to ultimately help answer some of the trickiest questions that we're asking ourselves now.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I love that concept because it allows for the ability to create these steppingstones to whatever that next thing is. And you don't know exactly. You can't say it, we want to go to this spot out there in the future. We generally want to go in that direction, but we don't know how to get there.

So, putting the, like you said, the smart artists, people things to have those conversations and create new stepping stones that could be built off of and, and move forward. Quite interesting and quite fascinating. So, I'm excited to see where it goes. The last question I want to ask you is where do you go for new ideas and inspiration?

Clive Chang: Oh, what a great question. I turn to others really. Right. I do think it's one of those misconception that innovation and new ideas sort of come from a little corner of an organization where the people who are supposed to be doing it, come up with brilliant new ideas.

The magic actually lies in casting a wide enough radar, right. To be able to have a multiplicity of perspectives and ideas come in. I do think having a little bit of a sorting mechanism and a prioritization mechanism probably is important, especially in organizational context, like this one. But look, many of my greatest inspirations sort of come in the middle of doing something completely unrelated.

Right. It's, you know, I'm a composer and pianist. So, I spend a lot of time sitting at my piano and sometimes it's deep in concentration reading a score for a first time. But it's sort of in the periphery that something will strike. Right. A lot of people say they find their best ideas when they run. Right. When they're out for a job, right. You know, I spend a lot of time active and so, having sort of a decompressing time to really not be in full on thinking mode and relaxing oneself of that pressure is often when those greatest inspirations come.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: That's quite helpful. I think a lot of people think that they can manifest innovation or manifest the next thing by thinking harder. And that's not always the. I really want to thank you for coming on the show. It's been fantastic and a fascinating discussion about some of the new things that you're seeing and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or about Lincoln Center, what's the best way to do that?

Clive Chang: Yes, please go on LincolnCenter.org. Please follow us on all the socials. And of course, if you have the chance to be in New York City, please come visit us on campus. Especially during the summer. This summer we have over 300 performances events all happening as part of our Summer for the City Initiative. There is a giant 1300-pound disco ball currently suspended above the fountain. It's on a dance floor that we're calling The Oasis. So please, if you are within proximity, we would love to have you dancing and celebrating with us.

Brian Ardinger: That's awesome. Well, Clive thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Clive Chang: Thank you so much, Brian.

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In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska, thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 Virtual Event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found IO2022.com. And now back to the show.

Interview Transcript with Karen Holst, Author of Start Within

Brian Ardinger: Karen Holst is the Author of Start Within. Karen and I met a couple months ago. Probably in mid pandemic. She had me on her show. She has a LinkedIn show that she hosts and you're always bringing on some amazing guests. I had a great opportunity to talk to her and talk about what's going on in innovation and entrepreneurship, and this intersection between corporate and startups and such. I'll turn it over to Karen to talk a little bit more.

Karen Holst: Great. Thank you. I am coming in from New Zealand. I originally was in San Francisco and then moved to Montreal for a couple years and still had San Francisco based work. So, I never really changed my profile in LinkedIn. It was very confusing. I had these, this double life going on, where I was spending half my year in California and half in Montreal. And then had the opportunity to come to Auckland and, and it’s been an adventure, especially given the, the time that we're in right now.

So, thank you for joining and I appreciate everyone sharing why they're joining here today. And I, I will tell you what I get excited about when it comes to innovation. It is unlocking people and doing this work and oftentimes that can be myself when I feel blocked up or maybe a little over my head in what I'm trying to do. Or it might be the team members and the people I'm consulting and bringing along and doing this work. So that's what I'm here to talk about today.

Quick introduction on myself. My background, I had started a company after acquisition. I joined the California Department of Education and had this moment of what does it mean to innovate in a large organization, a state agency, no matter. And that being very different and that leading to writing the book. I joined IDEO and I also teach through LinkedIn learning. So that's the quick and dirty on me.

I want to share a quick story on the importance of being bold and what it means to innovate and be the person that's igniting that in others. And this goes back to my ed tech startup. I was a co-founder in my early twenties and definitely feeling a little over my head.

We were going after another round of funding. And I really needed to catalyze teams to think differently and start solving new challenges. And I had reached out to a woman that I, I didn't know, but she was someone I really respected in the corporate world and had grown businesses. She was gracious enough to give me 15 minutes of her time.

And I sat down with her in a video call and said, explain where I was coming from and wanting to, you know, ignite passion and innovation in others. And what advice did she have for me in leading those teams? And she shared out of the gate, she said, don't bake goods and bring them into the office. You'll be seen as the mother caretaker, you know, the baker instead of the leader.

And I was floored by that response. One, I'm not a baker. I would not put anyone into the, the task of trying to eat something that I make. I, I can do maybe a simple cake with a mix and cookies. But that is not something I would pride and force on my colleagues.

But what I took out of that comment was, you know, assimilate. Fit in. And I looked around and I had, you know, an all-male board from our investment. And we were still looking to diversify our team and hadn't quite landed on how to do that. And so, I did slip a bit in my, what I think was my superpowers and being myself.

And that is one of the takeaways is, you know, being yourself and acknowledging your strengths is a big part of this work and innovating. And also doing that with others when you're leading others. So, to be yourself with the caveat of, but better. And I think what all of this leads to is whether you're the optimistic yaysayer and that's me, or the kind of cross your arm, realistic, you know, pointing and poking holes at problems. All of those are great perspectives to have. It's trying to find that balance.

And it's in yourself, it's in the teams that you lead. It's how your organization culture is built. All very important. And what it boils down to is being hard on the ideas and soft on people. So not focusing in on, you know, the person that's sharing the idea or talking about it, but really about the, the thing that's being said.

And I really want to go deeper in that today. We have such a short amount of time. I'm going to go quickly. Please feel free to ask questions throughout. I can't see them. So, Brian, if you can let me know of any come in, I can slow down. I'll just kick off with, Start Within framework. And that's the book that I co-authored.

And then we'll talk about the assumptions and mindsets about, around this work and go into two exercises that come from the book that you can use in your own work. Or you can take the teams. And then finish up with questions, of course. Where the book came from was again, when I had gone from my startup, I was hired within the California Department of Education to be entrepreneurial, but what that means within a larger state agency is very different.

We obviously had lots of government funds and policies to work through and to be responsible around. But also needed to move quickly. It was all about bringing technology into the classroom. So that has to move quickly, but also responsibly.

And it's also bringing in different ways of thinking. I was looking around for tools to do that. And there's so much amazing work out there on the culture of innovation and what leaders can do. But when you're a doer and you're tactically doing this work, I felt that there was an opportunity for Start Within in writing something about how to launch ideas within a big organization.

So that's where it was born. It was focusing in on these doers. And I, I think so much about innovation is around this word that can feel very exclusive. But the people that are doing this work they're innovators. They're close to the problems that are plaguing the company, the customers, the employees. They see the problems and want to fix them.

So, they're not just sitting back and saying, that's a problem for someone else. They're ready to take, you know, action. And they want to make things happen. In addition to that, the challenges, the tension is between getting them from that idea to actually seeing it through. That the organization that they work within there's often bias towards doing things the same. Even when we say we want to do, you know, innovate and do things differently, we just have this inclination to go back to, you know, status quo.

There's also this amount of work outside of, you know, this idea. It's our day job, but we are hired to do our real responsibilities. And so that can feel overwhelming to try to juggle all of that. And then finally the tools and resources, the tactical support in making this happen. So again, this is where the framework for Start With and kind of was born from.

The book is written around having models to identify the viable opportunities, the exercises to unlock creative problem solving. So, each chapter has an exercise that you can do solo, or you can take back to a team and do together. Thinking about the process and, you know, launching an idea with an organization and what that means. And then the strategies to come, overcome the, the obstacles and the roadblocks that come along the way.

So, the three phases of Start Within starts with getting ready, then goes into getting set, and go. Briefly covering that, getting ready is all about identifying if your idea is ready to pursue. The assumptions and mindsets and the biases that we have around our idea that might get in the way. And then getting yourself and your idea organized so that when you're moving forward, you have the right things in place.

The second section has the chapters around evaluating your organizational's readiness. Building your idea around the processes in place and finding opportunities for, for new ways of thinking. And then aligning to the organizational strategies and finding the people, you know, the stakeholder buy-in along the way.

Finally, we finish up with go, and that is building your prototypes. Experimenting your way forward. How to turn a no into a yes, which we're going to cover one exercise today. And then forming and supporting, support as you go and launching your idea. Today, we're going to cover something from Chapter Two, Section One, Assumptions and Mindsets. And then something from Section Three, Turning a No into a Yes.

I quickly want to talk about an example of the importance of getting past assumptions and biases. So, in 1997, crash test dummy was kind of the official way that in the United States, we were testing the airbags and effectiveness of, you know, safety belts. And these dummies were built in the seventies by an all-male engineering team.

And what we are finding today is that crashes are, are more likely to impact women, children, people of different sizes than these dummies that were built. And they were really reflective of the all-male American engineering team that built them. You know, they didn't take into account all the different sizes and body parts that we have as humans.

The data today from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, females wearing a seatbelt are 17% more likely to be killed when in a frontal car crash than a male. And then there's also a 2019 study from the University of Virginia that the odds of a female occupant being injured in a frontal car crash is 73% greater than the odds of a male occupant.

So, all of this was, you know, the crash test dummies were really built to prevent injuries and make the safest cars on the market. But there were assumptions and biases built in them as, you know, humans and making them reflect what they look like versus what, you know, the variety we have in riding and driving cars.

In the book, we talk about the layers of assumptions. I'm not going to go deep in them here, but it does start with ourselves, our background, and then goes out into the world that we are surrounded by. And all of this is part of when you recognize these layers and start to peel them back, you get closer to understanding what's blocking great ideas from becoming truly innovative and just being more of the same and incremental changes.

The first exercise we're going to go through is debunk the truth. And again, this is something you can do yourself. So, if you have an idea, a, you know, problem you want to solve, you can do this solo. But I think it's far better when you can find a partner and think about it out loud or better when you're leading teams through this work as well.

So, the Debunk the Truth exercise is really about you have an idea you're ready to go forward, or you have a problem that you think you've landed on, and before you move on, just pause and say, is what my assumptions and biases that are built into this idea this problem that I'm trying to solve. Actually, taking an account everything.

The steps that you go through, there's five steps and it's deceptively simple. You start by listing out the self-evidence statements. Then you're taking out anything that is irrefutable fact. By the way, we're going to go through an example of this. Next to that you're putting the opposition statements. So, this must be true. Then you're giving the statement an opposition. From that point, you reflect on what activities you can do to test and then you're prioritizing them. So, this will all make sense as we walk through it.

To think about this, I just challenge you to think about what problems, what ideas are you trying to solve for right now. And that can be in building your business. That can be in specific to a product or service. But if you think about a specific idea or problem, it could be across the spectrum in this phase that you're trying to solve for. Then as I go through these steps, you can think about the steps and how it relates to your work.

Now we're going to go through the Debunk the Truth. So, the first step is listing out self-evidence statements about your idea. And this is really easy to do as a consultant or someone outside of the problem, because you can really poke holes. When you're in it, and you're stuck and saying it the same way over and over. But, you know, on a post-it note, you would capture self-evidence statements. About your idea. And each post-it note would be its own statement.

For the purpose of this exercise. The idea that I'm going to focus in on was one that I had done with a, a large software company and it was around automation. You know that they're going to move forward on some innovation that would help automate and change their way of thinking. And way of working within the, the company. That would be the idea. The problem that they're trying to solve for.

And thinking about the self-evidence statements, some of the ones that we captured were automation will save time. You know, that's an obvious one. Automation will save money. In other words, automation will improve employee morale. You know, there was a lot of work that was being redundant, and these employees could be better using their time elsewhere. And that cost reduction is a business priority.

So, we captured lots and lots and lots. I mean, these are just for examples. We didn't just spend a couple minutes thinking about it. We really started to go deeper. And when people would talk generically, you know, trying to get more specific or if they got very specific, trying to get more generic, we're just pulling at this in different directions so we can get as much self-evident statements about that idea of improving automation.

This step that is Remove Irrefutable Facts. Most of what you say will not be removed. I mean, we're trying to debunk the truth. So, if you believe everything to be true, it'd be, it's an urge to say, well, these are all irrefutable. But one that we did, you know, cross off in this example was cost reduction is a business priority.

The CEO had clearly articulated that it was within all the KPIs and OKRs, and that is not something that we needed to debunk. It is a business priority. So, cost reduction is a business priority, we can take that off. And the rest of these, we kept up there as things to, you know, statements of opposition. That's the second step.

The third step is for each of these truths, creating a statement and opposition. So, the thing that makes the opposite, the self-evidence statement here on the left automation will save time. The opposition statement is automation requires time. Self-evidence statement automation will save money. Opposition statement, it will cost money again. To create is one and to maintain is another. Or automation will improve employee morale. Automation may create fear for employees, job loss.

So, we went through each one of these statements in opposition and created truth. And created the opposition statement. And when you present this with the team and explain that we're going to do the Statements of Opposition, as humans we immediately want to jump to this step. So we'll say, well, automation saves time, and then we'll immediately want to say, well, that could be, you know, actually the hope is that you could stay in the positive moment and capture as many of those, and then go to the statements of opposition. Rather than doing them concurrently.

There's something about the brain that when you focus on the positive truths and then flip it, you get more creative and more insights. The next step is taking these statements of opposition and saying, okay, this is a new insight. Maybe there's more to learn here. And once you're identifying them, putting the activities that you could do to go after.

So again, on the left, you have the opposition statements and on the right, you're seeing what were some of the activities that came from that, that we can find more learning to either prove the truth or disprove it. So, on the left automation requires time to create and maintain. Well, maybe we need to investigate frameworks that make automation more simple. Or automation will cost money to create and maintain. What's the breakeven analysis that we need to do?

You know, one of the things that came out of that and the opportunities for learning was the team stepping back and saying, actually, you know, we know we want to save money, but we also know that it's going to be a big overhaul if we want to do it right. How much are we allowed to move forward in automation? And how much is this going to have to be over a period of time?

It started to ask other questions. And some of the opportunities for learning was going back to leadership and saying, you know, here are the different scenarios. How do we want to break this down?

And then the final one was automation may create fear for employees. The activity was, can we interview employees about how they view the future? About how automation might affect their day to day? And they actually had some, HR had done some surveys already. So, in talking about this out loud, HR was like, oh yeah, we have some of this data. I can share that with you. And so, they were able to then go fine tune and go deeper in doing these interviews.

But again, you're going to potentially have multiple activities to one opposition statement. You're going to have a whole board of all of this. And you have to step back and say, all right, if we're going to debunk the truth and start uncovering assumptions and biases, we can't do all of these things. So, the final step is actually identifying what has priority. What has the highest risk if it's not disproven or proven. And the highest impact to the efforts that we're taking on.

So, in this example, as we rated it with this company, three of them that came up the, you know, higher impact was conducting the break-even analysis and interviewing employees, and then lower impact, lower risk was investigating frameworks that make automation more simple. They had spent a few years doing some of that research.

And so, they had some strong findings that they could rely on for that. But again, it was, this is how they would value, rank the activities. If you're in a different company, doing the exact same exercise on the exact same idea, how you prioritize it might look very different. So that is a very, very quick version of this.

If you're using this, I say you could do this in 15 minutes and get some people thinking differently. Spending more time going deeper is where you have the aha moments. The having 15 to 30 minutes per step, at the very least you could extend this over days and have it up there and kind of, you have the opportunity for it to ruminate and think about, but really the big opportunity in an exercise like this is also assigning someone to be the yaysayer and someone to be the naysayer.

And you might find people that are typically the optimistic person to say, hey, I want you to poke holes in this idea. Or the person that simply got has their arms crossed and can point out all the problems, asking them to be embracing the yaysayer and being the yes, and. And by putting that on people and the team you're making them use their brain differently. And that is all what, you know, innovation is about, is unlocking people and being bolder and expanding their spectrum of how they think about problems and how they identify ideas.

So, the second exercise won't take as long to go through. It's also deceptively simple. I love this one for myself when I do it. I try not to do it by myself. I love to do it over wine with my husband, or I'll find a colleague and do it over coffee. Or when I'm doing it, mentoring companies or executives and people within teams, this is a great tool to use. So, it's called the One Maybe at a Time. And then we'll go into the steps, which is the next slide.

Three very simple steps. You're finding out why there's a, about, you know, a barrier to the problem. You're exploring the opportunities and then you're finding the tactical solutions for how to move forward. So again, pausing here. What challenge are you currently, or might you be facing soon? An example that I hear often is cut back in resources. Whether that's funding, the number of people that can work toward a project, these are all great barriers to consider.

But what challenge are you seeing right now? Or are you predicting and building for, into the future? If you think about that as we go through these steps, I'll give you an example again, but you can use your challenge, your idea, as you know, we go through the steps as well. When I do this in Mural, you have the three sections, you can do it on a whiteboard. You can do it on a wall.

Each thing that you're capturing is going to be on its own post-it note. But the first, very first part of the, the problem that you're thinking about is the, the why behind there's a barrier, the roadblock. The, the no, because, and I'm going to give an example from a different software company. So, I was hired to think about, you know, creating the, the 10 vision and working with the leadership to make their innovation roadmap happen.

As I was there and looking around recognized that they had a very big problem in diversity. Something that they recognize as well. There were no women in leadership. The diversity of the people that worked there, they had a lot of work to do.

And so, towards the end of my project, raising that to the executive that had brought me on as an issue that I'd like to try to address. I got a big fact, no. Because we just hired someone to lead D and I efforts and they're, they're getting onboarded. They're going to take this on. Other, no, because that I would, you know, captured in doing this exercise was, well, no, you weren't hired to do this at all. This is completely out of the scope. No, we don't have the money to, to help, you know, pay for you to do this work. No, you're not an expert in this besides, you know, just being an experienced human in, in the corporate world.

So, there were lots of No Becauses and some of them, I heard. Some of them, I believed to be there. Some of them, I predicted if I tried to take this work on. Capturing each of them on a post-it note, and then I paused and said, where's their room for me to do something like what's the, maybe if what's the reframed approach. And again, when you're thinking about innovation, people can get blocked up and wanting to go towards the big prize.

But if you can find these incremental tears and thinking differently. And exercising the muscle of finding new ways forward, this will only lead later on down the line to the radical, big thinking. So, I, I love this example for very tactical specific needs. But it is a sprint towards the innovation marathon.

It's just one of the things that's going to continue to tweak you and make you better at doing this work and leading this work. So, the maybe if in this example, recapturing the, you know, reframing the opportunities. Maybe if I talked to hiring managers, actively recruiting, we could evaluate effectiveness of currently posted job openings.

This was something I could do without big lift. This is something that could make an immediate impact. And teaching and learning from it. Wasn't going to step on any toes. There were some other ideas that we came up with too. I, I sat down with a team of women that were very passionate about this. And thinking about what we could do that was not going to go against what we're there hired to be doing.

Final step is the Then What. Like, what is the action plan? What are you going to actually do to move forward and start testing how to move beyond this moment. And that was creating the volunteer led task force that would review the current job postings. And when we did that, there were ideas of putting the job postings in front of women groups, programmers, engineers, product leaders, and getting their feedback.

And the feedback immediately was so helpful. It. It allowed us to rethink how we wrote those job descriptions and what requirements we had. In all of this, again, doesn't necessarily feel like a truly innovative new approach. But just the exercise of doing something where you don't accept, no. You find a new way forward. That kind of re pulled back some of the scar tissue of like, oh, you know how things are around here?

No, you know, can't make change without it being slow. People started to see that if they move forward, even if it's slowly, incrementally. That they can make a big impact. So, I really love this exercise for that reason because it's super simple. It's easy to do and can make an impact in the long run.

Again, this is a, an overview of how you might want to use this either with yourself or by leading teams, but you can do it in very quickly. Spending more time and reflecting, I think, to get true new, you know, ways of approaching it's coming back to it and continuing to say, where are their new opportunities to experiment our way forward?

So that is the very, very fast version. If you want to reach out. Just to highlight what we covered, two exercises, this is a way to reach me. I teach an innovation product innovation course on LinkedIn. That's the Bitly. You can find the book on the Link, or you can email me directly. And of course, I'm on LinkedIn. So, you can find me there as well.

Brian Ardinger: I love that very much, Karen. You know, the book is great because it's, it's so tactical. You know, it forces you to, you know, here's the questions I need to ask myself or my team. And it gives you that kind of playbook in a variety of different circumstances. So, I encourage people to check that out for sure.

Thank you for coming out and being part of this. I know you've got a whole day ahead of you. It's early morning there in, in New Zealand. So, I appreciate you coming out for IO2020 and being a part of it. I want to thank all the attendees for jumping in here. Thanks again.

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In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska. Thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 virtual event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found at io2022.com. And now back to the show.

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Interview Transcript with Vaughn Tan, Author of The Uncertainty Mindset

Susan Stibal: Today Vaughn Tan will share learnings from internationally renowned cutting-edge restaurant, R and D teams on how to prepare for uncertainty and respond to it with grace and innovation. Vaughn is a London based strategy consultant, author, and professor. Vaughn's book, The Uncertainty Mindset, is about how uncertainty can be used to drive innovation and adaptability. Vaughn is also an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at University College London, School of Management. So Vaughn, I'll turn it over to you.

Vaughn Tan: Thanks very much for having me and thanks also for everyone who's here. Thanks for joining me today. I just want to say a few things about myself, just as context.

I was born and raised in Singapore, but these days, as Susan said, I'm a strategy professor at UCL school of management. I teach courses in how design thinking can update and. Conventional approaches to strategy and management. So I used to live in London, but at this very moment in Corona time, I'm physically located in a very rural part of France in a mountainous and volcanic region called the of van.

And this is basically my apology in advance. If there are any internet connectivity problems that develop along the way. So, in any case, my focus as a consultant or researcher, and as an author is I try and understand how to design organizations that are more innovative. And more resilient to uncertainty.

And these organizations include businesses, nonprofits, teams, communities. I'm particularly interested as I think the book's title and what I've just said may suggest in the role that uncertainty plays in making businesses better at doing innovation work. And I think that's maybe a little bit counterintuitive. And I'm going to unpack that a little bit more in the rest of this talk.

I got here by quite a circuitous path. Quite literally a decade ago, late in 2010, I found myself in a basement kitchen of a restaurant in Washington, DC. And I was just dodging kitchen porters while watching a team of R and D chefs come up with a menu of new dishes for a restaurant. And the owner and the head chef of that restaurant group is the Spanish chef Jose Andres, who you may know because of his philanthropic disaster relief activities.

There's an arrow pointing at Jose, right there. This is Jose's philanthropic side project, you know, which eventually turned into a huge one. If you're in the US, I think he's quite famous there. People know about him. It's called World Central Kitchen. And what they do is they create field kitchens for emergency food relief during natural and, and other disasters.

The thing that many people don't know is that World Central Kitchen is able to spin up these field kitchens to produce hundreds of thousands of meals a day very quickly because, it's how they organized. Right. So they use a very unusual way of thinking about how to design their teams, to be able to go from a very small, permanent team, to a large operation in any particular disaster setting that they choose to go into because of how they're organized.

And how they're organized is actually about what I call The Uncertainty Mindset. Because Jose's way of thinking about how his teams get organized for his for-profit organization. Think food group is actually the same way that he infused into what World Central Kitchen does, So, I'm going to come back to this in a little bit.

I wanted to say also a little bit about how I came to study culinary innovation. It was all by accident. I did my PhD at Harvard Business School. And when I went in, I was interested in understanding how to organize innovation teams. And this focus for me was because of my experiences before starting the PhD. I'd just come from working at Google in California. And while I was there, I worked on some really unusual teams doing quite interesting innovation work.

We were basically trying to develop parameters for new problems to solve. So, the first team I was on at Google back in 2005 at the very dawn of ad tech, as we know it today was trying to create an automated ad unit targeting engine. It didn't work then, although some of the machine learning foundations have been baked into the rest of Google AdWords and Ad Sense.

But I was also on the launch team for street view, which is one of the rare hardware business units at Google while working at earth and maps. And I also worked on Google's Space flight program, which was actually in partnership with the XPRISE foundation, where we tried to put a Lunar Lander on the moon, an unmanned Lander. And I also worked on structured data. I worked with the Pure Research Group on a new structured data storage and management product, which while it was still externally available was called Fusion Tables. And it's now used exclusively internally to run the data layers for earth and map.

I sort of burned out a little bit at Google and I left just before the 2008 global financial crisis to make furniture. I went to work at a wood studio in an art foundation in Colorado. And the strange thing is when I got there, I found again, something that felt a lot, like all the really interesting teams I worked with at Google.

It was an interesting network of people who came together to try and develop new techniques for working with materials. I guess the thread that connected all those bits of my former life before academia was that I was exposed to this wide range of teams and businesses that were all pretty good at coming up with new problems to solve and solving them well.

And so, when I decided to do a PhD about organization, my main question was something I think you all are interested in too, right? How do you organize companies and teams, so that they're good at coming up with new ideas so that they're innovative companies. So, it was pretty early in my doctoral research and I was casting around for a research project to like really work on, to write a dissertation about.

And if you know anything about Singaporeans, you know, that we're really interested in food. So, this is one of my favorite dishes from Singapore. It's called Bak Chor Mee which basically means pork mince noodle. And it is a kind of innovation in itself. Like every stall that makes this, usually the people who make this dish only make one thing. And everyone develops their own kind of interesting take on what this dish should be.

And the ones who are really good have made it very distinctive. But anyway, we're very interested in food. And so, Jose who I didn't know at the time was giving a lecture at Harvard during which he mentioned, how his innovation team, the Think Food Tank was not only how he made his restaurants innovative, but also how he made them really effective.

And so, I went to his office hours and more or less as a joke, I asked him if he would let me come observe the Think Food Tank for my PhD research. And he said, yes. So. I'm just saying, be careful what you wish for. This is how I fell into studying this really strange world of high-end cutting edge culinary innovation teams.

I eventually spent a lot of time at some of the best known of them. And what I realized along the way after having come away from tech was that innovation work is more or less the same work across industries. Even if the output and the input look very different. So having worked in both hardware and software tech and with startups after Google, I knew from the inside how tech innovation feels.

And I quickly saw that while the type of new product may be different. The process of coming up with good new ideas and executing them well is really similar even in food. So, innovation work, I think has enough similarities across industries that we can learn from looking at how innovation work is done at the frontiers of food.

And then apply those learnings more generally to other businesses in other kinds of industries. So, while I was at these R and D teams in high end cuisine, what I was doing was I was watching really good innovation organizations doing high level innovation work. Whether the innovation was creating a new experience of dining by adding cross modal sensory stimuli.

So, what you see on the screen now is a dish at the Fat Duck called the Sound of the Sea. Where the seafood that you eat is made more intensely marine by hearing the sound of waves lapping at the shore that come out of the iPod that you're plugged into at the same time.

Another kind of innovation that people work on is Material Innovation. In this case, they're discovering how to cook a new type of material, incredibly old clams, 200 years old at a restaurant that I will call Amaya. And these require developing a new cooking protocol that are unlike the cooking protocols used for other types of shellfish.

Other kinds of innovation are developing new media products. And this is Nathan Myhrvold's most expensive cookbook in the world. He was only able to do this by developing a novel vertically integrated business model for content creation and publication. And he has then used that same business model to produce series of books after that, that would not be publishable, and they are very successful. But they wouldn't be publishable under conventional business models in publishing.

Other innovations that I see in there that have analogies to other industries are new approaches to narrative storytelling. Instead of telling it in the form of a movie or play. Restaurants like the Fat Duck, when it reopened in 2016, use individual dishes in a meal, as the elements of story, they have to figure out how to do that.

And some of them are like IO2020 right. Developing an influential conference and a global multidisciplinary network, like a restaurant called Noma in Copenhagen did with a Mad Symposium, at this point almost 10 years ago. Or as we began creating a novel operational model for field kitchens that are meant to serve disaster relief situations like Jose did at World Central Kitchen.

Anyway, I ended up spending almost a decade and embedded in these world-renowned R and D teams, in an industry where basically the state of the art is changing frequently and unpredictably. It sounds a lot like high tech. It sounds a lot like media today as well. And these are the connections that I'm hoping that you all will see that I try and draw from outside of this domain of high cuisine into other industries that I also feel like I know and have worked in before.

So, some of the places that I was at the Fat Duck in the UK, one of the first pioneering culinary innovation restaurants in the world. A restaurant that I call Amaya that I claim is in South America. I'm under NDA, so I can't say where they are. A restaurant that at this point is quite famous called Noma, which is in Copenhagen and Denmark, and the mad organization, which is the conference and thought leadership organization that they set up in Copenhagen. The Cooking Lab, which is Nathan Myhrvold, he's the ex-CTO of Microsoft. His organization, which is in Bellevue, Washington, which produce really interesting media around food and cooking and technology.

And of course, Jose Andres's Think Food Group of restaurants. Ultimately, I just want to leave you with a few key takeaways from the research that I did. And the first and most foundational piece of insight is that all of these teams were innovative and resilient and adaptable. Not because they managed away the uncertainty that they faced or pretended that the uncertainty didn't exist, but because they had a different way of thinking about uncertainty. What I call the uncertainty mindset is simply explicitly treating the future as something unknown and unknowable, not as something risky.

I know this sounds like a trivial distinction, but I think it really isn't. Risk is not the same as uncertainty, even though most people confuse the two. Risk is when you don't know exactly what will happen, but you know, all the possible outcomes and how likely each possible outcome is. So if that's the case, you can do risk management through cost benefit analysis.

Real uncertainty on the other hand is when you don't know what exactly will happen and you don't know all the possible outcomes. Or you don't know how likely these known or unknown outcomes are. So just to illustrate the difference, flipping a fair coin, is truly a situation of risk. There's a 50 50 chance that you get heads or tails. And you can bet on that outcome.

Real businesses like the ones that we all are in, rarely face this kind of risk in the real world. What they face instead is true uncertainty. And now it's actually really undeniable. The current business environment is filled with true uncertainty where we have no idea what many of the possible outcomes in the next 6 months might be, or even 12 months. And we don't know how likely each one of those outcomes are.

So, the problem that I also, this was another insight from looking at these R and D teams, is that even though risk is not the same as true uncertainty, we've all been trained to think of not knowing only in terms of risk. And so, because of that, we think of every unknown situation as being risky.

And this is in its own way, it's kind of comforting, right? Because risk can be managed away. We can do cost benefit analysis. We can risk manage the situation. This kind of thinking is an unmistakable hallmark of the risk mindset. And it can be fatal, right? So just look for instance, at the UK and the US government responses to coronavirus this year, or thinking back to 2008 and before the Fed's reaction to complex derivatives in 2008, just to see what happens when we use risk management and a risk mindset to think about and react to situations that are truly uncertain.

The problem for businesses is that the risk mindset all starts with an organization's ability to innovate. Because innovation is by definition about not knowing exactly where you end up. When businesses over invest in managing the risk of known outcomes, they under invest in building flexible, adaptable organizations that let them change to be whatever they need. As the situation changes.

The risk mindset also leads businesses to over optimize and try and be too efficient and profitable. And it leaves insufficient slack in the system to permit real innovative thinking. And maybe the biggest problem is that they create organizations in which all the incentives are to do what's well understood. And not to learn by failing, which is inevitable, if you're trying to do something, which is really, really innovative.

I think the uncertainty mindset, as I said before, is simply acknowledging that you don't know enough about the future to optimize for it. And simply making this acknowledgement explicitly as a leader and as an organization changes how a business acts and how people and teams in those businesses act.

The nice thing is that it makes these people and these teams inside businesses, more flexible and more able to learn and change when they need to. I'll talk about three things after this, just to finish off, but injecting uncertainty into organizations I've found is the best way to make them resilient to uncertainty and innovative at the same time.

So, this is really the biggest, most counterintuitive thing. When I talk about this book to other people. They don't just try and say that, yes, we see that the world is uncertain. The organizations that I looked at that have been most successful, and this is not only in food, but outside of it, the ones that are most successful at dealing with uncertainty and being innovative. They actively create uncertainty inside of themselves.

And it's this intentional creation of uncertainty inside the organization that makes them continually able to come up with new ideas that are good ideas. So how do they do it? They do it in three ways. They do it by making the roles that their employees have open ended. They do it by having open ended goals. And then they also do it by stimulating a sense of really carefully designed and calibrated desperation among their teams. And I'll say more about each one of these things in turn very quickly.

So open ended roles are simply roles where your definition of what you do as an employee is not fully defined at the beginning. What this means is a large part of your role is quite clear and it's quite stable, but a part of your role is not. So, if you think about Google's 20% time or 3Ms 15% time, this is something like an open-ended role. It makes the role malleable and it also encourages people to, in a sense, negotiate what role they're going to play by testing things out with their colleagues.

Right? So, to try something that they think is worth doing that they're good at doing to show the results of that test to their colleagues, and if that test is shown to be useful, then that becomes part of role. The result of this is more innovative, higher performing teams where all that testing also helps team members learn what other team members are good at doing and what they like to do.

And what this leads to in the end, not only are the roles adaptable because they're constantly changing along the way, this also creates teams that are incredibly high functioning, where everyone knows what everyone else is good at doing. And also, is interested in doing. These teams, barely need management of the conventional sort.

So open-ended goals, I think are very similar to open-ended roles except in the context of goals. So we often think about goals as being very concrete. Want to achieve this micro growth in profits. By the end of next year. Open-ended goals for innovation are about saying how you think about abstractly, what success looks like.

So that there's lots of possible things inside success that could be successful. So open endedness just means defining goals, more abstractly and less concretely. But being very clear about what tradeoffs you are willing to make to achieve those goals so that you give the people in your organization, more freedom to come up with unanticipated, but valuable problem definitions.

And finally, uncertainty can also be injected into how you motivate teams and individuals in your organization. The conventional approach to motivation is to give people something that they want, like more money or promotion to encourage them to work better. This only really works when the things that they need to do to be successful are very clearly defined and very stable, but this doesn't work for innovation, right?

Because these incentives are usually not enough to overcome the inherent fear of failure that everyone has. And failure is necessary to do any kind of real innovation work. So, what these teams did was that they publicly and irrevocably committed to projects that were just beyond what they knew they could deliver.

And what this does is it creates desperation, right. It creates the sense that we can't simply keep doing what we're doing, that we're good at doing, in order to be able to deliver on this product. And what that does in turn is it drives the teams to abandon these comfortable, old ways of doing things.

And try new ways of doing things and generally learn new stuff. So, it creates a situation like in the gym with resistance training, where the teams and the people inside the organization gradually become better at taking on things that they don't already know to do very well. There's much more to be said about all of those things, but it's mostly in the book, which I encourage you to read.

There wasn't space in the book for everything, so I'm continuing to think through some of the implications of not knowing every week in an email newsletter, which I also encourage you to sign up for. It is completely free. I want to open up now to a very casual conversation.

So, Austin is curious about injecting uncertainty. Austin, do you want to say a little bit more about what you're curious about in terms of injecting uncertainty? Austin's question is structurally what programs might help inject uncertainty in a careful calibrated way into the organization? I, I think it's a really good question. So, I often make the distinction between having a program that is about injecting uncertainty and simply changing how people work. So that the way they work naturally encompasses more things that are not fully defined upfront.

So, we can talk about injecting uncertainty into roles. For instance, by saying, let's say you're trying to hire someone new. At the moment, the default position for most hiring is to say, I'm going to define a, a job description. And then I'm going to put that out to a recruiter to find people who might be good fits.

And one way that you can simply inject uncertainty into that is to say, here is the job description. That is 80% of the job that we're hiring for the other 20%, for instance, it can be any percentage, but I think 20% is a good starting point. The other 20%, we don't know. The 80% that we do know is clearly defined. You got to do these things and we're going to hire to make sure that you can do those things.

The other 20%, on the other hand, we want you to come in, and spend one day a week or two days, every two weeks or whatever you choose to do telling us and showing us what that other 20% should be and why it's important to us. Simply that's one program that will inject uncertainty into who you hire and what they do for you.

Right. And then along the way, if you make this explicit, it will force people to say, okay, what is this person doing in his or her 20% time, that is so valuable. Is it actually valuable? Can we help this person do something which is more valuable that we don't expect to need yet, but we actually realize that we do need now? I think programs like that inject uncertainty to how organizations work.

So, Ron Thomson asks great insight on what's needed for organizations to innovate for impact. Over the years, what are the most valuable lessons you've learned? It's a great question again, Ron. I think the biggest thing is uncertainty in an organization has this effect on organizations of making them innovative and adaptable. All the way through the organization, but for it to actually begin the most senior leaders need to be able to show one thing and they need to be talking about it constantly. And that one thing is being able to constantly talk about how they have themselves failed in the past, not hypotheticals. They have to actually say how they did fail in the past and how that failure led to their success today.

So, I want to reemphasize this point. It's that we talk a lot about success and why it's good. We don't need to talk more about that. We all know why success is a good thing. What we don't talk about is how, when you design failure correctly, you can learn from it. So not all failure is good. You can fail in ways that don't teach you anything, but you can also design work. You can design projects so that if you fail, you learn as much as if you succeed.

The Uncertainty Mindset is partly about being comfortable with failure because you know that failure teaches you stuff. And this, I think almost has to come from the top down, right? So, the most senior people will mean if the most senior people say that failure is okay, they will make the people underneath them say that failure is okay, and that will percolate all the way down.

And then at that point, it'll become possible for someone who is very junior to say, I can now take a risk at doing something, which I don't know how to do yet, because the failure might teach me something if I design it correctly. So I, I think the biggest lesson is if you're a leader, your most important job, other than setting the direction of, of the organization is to constantly not shut up about how you failed in the past and how it helped you to learn.

Okay. So, Jason also asks having too much stock on hand can hide a lot of problems. Absolutely. So, I think one key thing to say about what I've been saying, in this presentation is that I don't think that uncertainty injection is good for all kinds of businesses. It's only good for businesses that really want to innovate.

So, if you are in manufacturing and the manufacturing is well understood, you've got a proper well developed stable protocol for manufacturing a thing, you should be in a situation where you're trying to maximize efficiency and reduce waste. This is not the same thing as trying to be an innovation organization that is trying to find new ways of doing things.

I absolutely agree that if you're trying to exploit, if you're trying to be efficient, having a lot of organizational slack is not necessarily a good thing, because as you point out having too much stock on hand, having too much slack can hide a lot of problems, especially problems associated with people who are simply coasting, instead of doing what they know they need to do. How they know they need to do it.

But if you are trying to build an innovation organization that is trying to do new things that have never been done before, you must have slack. Because if you don't have slack, you cannot fail. And if you don't fail, you can't learn how to do something new. Yes. And Austin makes a great point, which is failure in certain environments, which are efficiency operation environments should be mitigated as quickly as possible with a known solution. A hundred percent agree.

And failure in uncertain environments should be designed to encourage learning and should be encouraged as well. Right? So, it's two things you should encourage failure that is designed so that when you fail, you learn something interesting and useful.

You should encourage that kind of failure, not the kind of stupid failure where you fail for no good reason. And you don't know why you failed. Let's see. So, Ron has another question, I guess, with the uncertainty mindset, like the fear of failure being foreign in most enterprises, any insight on the lessons learned from Trump maintaining the status quo?

Well, so I think one thing that I, I want to say wrapping up, which is actually relevant to Ron's question. I'm not sure that especially now any business anywhere can think of itself as being in a certain business environment. So, I wouldn't say to embrace the uncertainty mindset 100%, but at least if you are a business that is exposed to any kind of external environment, like if you are operating any kind of business where you have customers or suppliers, you need to be thinking about how to build your employees up. Your team organization up so that they're able to adapt if things suddenly change.

The organizations and the businesses that were able to pivot really fast, when the last wave of the pandemic hit us, were the ones who had people who were able to change what jobs they did at a moment's notice because they were used to developing new jobs.

Right. So, if they had open ended roles along the way, they were used to changing what they. And I think what every business needs to do is to encourage people who are employed by them, their suppliers, everyone who they work with needs to expect that things are going to be changing unpredictably in the future and to be ready for that to happen.

And a large part of that is simply not expecting that things will stay the same or that you can predict what they are and that at the very base level, Is the Uncertainty Mindset, in a nutshell. Just the moment you start to think and plan as if the future is not known and not knowable, you instantly have a leg up on everyone else who thinks, oh, I'm going to optimize. Because I can expect what the future will be.

And I can predict it with some certainty, if you just don't even think that everything you do will be slightly different and then very different as a result. And you'll be much more adaptable. Back to you, Susan.

Susan Stibal: Vaughn thank you very much. Those were great things to think about. Really, we appreciate you being here from France. And we want to thank our sponsors of the Inside Outside Innovation Summit. So Vaughn, hope to see you soon.

Vaughn Tan: Thanks for having me. Hope to see you all sometime.

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Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage in experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Doc Williams, Brand Developer, Founder of Brand Factory and Maker of Build With Me

Susan Stibal: Doc Williams is here to show you how to best utilize this new field of building without code and what concepts, tools, and plans you need to begin creating. Doc Williams is a brand developer, founder of Brand Factory and maker of Build With Me. Doc is also an entrepreneur who has worked with everyone from ESPN to App Sumo. So, Doc, I will let you take it away. Thanks for coming. And I can't wait to hear your presentation.

Doc Williams: Well, thank you so much for having me. I really do appreciate it. I'm so excited. Saw the other presenters earlier today. I'm just so excited to be here. So, I'm gonna get right into it because I'm excited about No Code. I'm gonna be talking about how I can help you. And I have a small presentation, but again, this is about how I can help you.

And if you're new to No Code, if you do not know what it is or you've heard the term and you're not so familiar, we gotcha. Don't worry. We got you in this Presentation and we're going to go through this a little bit. We're going to go through this. Okay.

This discussion today, we're going to be talking about an Introduction to No Code. Okay. And again, I don't want to talk about myself that much. So, I'm going to go through this very quickly. Just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. So again, I run a six-figure consulting business and strategy. I also help startups integrate tech, so everything from telling their story to actually building that tech stack. So, I've worked from copywriter front end dev. I've been a CTO a few times. A CIO, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that kind of stuff.

So more importantly, I just get to work with some great people. That's what I like doing. So, we're going to have to stop looking at my picture as I'm looking off into the sunset for a moment. We're going to be talking about the world is changing really quick. And Brian was talking about this in the intro to the Summit, and I cannot agree with that more.

Right now, we see a huge shift of technology and what's going on in the world. 83.5% of small businesses experienced a negative effect with the COVID pandemic. 72% of the world startups saw that their revenue fell and 56% of the US workforce holds a job that is compatible at least partially with remote work. So, there's a lot of things happening all at the same time.

And people are scrambling to come up with new ideas or to test new ideas, lean out their business, and you can be doing all of that by using the power of No Code. And so, we're going to be talking about why you need to be ready for this new age and using No Code as an innovation.

So, the first question is before we even get started and how you can be using no code, it's important to understand what No Code is. So, what is it? Let's go with a definition real quick. No Code is a development platform that allows programmers and non-programmers to create apps and programs, using visual tools instead of traditional computer programming languages.

Oh, that was a lot. So, the TLDR, what is it? Building visually. So, a lot of times some people are already using no code tools and they did not know that but basically allows you to do things that usually took what programmers were doing, writing code. So here are a few no code services. Now there's a whole other discussion. If you want to know the difference between no code and low code.

But here are a few no code services that I use almost daily. So, there's Bubble, Air Table, IFTTT, Elementor, Zapier, Hopin, Repurpose.io. Okay. Those are a lot of different tools. Now what we're going to be talking about, this is the Intro to No Code. So instead of delving into very specific platforms, we can talk about it in the Q and A, and that's not a problem, but instead of just talking about all of these different services, what's really important is looking at areas to disrupt the industry and how it can help you figure out what you want to get done in your business. So, in the chat, please let me know.

Yep. Has anyone tried Amazon's HoneyCode? Yes. I did a whole breakdown video on that about three weeks ago as well. Yes. We're going to be talking about a lot of these things. If you're thinking about like seeing the handle, not the tool. Tons of times, if you only think about the tool you're going to see, like, only if it's a hammer, you're just going to see about how you can hit nails. Right?

If you've got a Catana, it's the same thing. You're just going to be slicing things up. So, instead of thinking about just the platform, think about the handle. What are you trying to accomplish? And then we can go into the right kind of platform. Now also too, just to let you know, I have a YouTube show called Build With Me.

And so, I build three different businesses with one No Code tool every single Wednesday night. And also, I do tech reviews for App Sumo. So right now, I'm up to 453 tech reviews for them. And then, for the show we've done like a hundred episodes. So, we just passed 300 businesses with No Code tools. So, let's get right into it.

If you are trying to use no code and you're trying to speed up your design process, no code can be perfect for this. Designing complex websites and applications, it takes a lot of time, but with no code, you can do this really quickly. So again, if you are having a problem and I want it in the chat, if you're dealing with a design problem, you need to mockup things very quickly. We got you.

What about another one. Automation. Perhaps you're doing a lot of manual tasks. For example, one of our, one of the clients that we were working with, they were working with a big manufacturer, and they were manually still filling in invoices and filling in all of these different things. Well, we had a No Code tool that automatically you set up the boundaries of reading different boxes.

So, when people scan their order and instead of retyping it, taking all that manual work, it just looks at the numbers, looks at the letters, and then it just automatically does everything for you. So, and it already puts it into the system. So again, what tasks are you looking to solve as well?

The other one too, is architecture. So, system frameworks. If you're thinking about email marketing, SOPs, lead generation, complex, the complex tasks, we can talk about architecting a way for you to be able to solve those problems as well. That is the three main ways. And really the reason we went through the three ways, and we looked at it this way is actually even older.

We talk about, a lot on the program, Leonard DaVinci, and how he broke his style up was he was an artist. He was an engineer. An architect. And that actually forms a really clear line, especially with a lot of no code tools, which bucket you want to be into. We're going to talk about those three. And before we go into it and talk from the chat.

Why start now? Because you need to be saving time. You need to make sure that you are getting to your goals. You're being able to adapt and pivot in this time. So, this is the time to start. Now, how can I help? I do courses, consulting, workshops, whatever. I work with all different types of companies. I'm going to be helping you today in answering your questions, but keep in mind if you need help from me later on, go see me on YouTube.

Go email me. I'll bring this up. And all of that kind of stuff from building a marketplace in less than 60 minutes, was it two months ago, we built Netflix in an hour and a half. Creating Roku channels for your companies. We just do a lot of different random stuff. Oh, building SOPs for crime scene cleaners, you know, we go on and on.

So, let's get right into it. What people are trying to build. Now, let's go through a question. How do I say that first name? Petro Petro. Maybe, maybe if I butchered it, I'm sorry. I want to build a product development and project management system, basically from cradle to grave life cycle management system and seeking a platform to get started.

Okay. So that's a really good question. And what I would do with that one before even answering which one to go with, I would say, are you using it for your own team first or are you trying to build it as a Micro SAAS and get other people involved? So, if you're trying to build it internally, I would first talk about, okay, do you already have your SOPs broken out and how you want your workflow before deciding on a platform?

And do you want to be building on top of a platform or actually just build it from the bottom up? So, I know that's a lot of different things, but I would go with that detailed first. But I can go through a couple different platforms, how to do that. Once I get the answer or more details, I will swing back around.

Lindsay brings out, build a dashboard to show business metrics. So, I've got that one. All right. So let me break out of this. Actually, I was building a dashboard yesterday. So, if you're trying to build a dashboard, let's go through a couple different options. We were doing this with a client with the NBA about three weeks ago. And people were saying, well, where is this fancy system he's going through? It's just all my Twitter thread.

So, we could use DataBox or we could use GeckoBoard. Okay. So, let's bring this up. I'm going to bring up Gecko Board. So, who asked this, Lindsay asked talking about, which one, if you're trying to display your data? Even if you're using like Google sheets or whatever, you can be using that. So, DataBox or Gecko. Yeah, depending on exactly the features that you want or how often you want it to be updated or what you want it to be integrated with. But I would go with yeah. Data Box. Gecko Board.

Don, I think you're asking rapid prototyping. Own team then Microsoft. Okay. Petro again, let's see my own team and Micro SAAS. Okay. So, you're trying to build out your own team and Micro SAAS. Okay. So, if I was going to do that, it depends if you want to first white label or just pull the API or something like that.

But Jumple would probably do that because they're already built to be similar to like Asana or, or a Slack. It's kind of like a mixture of the two it's really focused on agencies, but they do offer you to basically just white label it. And to do custom build outs too.

So, they are a marketing team and they're developers. So, they're all in house and a couple months ago, they were talking about having solutions if certain companies want to have their own platform to build it out. That's another option and you can make a Micro SAAS platform pretty easy off them. Their team is in Australia. They're really cool. So, that might be something

Jen's asking Twilio. Twilio integration with no code. Yeah. So, tell me more. Yeah, I definitely agree. We've had Twilio integrations. We've had someone build out their, it's for fancy football, but they're adding Twilio with it. So, they're adding actually another filter basically, so they can run their draft on Zoom and then they're using Twilio with it.

And then they're transitioning from that to build their own platform for video conferencing. But they're modeling it using Zoom. They're using all the filters and then they're building it totally out with Trello and they're doing it with 70% no code. So let me know if you are what you're looking for with that one.

Carlos is talking about what are the risks and downside of using No Code? It kind of depends Carlos of what you're trying to accomplish. A lot of people, sometimes there's a feeling like, oh no codes can do everything. Well, you know, it has limitations, but it depends on what you're trying to do, Carlos. If you're trying to validate, you're going to scale to a certain point, but as long as you know, your limits and where you're trying to go, it can go pretty far.

If you're either bootstrapping or if you're VC funded, but you're making it really lean before you get to the next version. I can say that there are very successful apps and very successful businesses, all built on Bubble and No Code. Most people wouldn't know unless you asked them. So, it kind of depends on the capabilities of what you're trying to do.

Now on the flip side, someone asked me the other day when we did this breakdown, they're like, well, you showed me how to create Netflix, but I can't add, like, I think they wanted to add like 3000 films. And they didn't want to pay for like a server. I mean we got to be reasonable here, guys. So it depends on what you're trying to create or what you're trying to do. And hopefully that answers.

Rebecca says best one that includes document generation. Hmm. I would need to know a little bit more about document generation. What do you mean by that? Good question. Legal documents. Oh, okay. So you're saying creating templates for legal documents or you're doing oh, in Word. So let me ask you this, Rebecca. So, you are a business and you're trying to either sell legal documents, like templates or to interact. I need a little bit more details.

I'll, I'll find it in a second. Jason, from Fire Spring is bringing up something. Let me know what's going on with the details. Streamlining the process of creating documents. There are a couple different ones, depending, again, there's a lot. I like Taskly. I see what the logo is, but I don't know how to spell it. There are a couple different ones. I mean, if I'm looking at that, I might even go with Nucey possibly. Streamlining the process of creating a document. That's tough for me because I would want to know, do you have to have input from other people on your team? Is it just for your own workflow?

If I was doing something where I'm trying to create documents, I would probably Nucey and again, this is just if I'm trying to go with clients and everything like that, and I want everything where I can have a plug and play, I build out the templates and then everyone on my team can just access and build it out afterwards.

Better proposals or Nucey. I would think. Oh, other teammates and or for clients. So, if I'm doing really advanced ones, I'd probably do Better Proposal. I use both. I have more contracts with Nucey. Because it's more based on a one pager. But every single time I use Better Proposal, I always get compliment. How well it looks. I mean, this Better Proposal probably is my bet. Not only that, because you can build your own branding kit too, so everything's on point. And your team can work with it. And then your clients go right with it. Good question.

Three must have no code tools. Okay, Susan. I'm glad you asked that question. It really depends. Okay. So, so if I'm trying to build out automation. I'm probably going to go with Zapier. Yeah. We could go with Integromat. And all the other ones, but like, if I'm just going to go with like general automations to save you time, I'm probably going to build out Zapier, probably going to go with that one.

And that's if I'm business related. If I'm trying to figure out, just automating my life. And just things that I have to do around the house. I probably go with IFTTT because then it's allowing you to basically create different automations, like a recipe. And it's all based, it's really just really easy stuff. But I feel that Zapier is more leaning towards business.

If I'm doing something where I'm just trying to automate my life as much as possible. I'm going to go with IFTTT. If, so yeah, that's where I would start. If for me personally, for my business, the one thing that I use is probably repurposed.io. They don't get talked about enough. Basically, this is when I was working with Vayner Media in the Sasha Group.

So, this was broken down where we did a challenge where Gary has about 25 people working for him in building content. So, we built the Gary V Content Model 2.0 using Repurpose. So, with one person and using repurpose.io, we replace 25 people. And the way that you do this is you're plugging this in. You're live streaming. And then you're dropping timestamps and it does it automatically.

Or you can set it up and you can distribute your content and it makes all of those pieces for you. So, say for instance, you make a 30-piece, 30-minute live stream. Well, I can make 37 pieces of content with automation right off the bat. So, this pretty much changed my entire workflow. And what used to take like four full-time VAs. Now it takes 20 minutes a week to do all this.

And we have a podcast. We have a YouTube channel. We have all of these different outlets, and I don't think repurpose. And he's awesome. That's his company. And they just kill it. They just kill it. So again, I probably, I would spend tons of time if I did not have this.

So, Repurpose is definitely up there on it. Let's see. What else do I use a lot? Again, it depends on what you're trying to do with your business, and if you're using it more for content creation or just saving time or money in your business. The other one that I really like, and although you could do it similar to like Typeform or anything like that, you can go with, my favorite is probably Paper Form.

And that's because not only does Paper Form have tons of integrations, the automations are just like second to none. So, we actually built a marketplace using Paper Form and a Google Sheet and yeah. Oh it, now, if I was going to build a full, like a full marketplace, which we're getting contracted a lot to do now, I probably use ShareTribe though.

I probably use ShareTribe. I pretty much use ShareTribe, maybe, seven times a week, at least. But we've spun up, built out niche marketplaces so quickly. We've built a Ikea marketplace. We've built a marketplace for App Sumo. So yeah, a lot of good stuff. That was a good question, Susan. So, I hate to be that vague, but it kind of depends on what your business strategy is or what you want.

If you're trying to go for automation mockups. Oh, now if I'm trying to go up for mockups. And I'm trying to look at the most robust, No Code tool. If I'm using a mock-up, I'd probably use Sketch.com. The reason behind it is it integrates with so many other systems. I can be mapping things out, giving it to my devs.

It's not a big deal at all. If I don't have that kind of team and I need to do the animation. And I need it to code in the background, Supernova. People don't talk about enough Supernova. You can build out all your animations. It writes the code. You can send it out. You'll be good to go.

Are large corporations using no code or just startups? No large corporations are using it. Depends on how they're using it. Again, I don't want to generalize. I'm sure some don't if you're using Windows, we're going to have to go a different way. Y'all if you use a Mac, keep on going.

Yeah. So, Susan was talking about bigger companies. I've seen bigger companies use no code sometimes to use it with smaller teams to build out ideas or build out MVPs very quickly. And then again, bring it back in house and then they'll code. Either way, but I mean, if you look at some of the bigger companies. Again, it depends on what people call no code, because some people call Shopify no code. Some of the biggest e-commerce stores online are Shopify, which would be no code. So, yeah. Good question.

Really good session. Again, no code this is really just the introduction to it. There's tons and tons and tons of apps and platforms being made with no code. What I would encourage you to do is write down the functionality in what you're trying to get out of no code, and then decide to use those platforms. Because there's just, it's endless. It really is endless.

Susan Stibal: Do you have any final remarks?

Doc Williams: Start and just begin and start experimenting and start working on it. And if you don't know how to do it, no code community on Twitter is so vast and there's so many people trying to help. So, reach out to me, reach out to anyone that's an expert in that type of no code platform. They'll be happy to help you. And yeah, just keep building. It will be good times.

For More Information

Susan Stibal: Doc, that was terrific. And if you want to see more of Doc, check out his build with me on YouTube. It's very similar to this session. So powerful, so much information that can really change the course of a startup or even intrepreneurs. So, thanks so much, Doc.

Doc Williams: Definitely. Thank you so much. Bye bye.

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Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Steph Smith, Trends.co / The Hustle / Hubspot

Brian Ardinger: We are excited to have Steph Smith here with the Hustle and Trends to talk about one of these amazing new trends that we're seeing. It's the whole move to remote work. Steph is the Head of Trends and Product Manager at the Hustle, which is a great newsletter, if you don't subscribe to that. Trends is their exclusive group. And I I've got to say it's, it's one of the best groups out there to talk about new things that are happening out there, new business leaders, things along those lines.

She's got a new book out called Standing Out in 2020. Doing Content Right. And I know she's been doing a series of sessions on that. It's an eBook. You can check it out at stephsmith.io. She's been blogging for a ton of time. And she's also been in this world of remote work. Been a digital nomad for a while. So, with that, I'm going to just turn over to Steph. And we'll talk the trend of remote working.

Steph Smith: Sweet. Thanks so much. That was a great intro, Brian. Today, I'm going to be talking about something that I care a lot about. I saw some other people in the chat mention that they've been working remotely for a long time. Two, I'm going to be talking about thinking past the office and designing what I call resilient, remote teams. And I do this in a little bit of a different way than I think most presentations on this topic are, which give you a lot of super, super concrete, like you must do this.

I like to think of this more so as how do we think about what has changed? What does that mean? And what can we learn from this? So, I use three books and I'll get into that in a second to actually convey some of these points. But just quickly, I don't want to talk about myself very much. Brian gave me a great intro. All you need to know is that I have been working remotely for the last four or five years now.

And I did that originally at a company called Top Tell, which was one of those kind of remote first companies built from the ground up to be remote. Now I work at a company called The Hustle and I've done some remote training for different companies. And in general, have been nomadding around for the last couple years as I work remotely. So that's enough about me. Let's talk about where we are in this world.

As I mentioned before COVID there was a series of companies I'd say only a couple dozen of scale that were built up to be remote. From the ground up, they said, you know what, we're never going to have any offices. Or if we do, we're going to be remote first. Companies like Zapier Basecamp, Web Flow. All these companies were built from the ground up to facilitate positive remote working environment.

Now, as we all know, you saw this kind of trend, the slow trickle of people that were searching for remote work overtime. This is Google trends from 2004 to present. Then as we all know, 2020. crazy year. We see this big spike and we're all remote, whether we want to be or not. And this includes huge companies like Google, Cora, Coinbase. Shopify that at least are either going to be remote for several, several years or in some cases like Shopify have just claimed that they are now remote first from here forward.

The question then becomes with all of these companies with now millions, if not billions of people that are kind of thrown into this new environment, what happens. What happens to these organizations that weren't built from the ground up? Like Zapier, Base Camp, or Buffer.

Some of the questions that I have here, allude to what I'll be talking about in this presentation. So how does remote work or the shift influence how people interact with one another? How does it influence the social fabric or culture of the company? How does this change how potentially leaders should or can operate at these organizations?

And in general, this all brings me back to the title of this presentation. How do we build resilient teams? And resiliency in this case means teams that thrive in the environment that they're put in, right. It doesn't feel like they're kind of pushing against walls. It doesn't feel like there's friction to achieve certain things.

It feels like they're put in an environment where they're put in a place to succeed by nature, by the nature of the environment that they're in. So, as I said, this presentation is really based on three books that I've read and, and I think are excellent. It's Give and Take, Algorithms to Live By and The Four Tendencies.

And I like using books like this to really frame these conversations because these books are actually not based on remote work at all. They're based on human psychology. They're based on how people interact in given situations or environments. And then I just layer on a question. Is this still true with remote work or how does this change as people go from an in-person environment to remote.

And so, we'll talk specifically about how giving and taking behavior may change with remote work. We'll talk about how we can design systems. So, using something From Algorithms to Live By, Game Theory. How do we incentivize people to actually act in their best interest? Because they don't always do that on their own.

And how do we in general make remote work sustainable. And then I'll talk about the potential archetype of remote worker using this four tendencies framework. To preface the three books and the three things that we'll talk about, I want to jump back to summarize where we are.

So, we as a society had a majority of people working in offices. And now we have a majority of people working remotely. And I like to kind of facetiously say that when you work in an office, you work in a box. And that box is predefined for you. And even though it's a little facetious in terms of the analogy, a lot of that is true in the sense that you have a lot of things, whether it's, you know, where you're physically working, how you're working exactly, when you're working.

A lot of that is super predefined for you. And for some people that's actually better. Some people that's worse. I'm not trying to ascertain whether one is better or worse, but the idea is that before you had a lot of things mapped out for you, right? And now when you're working remotely, the way, the analogy that I like to give is that box is kind of like stripped clean.

So, you get rid of the walls, you get rid of exactly when, how you work. And now a lot of people are left to figure out how to build their own box. And what I see a lot of people doing, whether it's individuals or companies is they basically do this Control C Control V where they basically say, you know, we had all these things, these processes, these systems, these frameworks that worked in our office. So, let's just take all those and let's paste them into our new environment.

And that can work. But what I think we have a unique opportunity to do is in fact, rethink the box. So, build our new box from the ground up. So instead of just copying everything and saying, oh, this worked there. It should work here. Let's just rethink what are the things that we should operate by in this new environment? How do we rebuild our box?

And something more important than that is instead of giving our employees a new box saying, hey, this is your box. Please take it. And again, abide by these rules or operations or logistics. Let's actually just give them the tools to build their own box.

And this kind of summarizes part of what I'm, I'm getting to at least to preface three examples is, is a quote from Amir. Who's a CEO of Doist one of those kind of remote first and companies. And he says, basically, remote. Isn't just a different way to work. It's a different way to live. We have to acknowledge that we're kind of blurring these lines and people, you know, experience isolation, anxiety, depression. And in general, we need to figure out ways in systems to resolve this new, almost more complex issue where you have people, people's work and their lives just meshing into this continuous system.

All right. So, what are the cornerstones of remote work? I mentioned this because this bleeds into some of the examples. So remote work overall, at least prior to COVID, when people weren't forced into it, really prioritized three things over three other things. Meaning output trumped input, which meant that didn't matter exactly how many hours you were working or exactly what you did to get to the impact that you're driving for a company.

What mattered was the impact, the output. Similarly, remote work tended to favor autonomy over administration. Again, this idea that didn't matter exactly how you got from Point A to Point B. You had the autonomy to figure that out. And similarly, flexibility over rigidity. So, let's keep these cornerstones in mind throughout the presentation. And consider that even those cornerstones sound kind of resoundingly positive, all of us at face value are like, yes, I love being graded on my output. I love being graded or given the autonomy to figure out how I deliver that output. And I love being given flexibility.

But let's just keep those in mind and consider that they're not always strictly positive. All right, so let's dive into the first example in the book, Give and Take. Obviously, these books are very in depth and I only covered one small sliver of them in this presentation. But the key takeaway from Give and Take is that Adam Grant, he's a professor at Wharton, amazing writer as well. He talks about three different types of individuals. So, Givers, Takers, and Matchers.

All you need to know about them for the purpose of this presentation is that givers basically believe in this world as a positive sum game. Meaning they believe in mutually beneficial situations. They're willing to give without expecting anything in return.

Takers are kind of the opposite of that. They think zero sum game. I'm sure you can imagine or conceptualize people in your life that you've encountered that really are trying to get ahead at the expense of other people.

Now matchers fall somewhere in the middle. They basically believe, or kind of function off of this idea of reciprocity and fairness. All right. So with that in mind, the question or sorry, before I even get to the question, something I want to mention is that the whole premise of Adam Grant's book is a little surprising in that most people would expect that given Takers and Matchers and Takers in particular, their approach to life in terms of kind of utilizing other people to get ahead or prioritizing their own growth over other people, you would expect those people to be the most successful.

Now, interestingly enough, he found that Givers were both at the very top of the spectrum of success, and the very bottom. You can notice two different types of Givers here. One is selfless. One is, is otherish. All you need to know here is that Otherish Givers are Givers but have found a way to prioritize their own needs.

So really interesting that Givers not only elevate other people, but they are actually the most successful on their own. So, this is kind of a summary or a quote from Adams, which basically says they succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of others around them. You'll see that the difference lies in how Giver success creates value instead of just claiming it.

So, in general, I think the obvious takeaway here is that we want more Givers at our organizations. Now the question becomes, and this will be a repetitive question throughout, is this the same with remote work. Or how does this change with remote work? Some of the sections here are based on actual data sources.

This one, not so much. This is me more hypothesizing. And what I've come to in terms of my many years leading teams, interacting with teams, being individual contributors on teams is that because if we remember the cornerstones of remote work, we prioritize output. We prioritize impact. That which in remote, all that matters is that impact, right?

Are you delivering value? Are you worth your salary? Are you hitting your KPIs. In person when you're in an office? All that stuff matters. But it's also weighed against certain unspoken things, unspoken rules, like the amount of time you're spending in the office. Whether you're on time for things, whether you stay late to help another employee in general, everyone knows who the team players are in an office.

That's not always true when you work remotely. I think if you've worked remotely over the last couple months, especially if you were in an office before, you can probably resonate with this idea. In remote, there's a couple thing, other things that I want to know. This idea of staying on longer to, you know, as a Giver, let's say you're helping other people.

That's super difficult to quantify because when you're working remotely again, our work life and our lifeline blend together. So, it's actually hard, if I were to ask anyone on this call, how many hours did you spend this week working remotely? I think a lot of people would struggle to actually quantify that.

So then layering on, am I working extra? Am I not working enough? It's really hard to kind of parse that out. Additionally, if you support someone. Let's say I have a friend and her name is Sally at work. And she says, Hey Steph, can you help me with this project? And it actually takes like, you know, five hours out of my day.

I end up helping her. All of that work for better or for worse is hidden online. Sally knows about it. But everyone else at work, didn't see me stay late to help Sally. They didn't see the output of that work. They didn't see the Giving behavior. And so, in addition to this, KPIs in general, when you work remotely by nature of trying to ascertain that output of people, tends to be more individual. You even hear people use terms like manager of one when they're working remotely.

And in general, the idea that I'm trying to get across here is that by nature, when you're working remotely, because there are so much emphasis on output and impact, which has many positives, basically takes away the recognition that you typically get in an in-person environment of these Givers, and what happens is these Givers end up burning out, they become more of those selfless givers that you saw at the tail end.

Instead of the Otherish givers that were the most successful individual. And something I want to call out here is that regardless of intentions, morals, or values, and what I'm saying here is it doesn't matter if someone's a good person or bad person. That's not what I'm trying to ascertain. Bad incentive structures result in bad behavior, no matter how good of a person you think you are.

So, what's the takeaway here? Again, I'm trying to go through this quickly, so I won't go through everything. But the idea here is that you still won't have a water cooler. In the office, which almost acted like, you know, animals in the wild. There's like a certain hierarchy and there's a kingdom and, and it kind of regulates things, right. You just subtly, but it does. You don't have that anymore with remote, or at least it's not created without intentionality.

And so, there are a couple quick things that you can do. The first thing is just ask your team very simply who helped you this week? Who did you work with? Where did you put in extra hours? Where did someone else put in extra hours for you? You must ask this because it will not be surfaced as naturally as in the office.

The second thing is build KPIs to incentivize teamwork. This is a little harder to do because again, when you work remotely, you're trying to ascertain output. But think about how you can do this to incentivize teamwork. So, you're not kind of encouraging people to act more as Takers versus Givers. And then finally create an environment where you're not just recognizing good behavior or giving behavior, but you're actually rewarding it.

So, some companies like GitLab have actually started things like micro bonuses, where in addition to the bonus structures or the compensation structures that you get from your boss, other people around you can actually reward you based on your giving behavior. Because that's really important. You're not just recognizing it in like kind of shout outs or things like that, but you're actually rewarding this behavior. So, you're incentivizing people to continue doing it.

The final thing I want to call out is that you can do as much as you can once you have people at an organization to incentivize giving behavior. But you can also kind of integrate this into your hiring process. Which means bringing in people who are more naturally Givers.

So, Adam Grant mentions in his book. This is directly from Give and Take where he, during the hiring process asks this question, can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved? And the idea here is that people who are Givers tend to mention either people at the same level as them or below them in terms of the people that they've helped.

And it's a natural response. Of course, this is again, not quite scientific versus Takers, tend to mention people that are above them. That they've helped, because again, there's this nature of people who are Takers, trying to get ahead and using things like status to get ahead. So, something to keep in mind as well as you're hiring.

So, the second example that I want to go through is from Algorithms to Live By. Again, excellent book. This is a book where basically they take principles from software development or software engineering and use it to help us think through problems that are outside of that scope. So, things like Cashing Theory or Kneeling or making intractable problems tractable.

The one that I want to talk about today is Game Theory. So, in Game Theory, I'm not going to go into depth, but it's this idea that within a game, there are certain rules. And within those rules, they incentivize people to act a certain way. And once a game is predefined, you tend to get to this equilibrium where all the players individually are acting their own best interest.

But sometimes the kind of aggregate of those actions actually may result in outcomes that are worse for everyone. Again, depending on the rules that were set for that game. And this equilibrium that I'm specifically talking about is called the Nash Equilibrium. And it's this idea again, there's this kind of long definition and talks about a stable state.

The idea here is the Nash Equilibrium is within an environment within a game. It's the outcome or the optimal state, where there's no incentive for any individual to deviate. Now, this may not sound super actionable. So let me give you a precise example of what I'm talking about. So, with remote work, a lot of remote first companies tend to go with unlimited vacation.

And I think this is something that probably more companies will end up moving towards as well. But something you keep in mind here is the Nash Equilibrium of unlimited vacation approaches, zero days. And the reason for this it's a little counterintuitive because you think unlimited vacation sounds amazing. Sounds like a great perk.

Well, what happens with unlimited vacation is that people look to be perceived as more loyal, more committed, more dedicated than their peers. And therefore, they look to take just slightly less vacation than their peers. And what happens is a cascading effect, which approaches zero.

This is actual data from Buffer's Data Remote Report from 2019, where you can see in blue, the amount of vacation offered, and then in orange, the amount of vacation that was actually taken. So, you can see around 30, 35% of people had unlimited vacation. And if you look at how that's actually distributed, most of the people who had unlimited vacation took anywhere from no vacation to two weeks’ vacation. Versus the people who had, you know, six weeks, five weeks, four weeks were likely to actually take that amount of vacation.

So, what is my point here? Well, in Game Theory is this idea where basically you have a game and then those rules are set for the game. And then you just see what behaviors actually emerge from those given set of rules. Well, I think with remote work, we have to be a lot more intentional about not just kind of throwing rules out there, again, kind of redefining our box and, and not just taking a box that already exists.

And you can do that through Mechanism Design, which is kind of flipping that script and saying, what are the behaviors that we actually want and what rules do we need to establish to actually generate those behaviors? So kind of again, reversing the question and figuring out what behaviors you want to incentivize. And then figuring out what rules need to be in place to actually achieve that.

As I mentioned, the box has changed, the game has changed. So, here's a couple examples of things that people struggle with from the same report, when they're working remotely. It's things like unplugging, loneliness, distractions, culture, and communication. If you were to ask the same question to people who are working in an, in an office, these would not be the case, which shows us the game has changed. The problems have changed. The things that we're solving for have changed and therefore you must come up with rules or incentives so that people act in their own best interest.

So again, you're thinking backwards. You're asking the question, what are the KPIs that you need to actively design to encourage people to, for example, have a work life balance outside of just the freedom to define their own. And this is really important because it sounds counterintuitive to say a I'm actually going to define more rules. Because flexibility sounds like a great perk or sounds like a great thing to have. But actually, you can help your employees in certain situations to actually help them again, this idea of building their own box.

Something I want to call out here is again, is Wall Street, which is again, the most like capitalist type environment there is, has mandatory off hours. So that brokers don't push themselves to their Nash Equilibrium, which would be the sleepless equilibrium, where they're constantly trading. So, you have to think backwards and figure out how to design an environment that people succeed in.

Quick couple examples before we move on to the third example. The third book are things like a minimum vacation policy, mandatory days that they must take off, allowing people to take back their calendars and actually block off significant parts so that they're not encountering what people call Calendar Tetris. I like this example from Keith, I don't know Keith personally, and this was pre COVID.

But basically, he decided to close his office on Friday. Simple things like this, where he basically said it's a mandatory weekend. You are not allowed to work, even though it seems strange in a digital environment. And I'm giving you 50 bucks to go eat at your favorite restaurant. So, think about how you are intentionally designing systems for your employees.

Finally, third example that I'll breeze through is the Four Tendencies. And I'll caveat this example with this quote directly from Gretchen Rubin, the author that says the happiest, healthiest, most productive people aren't those from a particular tendency, but rather the people who have figured out how to harness the strengths of their tendency, counteract the weaknesses, and build lives that work for them.

So, what is the Four Tendencies? It's this idea that there as it sounds like four tendencies. Upholder, Obliger, Questioner, and Rebel. Now these two highlighted in green are not highlighted, because they're the best. As Gretchen said in that quote, it's just that they're they are the most common. Now the Four Tendencies is basically a two-by-two framework, which identifies how people respond to expectations or accountability.

So, do they readily meet outer expectations? Do they readily meet inner expectations? Do they resist both of them or do they kind of fluctuate towards or air towards one or the other? So, I personally am a Questioner. I resist outer expectations and I meet inner expectations. To give a quick example, if I wanted to get fit, having a gym buddy as an outer expectation expecting me to show up that actually wouldn't help me. And that actually is something that I've tried to do throughout my life. Hasn't worked.

Meanwhile, something like actually understanding the science behind why I should be fit or kind of convincing myself that my identity, or I want to be the type of person who, you know, respects their health. That works for me. So as a Questioner, I meet inner expectations. I resist outer expectations.

Now I did a poll on Twitter a while ago, got around 400 votes from people who had been working remotely again, pre COVID. And it was interesting to see that the most popular tendencies among this again, non-scientific poll were Questioners and Rebels, and I thought, huh, that's interesting.

If you remember questioners and obligers for the most common in the overall population with remote workers, or at least those who sought out remote work. Where questioners and rebels with the, the familiarity or the common thread here is that they both resist outer expectations. I thought that was really interesting.

And I think that relates to this idea that there's a level of self-selection or misalignment with outer expectations of society, of people trying to at least identify their own work norms, identify their own vision or how they can actually build something, build their own box. And this isn't again, mean that they're more successful or less successful.

It's just perhaps that they actively sought out this type of environment. Now, what's the takeaway here. This is a brief section compared to the other two, but it's the idea that people actually respond differently to inner and outer accountability. We used to have everyone in an office and that didn't necessarily work with everyone.

Now we have everyone remote that doesn't necessarily work for everyone. So, I think the idea here is that leaders need to actually learn past, just the high level this person is good at these skills. This person is good at these skills. This is my top player. This is my, you know, less valuable player. And more so think about how to tailor their leadership stylers to figure out how to motivate their employees. Whether they're in a remote environment or not. But especially if you're in a remote environment, how do you incentivize, if we just quickly go back, how do you incentivize Upholders and Obligers when Questioners and Rebels tend to naturally seek out this environment?

And on the flip side, if you're in an office, how do you naturally incentivize Questioners and Rebels so that they're motivated when Upholders and Obligers may more naturally fit into those traditional environments. So just something to consider. Right.

This is the final slide I have, and I know we're running out of times, but the idea here is just, again, there are certain things or certain ways that humans tend to interact in, in an person environment.

And they don't necessarily act the same ways in a remote environment. And in particular, they may not even act in ways that benefit themselves all the time. So, we must as leaders, if you're leading a team, if you're leading a company, It's good to consider some of these things and figure out A: How do I encourage Giving through discovering, hiring, promoting, and acknowledging and rewarding as I said before Givers.

How do I select incentives or develop the right systems so that we're using Mechanism Design and not just throwing people into a game and hoping that they choose the best outcomes that are best for them or best for everyone?

And then finally, how do we actually learn about our people past the face value in terms of their skills and figure out how to harness their unique strengths, whether they're in an in-person environment or a remote environment.

If you want to find me, or if you have questions, happy to answer them now, but you're also welcome to email me or DM me on Twitter and that is it.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Courtney Powell, COO and Managing Partner at 500 Global. Courtney and I talk about investing in emerging markets, the differences between startup and corporate innovation, and the current market dynamics that startups and corporate should be paying attention to.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Courtney Powell, COO and Managing Partner at 500 Global

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Courtney Powell. She is COO and Managing Partner of 500 Global. Welcome to the show.

Courtney Powell: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here Brian.

Brian Ardinger: In a certain way, it's coming back to our original roots of the Inside Outside podcast. Where the original podcast episodes were an inside look at startups outside the valley. And we thought, hey, what better way to have a conversation around that then inviting you to talk about what's going on at 500 Global.

Because for those who may not be familiar with 500’s global $2.7 billion under assets and management. You've invested in probably 2,000 to 3,000 startups around the world. And 45 Unicorns have come out of that, in nine different countries. So, you've definitely been on the forefront of looking at what entrepreneurship is outside the valley. Can you talk about your journey into this innovation space from entrepreneur to corporate innovator to venture capital?

Courtney Powell: You kind of mentioned a little bit about 500's history in terms of starting in the Valley, but then pretty quickly deciding to invest worldwide. So, I actually came to know 500 pretty early into my own entrepreneurial journey.

So, in 2010, I was based in Austin, Texas. And I had already actually been a part of a really early startup that had done well. But I joined when I was 19. So, one of the first employees with the two other gentlemen who started it. I kind of watched firsthand as that company went from literally being, I remember it so clearly in my mind, it was like a yellow legal pad that they were describing the technology on that they wanted to do.

The company was called Boundless Network and they were trying to create automated group buying software for corporations who wanted to buy pens and koozies. And drive down the cost by having this kind of group buy system. So I saw really up close what it was like to go from this legal pad to raise what I think amounted to, you know, more than $50 million ultimately.

And the company then got acquired down the road by Zazzle's. I saw this journey and right away knew that this was my calling. I wanted to start companies. And so about five years after I started working at Boundless in 2010, I launched my own company, which at the time was really early in marketing automation consulting.

So, I was doing Salesforce implementation, also marketing automation consulting. That taught me a lot about what it was like to run my own company and particular consulting firm, which you know, has a lot of challenges.

A few years into that, I was struck with an idea for my first tech startup. And that was around helping consumers when they had problems with big companies like Time Warner Cable, or Airlines, or, you know, Telecoms or all these other companies.

So long story short, I started the company in Austin. And in Austin, the venture network at that time was very small. It's still relatively small, but very, very small then. And I remember feeling like, okay, I don't really know how to get plugged in to the network here. I am a female, a young mother trying to raise capital. I'm the only woman in the room and, you know, in 99% of the cases.

And somebody told me about 500. So, 500 had just started, you know, they were a year, I guess, into existence. And I made my way to the Valley. Applied to the accelerator. Got into one of their early accelerators. And that was really my first introduction to the world of Silicon Valley. And having received investment from 500. After that, I then ran that company for a few years before shutting it down. And then got into building consumer real estate tech.

And I eventually became CEO of another company called Agent Pronto. Which is still up and running. Ultimately it got acquired by Fidelity. And then after my time at Agent Pronto, I joined Keller Williams. And I joined Keller Williams, not as a real estate agent or at the brokerage level, but at the parent company level. Where I focused not just on building out consumer tech initially, but eventually got into corporate dev.

And began helping them to diligence companies, look at investment opportunities, and long story short decided that, you know, I wanted to move it to venture someday and see the other side of the table and eventually made my way to 500.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. I want to dive into 500 and what you're doing now. And can you talk a little bit about the strategy that 500 has employed to uncover high value opportunities in under-invested markets?

Courtney Powell: Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned, it was really two things that 500, I like to say, got right. One was this idea of diversification. You know, especially when 500 started in 2010, the idea of investing in a 100, 200, 300, 400 companies a year was very, very new and controversial. Diversification was really important.

And then as I mentioned, also investing outside of the Valley. Even when 500 was looking for example, to move the office from Mountain View to San Francisco in 2013, that was still odd. Let alone the idea of, you know, investing today in over 80 countries.

That really just came from the belief that we knew that there was talent everywhere. And really, it was just a matter of being able to pair that talent and those opportunities with capital. And I would also say the practices that maybe were commonplace in Silicon Valley, that in other countries and other regions, weren't yet as mature as what we were used to in the Valley.

So that combination of both the investment practices. The friendliness toward founders. The standardized terms. You know, the combination of really wanting to not just provide capital, but also make sure that we were bringing founder friendliness, standardized terms, to these other regions and just trying to, you know, meet these founders who were creating incredible ideas and definitely had the skillset to be able to take things forward. That was really the spark and the ethos that has built 500 into what it is today.

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting. You talked about some of the positive benefits that the Valley brings as far as when it comes to venture, and that. Can you talk to maybe some of the bad habits that venture capital in Silicon Valley, you try to avoid when going into different markets?

I think about some of the things of over-indexing, for example, as you have to be a Stanford grad or things along those lines that you typically hear about. How do you avoid some of the habits or bad habits or traps that venture capital in the valley is known for?

Courtney Powell: I mean, I think it's definitely well-known that venture capital as a whole has a diversity problem. I think of that problem, not just in terms of the demographic diversity, but also the geographic diversity as well. So, I think with 500, in particular from the beginning, there was a focus on a couple of different things.

Number one, having been built by operators and people who didn't have the Stanford background necessarily. I think made the firm keenly aware that there were many other people out there who maybe had a non-traditional path who wasn't the 20-year-old Stanford male.

And so right away was really actively looking to not only invest in founders who were diverse, but hire teams, investment decision makers who were diverse. So today, I mean, I know there are very few funds and firms led by females. I think we have been really open with our own diversity stats and our own commitment with regard to investing in underrepresented founders.

And as I said, also, geographically. I think this is a huge opportunity, as well. So, I do think that you see today is still only just a few percentage points of VC actually being invested into women. I think that's such an interesting stat because around the world, even in the Middle East, for example, where people often think that, of course there couldn't be like a huge amount of deal flow of female founders, almost 30% of our portfolio is female founded. In the Middle East. 30%.

So, this isn't a pipeline problem. It's not a pipeline problem in the U S. It's not a pipeline problem anywhere else in the world. It is really the intent, and I think the makeup of the teams who are making investment decisions.

Brian Ardinger: So how do you go about identifying talent and how is it different across cultures, across languages and that? Are there things that specifically you look for?

Courtney Powell: That's an interesting question. And I think it varies a lot. It has varied over time, as our firm has evolved from starting as an accelerator to today investing multiple stages. All the way from pre-seed to pre-IPO. You look for very different skillsets. But at the end of the day, what has been really critical for 500, is a commitment to, you know, the original ethos backing these founders all around the world. All around the various underrepresented communities.

And I think also, you know, the belief that we have that's core, is we say that our mission statement is uplifting people and economies around the world through entrepreneurship. And what we mean by that is we want people who believe that investing is actually the best way to advance societies. To advance individuals as well.

So, you know, we want to make sure that we're doing that in a way that is contributing to the development of these ecosystems. And it's done in a sustainable way. And I don't mean sustainable in this sense. You know, more of like the ESG mindset. But more like we want to be contributing to communities where we're hiring people who are going to be long-term in a community. Who are going to bring skillsets back to that community, that they are local to? We really try to avoid the fly in fly out model.

And in these ecosystems, we say that we are both hyper-local and global. And that's really true. We're building, you know, long-term teams on the ground. And of course, keeping connected back to our kind of home base in Silicon Valley. But we really believe that we can contribute to an ecosystem in that way.

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about the diversity in the companies and the people that you invest in. What are some of the opportunities that you're seeing in emerging markets, whether it's region specific or sector specific? What are you seeing out there?

Courtney Powell: This year in particular, I've spent a lot of time in the, in the middle east and Africa and Pakistan, which has been really fascinating. And the key lesson that I've learned at my time at 500 is that founders are the same every where.

Like the energy, the creativity, this need to kind of bring to life some value or some product, you know, that is inside of you. That energy is the same whether you're talking to somebody in Cairo or, you know, in Iowa, or in Silicon Valley, it doesn't matter.

I think some of the trends that we're seeing definitely a huge boom in FinTech. But I'll qualify that and say that the types of FinTech plays that are exciting in emerging markets are very different in some sense than what you might see today coming from the Valley. So, a huge emphasis on financial inclusion.

So, if we just take Pakistan for a moment. 230 million people in Pakistan. Less than 300,000 people have ever made an investment in the stock market. So that tells you, you know, the gap that exists. Or I was in Senegal recently. And Senegal, the population size is escaping me. I think it's about 30 million. But less than 30,000 people have salaried jobs.

So, the ability to create really infrastructure level products for financial inclusion, to bring people out from the shadow banking world and into a more traditional and hopefully better system, I think is really incredible.

Brian Ardinger: We talked earlier about you had a chance to spend some time in the corporate innovation space as well. I'd love to get your insights on how corporate innovation compares to some of the things that you're seeing in startup innovation. What's similar what's different?

Courtney Powell: It's very interesting to me now to reflect back on my time in corporate development and corporate innovation, because today I'm often asked to do that at the government level. Where we'll come in and work, you know, with these governments around the world who are trying to take on actually a very similar mandate, right? How do we incorporate this innovation into our own workforce? But at the same time, you know, there's also some startups that we're looking to back.

And, you know, I think what I took away from my time in corporate innovation, there's a lot of room to create misaligned incentives. What I hear and have seen is oftentimes we have corporations who are trying to either buy an innovation and become innovative by osmosis. Or by innovation and quell it immediately and create an exclusive product for themselves. Right.

And both of those things I think are very, very difficult to do. But I've also seen it work well where both parties are very upfront about what they can bring to the table. And the guardrails are really set up front. In order to either A: Allow innovation to continue to flourish or B: Know exactly where in the value chain they're expected to build into. You know when they're acquiring these companies.

We get asked a lot of time as 500 to help corporations create these programs for themselves, run accelerators, this type of thing. And I've seen some of that be successful as well. But again, it really has to be about understanding what those incentives need to be and, you know, making sure all parties are really aware of what the opportunities are.

So, I think it's tricky and I see it now much differently, you know, as the other side of the table, I think. I still think, you know, you've got great examples of companies out there who get it right. And build teams and let them run. And give them the mandate and the support needed to really, you know, find some innovative ways to bring themselves into the digital world.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. I don't know if it's similar type of dynamics in a startup realm around how difficult it is to create a billion-dollar company from scratch. I think it's probably similar odds for corporations oftentimes to think and become an innovative company.

Courtney Powell: I think that's a great way to put it. And you know, I actually think one of the best examples of corporate innovation that we've ever seen is probably not one that we think of as corporate innovation, which is Amazon.

Amazon building their core business of course their online retailers and platforms but having given teams within Amazon the freedom to experiment with something on like AWS who today is driving like the biggest profit center of the company.

But again, that's less of an initiative and more, just a result of a culture that it's okay to fail. That's really, I think the innovative characteristic that a lot of the programs that, you know, I think have evolved maybe could use more of.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Obviously, we're living in very uncertain times. Current market dynamics are changing, especially in the United States where you're hearing a lot of venture capital firms saying, you know, buckle up for downturns and recessions and everything around that. What is your take on the current market dynamics? What are you seeing both inside or outside the Valley?

Courtney Powell: You know, I've been asked this question a lot in emerging markets, because I think people are really looking to understand the U S position right now. I think generally speaking from my vantage point, it will be difficult to curb the volatility unless inflation is dealt with much more aggressively than what it has been in recent months and even years.

Now, I think in terms of how it's affecting the startup ecosystems around the world I am definitely seeing a slowdown at the later stage and that's across markets. You know, whether it's the US or the Middle East, or I'm hearing less about East Asia, but certainly already in Europe as well. Those later stage rounds, I mean, you had the market, you had Tiger, SoftBank, people kind of flooding these big, late-stage rounds who now are suffering in the public markets. And therefore, they don't have as much cash to cross over with. I think that's a real consideration for later stage investors.

We're seeing less of it in the seed stages. However, I think that people are pretty spooked. Founders are spooked. So, I think so many people are telling their own portfolios to really just kind of buckle down. And we're starting to see founders just try and close these rounds as quickly as possible.

And you know, it's a great opportunity to focus on, you know, on one side of the table, on your unit economics. And if you have the war chest right now, then it's a great time to deploy it. So, I think there will be people who come out ahead of this downturn. Certainly, it's a great time to deploy capital.

And I think we all hope that whatever this is over quickly. But in any case, the arc of history is still heading toward technology just leveling every single industry. So, I think there's still a lot of upside to be had.

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Brian Ardinger: We are definitely living in interesting times, and I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to tell us a little bit about what you're seeing out there. Courtney, if people want to find out more about yourself or about 500, what's the best way to do that?

Courtney Powell: For myself, you can follow me on Twitter @CourtneyPowell and same on LinkedIn. And with 500, you can check us out at fivehundred.co or follow us @500globalVC on Twitter.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Courtney, thanks again for being on the show. Really appreciate it. And looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Courtney Powell: Thanks so much Brian. Take care.

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On this week's Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Susan Golden, Author of the new book Stage (Not Age). Susan and I talk about the $22 trillion market opportunity in the emerging longevity economy from education to workforce to healthcare and housing. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Susan Golden, author of Stage (Not Age): How to Understand and Serve People Over 60, The Fastest Growing, Most Dynamic Market in the World. Welcome to the show, Susan.

Susan Golden: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Ardinger: To give a little background. You've got a lot of experience in this particular space. You teach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You're a Mentor at Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator. And a thought partner with Pivotal Ventures on their Caregiving Innovation Initiatives. I think the first question I'd like to ask is what drew you to this topic and exploring this $22 trillion market opportunity called the longevity economy.

Susan Golden: Great question. I have a background in public health and then went into venture capital in life sciences and health services. And I actually took a career break, which is part of what the book is about. That many people are going be taking career breaks if they're living 100 year lives.

And went back to school. And Stanford had just started a new program called the Distinguished Careers Institute, for people anywhere from their fifties to their eighties, come back and rethink what they want to do with the next chapters of their life. Because they're living much longer. And nobody should be thinking about retirement in their sixties because they have another 30 or 40 years to go.

And I learned about longevity at Stanford. There's a wonderful center on longevity that is thinking about how do you plan for the 100 year life. And it's very dynamic and it's not just about the typical impression that most people have, that all older adults are elderly, declining, frail need a whole variety of services.

Some will, and most of us will need something at some point in the end of our lives. But most people are going to be living very vibrant lives well into their eighties. And this has created a whole new economy that most people just don't know about. And particularly investors and innovators don't know about it.

Traditionally, if I asked my venture capital friends, why aren't you investing in this? They would say, oh, this is about senior housing and fall prevention and medication management. And that's a piece of it, but there is now, as you said, a $22 trillion worldwide market right here in the United States.

Right now, it's estimated to be about $8.6 trillion. As over 10,000 people are turning 65 every day and they're going to be living long lives. And over a third to a half of children being born today can expect to live to their 100s. And this longevity economy now includes all their spending, the stimulating new jobs that are being created for their products and services.

And companies are beginning to rethink their longevity strategy. Not just for products and services, and how could they have a multi-generational. But also, how to have a workforce that's multi-generational. And how to take advantage of that.

And most people don't realize that people over 50 have most of the wealth. They're responsible for 56% of consumer spending and 83% of wealth in the United States. So this is a gigantic market opportunity, gigantic innovation opportunity, and a great need to support healthy aging as our population is going to grow in this category.

Brian Ardinger: So, with the fact that it is growing and there's this massive opportunity, what are the biggest misconceptions out there? Why do you think more people aren't exploring this at this point?

Susan Golden: I don't think they fully understand the vibrancy that most older adults are in. And that they're in multiple stages. And they tend to lump all older adults in one category. All people 65 and older, or whatever demarcation one takes 70, 75 when there's great diversity in aging.

And I think we should be thinking about ageless people. But more and what I argue for in the book about stage, some companies have done this well. They recognize what stage of life somebody is in. So, they may be in a re-purposing stage or transitioning out of one career to another. They may want continuous learning and educational opportunities as I, and all my colleagues who've done the DCI program at Stanford were in. To refocus what we want to do next and what are our life priorities.

But there's other traditional consumer facing industries that people haven't thought how to reinvent them for people with longer lives and how to support their health span. And this includes housing alternatives and home modifications, fashion and accessories, education as we mentioned, entertainment, travel, you can think of that just virtually every consumer opportunity that is going to have a burgeoning longevity customer that needs to be understood.

And so, understanding what stage somebody is in, will give you a much broader perspective about their needs. There may be a caregiving stage even.

Brian Ardinger: In the book you talk about, you have five kinds of key stages. Can you walk through what those stages are? And what's important about them.

Susan Golden: So, I came up with the concept of 18 life stages that could be divided into five quarters of life. And I know that's funky math. But people traditionally think about life in three stages, which is your education, your working stage, and then your retirement stage. And now I think we have to think much more broadly.

So, I think about the first stage of life as sort of your growth stage. And when you're launching and you're first and beginning to experiment. And in your second quarter, you have different stages where you're doing continuous learning. You're developing some financial security. You might be caregiving, parenting, optimizing health.

And then the third and fourth stages I think are what might be considered new. Which is, I call them the Renaissance Stage where you're reinventing what you're doing. You're repurposing, you're relaunching. You may be transitioning, may have a portfolio of things that you're doing as I do. You might be an entrepreneur or an “olderpreneur” as people often say.

And then the later stages are maybe where some people think about more about their legacy planning for end of life. But people are living to 100. So, I put in a fifth quarter because we just don't know what that whole new paradigm is going to look like. And how people are going to be using those extra years.

Brian Ardinger: Well, a lot of it has been driven by other parts of the economy as well, whether it's technology or healthcare and that that's literally changing the way we live. What are some of the trends or things that you've seen that are allowing folks to be more productive as they age?

Susan Golden: Well, technology is certainly making a great change in the way we age and for the better. Technology services, anywhere from being able to access transportation more easily. It may not be wanting to drive yourself, but there's lots of transportation services and easy ways to get access to it. Uber, Lyft even have special programs to help you get to medical appointments and interface with medical system.

We have delivery of virtually everything you can possibly think of. You can do online banking, but interestingly, not all older adults are digitally literate and that's another innovation opportunity. Other countries have national programs to make sure all older adults have active digital literacy training every single year, not just one, but multiple times. That's where we're seeing it.

Tech in the home. We're going to see a lot of healthcare, not just during the pandemic, but continue to be telehealth services. People are thinking about remote health in the home going forward. And then working from home is creating all sorts of opportunities for older adults. Giving them enormous flexibility.

We see tech really supporting caregivers. This is a whole new need because there are 48 million unpaid caregivers in the United States. And that's some of the work I do as a thought partner to Pivotal Ventures. They're actually supporting an entire accelerator through Techstars, just devoted for innovations to support unpaid caregivers in the United States.

So, we're seeing an uptick and definitely more interest in this area. But most people, I would say most innovators and investors have not fully appreciated the enormous opportunities.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's what I like about this book. It not only lays out in granular details, some of the opportunities that you're talking about, but it really is for entrepreneurs. It outlines a number of different market opportunities. It gives the lay of the land and a call to action for entrepreneurs to start tackling some of these types of problems and that, that are out there. Having said that, what are some of the opportunities that you're seeing startups get into and maybe what opportunities are being missed.

Susan Golden: When people are coming into this industry, it's so big and so many different verticals you can focus on. It's better to focus on one and then expand. So sometimes I feel like companies are trying to solve every problem. And that can happen over time if you create a fabulous platform. But definitely focusing on a particular need, don't create a product that you think somebody will want to find out what the needs are.

And I really advocate for multi-generational teams. I think as companies have a multi-generation workforce which is going to be inevitable as people are going to have 60-year career spans with caregiving breaks, optimally at different times of their lives. But learning what somebody needs, the mantra and the industry is designed with not for. So don't guess what an older adult will want, bring them into the conversation early on.

And then companies that are, and entrepreneurs that have designed a product that's just for older adults and it calls out it's for you older person. And we could say that the stereotype there is big beige and boring is not the way to go. Is to create a product that might have still features that support an older adult’s needs, but could potentially be a multi-generational product.

And an example of that is OXO Kitchen Utensils. I don't know if you've ever purchased them, but they're very much designed to be easy on the hands. Great dexterity, compatibility. And they're good for young and old. And they're not sold at it's a multi-generational product. It's not sold just for older adults. It's not sold just for younger people.

But too often marketers targeted the 18- to 34-year-old category. And if you broaden your perspective and think about older adults in a very vibrant, and different stages of their life, you will have a much larger market to address.

Brian Ardinger: And I think you're seeing that in the marketing sense as well. Like you said, seems like most marketers always target that younger demographic. And some of the things that you're talking about, it's not even the age, it's a specific problem set. Which could, like you said, span different ages as the person grows and adapts. Talk a little bit about some of the products or services that you've seen or some of the trends that are most exciting to you.

Susan Golden: The ones that are really catching my attention is new housing alternatives. Traditionally people thought everybody wanted to go to a senior retirement community, assisted living facility. And over 90% of adults want to age in what they call age in place. But their current home may not be ideal for them. It may have many steps. It may be too big. They may feel isolated. So, there are some new interesting housing companies, basically housing alternatives. And one is an example that came out of the Techstars Accelerator two years ago called Upside Home.

And they rent apartments in buildings that are, multi-generational. Not just for old people. They fully furnish it so that it's compatible for an older adult. And this might be somebody who wants to spend three to six months in Florida or may want to get rid of their larger home. And it's no longer appropriate and have all the concierge type of products and services that come with apartment living, but they also have all the features that an older adult might need, including having access to caregiving as needed, transportation, food delivery. So, it's a really exciting new model that includes a variety of products.

So, they started sort of like in one area and expanded to create a platform that provides now health services to those who live in their apartment complexes as well, which is really exciting. Home modification itself is a whole burgeoning industry. If people want to stay in their home. And so that it enables them to live longer and better and in a healthy way. That's one whole industry.

And we're also seeing this in clothing and fashion. Whereas people let's say are active bike riders, but their current configuration of pockets and their clothing might not be ideal for their range of motion or if they have a rotator cuff issue. But you know, you could redesign it so that it meets the needs of an older adult. And that's just some of the things we're beginning to see as people look at a whole range of things.

But education would be another whole burgeoning industry. I see a lot of great companies starting up as a way to help people find productive ways of staying engaged from a learning, but also contributing their talents.

So older adults, teaching older adults. Older adults teaching younger. These are some really vibrant ways of creating community while somebody is aging in place to support them and make them feel very purposeful and connected. Which we know that social isolation, is one of the greatest risks of aging in your own home. And you have to stay connected in a purposeful way.

And then helping older adults find work. Most older adults do want to work longer. They may not want to work in the same position for as many hours. They might want flexibility, but so to younger adults we're finding. And so, as a need very much so to help older adults get matched, where they can contribute and benefit society with all their talent and expertise and wisdom.

Brian Ardinger: That's a great point. And we briefly talked about the fact that the workforce itself is changing, whether it's remote work or that. How do you see the corporate environment changing because of workforce and an age group that will be in the workforce for much longer?

Susan Golden: I think companies that will do well, having a multi-generational workforce, will do so because they will have continuous learning opportunities for their entire workforce. Upskilling will be critical because things are changing so rapidly.

There's a lot of companies right now that are offering wonderful “returnship” programs for people who do take care of giving breaks in particular, both men and women who may have been out anywhere from two years and more.

And give them an opportunity to come back to the company they worked with. Retool, upskill, and then they're offered an opportunity to decide if they want to take a permanent position. And these are 16-week paid returnships. And this is happening in a lot of progressive forward-thinking companies.

Companies are also providing upskilling just in terms of being financially literate. You cannot have successful aging if you've not planned for a longer life. And the financial services companies have done a particularly great job in this area. Not only for their clientele, Merrill Lynch is one company that I've written about that hired a financial gerontologists to help redesign their wealth management products. But also, to support their own employee. And have them planning for a much longer life.

So, companies that do it, not just for the customer, but do it for their employees are the ones that are really going to distinguish themselves and utilize their multi-generational workforce to continue to modify products and services going forward that can benefit all sectors of the economy.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, if I'm an entrepreneur out here listening to this broadcast, what are some of the resources or places to get more up to speed on this topic and others?

Susan Golden: I would say, look at the book. And the book and in the appendix has a long list of accelerators, incubators, articles to read, and to familiarize yourself with all the design challenges, the industry newsletters, podcasts. It's a nascent industry, but it's still, most people don't know about it. So, I put in a long appendix with different resources. And check out the different accelerators like Tech Stars. ARP has an innovation lab, so you can see some of the companies that have been developed through these accelerators and launched. And get a flavor of where some of the needs are.

But we don't know all the needs yet. This is new, old age is new. We don't know what everybody is going to need because there's going to be such diversity in aging. But we do know there's just a paucity of products and services to support healthy aging. And so that all people can live long lives with dignity and purpose.

Brian Ardinger: We talked a little bit about the U S market and that. But are there other markets, obviously you hear about Japan and their aging population. Are there any insights that we can gain from looking at other countries and what they're doing when it comes to the population?

Susan Golden: Yeah, I mean, some of the societies that have aged faster have a delayed retirement ages from mandatory retirement to much later. And I think that's a good practice. There's a lot of up-skilling that's going on in other countries. And the one that I mentioned earlier, digital literacy. Denmark does that. Israel does that. It's part of the fabric of respecting and integrating older adults into society.

So, we can learn a lot from other countries. Singapore has a whole incubator around how to develop products and services to support longevity. And we have some very excellent programs happening on a state level. But we do not yet have national policies that fully support healthy aging, including paid family care leave acts because we need that people will need to take breaks for caregiving.

There are 48 million unpaid caregivers in the United States. And many of them are women. And many of them have to take time off from their careers and then retool. Integrating that into a national strategy will be key to support healthy aging.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Susan, I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share this new opportunity. It's going to be exciting times for sure. A lot of challenges, a lot of opportunities out there for folks to take a stab at. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book Stage, Not Age, what's the best way to do that?

Susan Golden: The website for the book is StageNotage.com and I welcome speaking and learning about any new opportunities that people may have.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Susan, thank you again for coming on the podcast here. Super excited to see where this goes and looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Susan Golden: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Monica Kang, Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink Creativity. Monica and I talk about some of the obstacles and opportunities around creativity. And how individuals and companies can benefit from enhancing their curiosity, creativity, and courage. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Monica Kang, Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink Creativity

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Monica Kang. She is Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink Creativity. And also has a children's book called Have You Seen My Friends? So welcome to the show Monica.

Monica Kang: Thank you for having me.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we do in our Inside Outside community is ask our audience out there, who should we be talking to? And what are some of the interesting things that you're seeing out there? And somebody said, hey, you should talk to Monica. I think the first question I want to ask is probably a softball for you, but why does creativity matter. And why does it matter more today than ever before?

Monica Kang: I'll start with maybe the notion of, I feel creativity is one of the words that we don't realize how much of a jargon it is. Because we use it so much. We say like, oh, you're creative. You're not creative. Or like, that was creative. That was innovative. We put in our marketing materials. We put in our campaigns. We put it in how we describe things.

But if you really break it down, like, do people really understand or live the value that what it is. I think that was part of the reason why when you go back to why it's so important to talk about this is actually because of that. Because we use it all the time, but so many people don't realize the root and the nuances. And hence, don't realize this is jargon, that we're just keep throwing it around without the full intention.

And so, I first fell into it because of that very situation. I was originally in nuclear weapons security. Government work. Wanted to be a diplomat all my life. That having grown up in DC and in the States, as well as in Korea and worked in Europe. And, you know, hey, I'm not comfortable with science and math. So, this sounds like the perfect path. And like, I love people and building relations.

And so, I was good with a lot of things, but like creativity, wasn't really a thing that I would describe I was good at. Even though now looking back, I realize I had. And only until when I find myself really getting depressed and stuck in a dream job where I realized that I was finding myself literally crying to work, feeling upset, not knowing what to do in a job that I fell in love with.

And I'm like, what is wrong with me? Like I'm solving a very important mission. Mission-driven. Preventing bad guys from having nuclear weapons. We're working in the government. It's really hard to get into this industry too. And yet feeling stuck.

And what helped me gave the courage of, you know, walking to work instead of taking the bus to work. Getting curious about all these different surroundings. And realizing how one life decision can make a huge difference. Because now I felt so curious in the office got even more energetic. Even though the work description hasn't changed at all.

It got me curious about understanding about, well, what happened. And people did ask me like Monica, whatever you're doing, you seem happier. And that's where I realized creativity was one of the key elements.

I didn't know back then, but it was the mindset of simply doing something different. Finding the courage to take different things. Try different things. Ask different questions. Even organizing my process of the project differently because as I looked at the traffic in the fourth street every day, I'm like am I creating traffic in the way I do things unconsciously. Just like how there's always traffic here. Like at this time?

What do I need to do differently? And getting curious about it. And that's where I learned that comment that I started the beginning. That question of creativity, innovation. There's so much history and research behind it. That I had no idea. And because we throw around the word and use it so much, that I misunderstood what it meant.

And I didn't know that it was for everyone. I didn't know that something that we can all do more. And regardless of where we are, it expressed differently. And I think it's even more needed now because of the pandemic.

Brian Ardinger: Oftentimes I think the perception of creativity is it's some kind of magic. Or it's something that other people do. Or, you know, some, other people can possess that, but I can't do that. So, this idea of creativity not being magic. That being every day and available to anybody to possess or use, talk about how you identified that little nugget and what are some of the tactical things that you do to bring out that magic.

Monica Kang: So, I love that you said it. Because immediately one book that I'm remembering, it's about daily habits. And I was mindful because I'm like, wow. So, all these creative, innovative historical people around the world, like they had to work hard to be a better writer. What, like, they didn't just magically write that book. And like became a best seller. And like, no, they had to write every day. The musicians had to write music every day. And I'm like, wait, if that's how it is.

Like I wonder in the traditional non art industry, how they do creative. Of course, same thing. I think of new ideas every day. They had to try new things every day. Get rejected every day. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I mean, even the story of how WD40 product came about. Are you familiar with the WD40 products? So, it's that spray, right. You know why that name is called WD40.

Brian Ardinger: I do not.

Monica Kang: The reason why they named WD40 for that product was not a coincidence. It means water displacement, right? 40. Which indicates that it took 40 times to perfect that formula.

Brian Ardinger: Ah. I hadn't heard that story.

Monica Kang: How often are we willing to try 40 times. Hear 40 nos. Before we get to that yes. Not a lot. And I think that brings a weight. Hence to that question of what can we do every day, is that it's building the routine. As I learned about these daily routines of all these famous people of what they've had to do every day. Learning about stories like WD40, that how many attempts that people had to try.

And my day-to-day activity, that means that I need to just make it a routine of constant learning and trying new things. And so, one activity I always share as a recommendation is like, what's a five minute time that you can always block to do something different. Or to do something intentionally differently.

So maybe it's that, okay, if you always commute somewhere, could you try a different commute, maybe at least two or three times when you're not in a rush hour. Maybe you take a different path. Maybe it's that you take the same commute, but you'll listen to different music. Or maybe you'll listen to different podcasts. Maybe you're going to listen to this one time and then another podcast.

Maybe it's that you actually take a silent ride sometimes. Just like Pink. Even though that looks like a naive, like how is that going to make me more creative? By making that simple decision, you're letting your mind wander in different ways. And explore different things. Which gets into the practice of thinking differently. Which is the essence of creativity to get to innovation and all these new ideas.

So, to get to that WD40 product, they probably had to do a lot of that, somewhat unorthodox, like somewhat unexpected things that led to that 40th idea and innovation. And so, the key of those different elements is that you have to make it a habit. And it has to also be celebrated and enjoyable, but that's why I shared the tip with like, find a routine in your day.

That you can do easily. That it doesn't feel like I don't have time to do that. I don't have time. Think about your exercise. Think about your sleep hours. Hopefully everyone's sleeping well. Sleep routine, like things. When it's built-in routine, it's a little bit easier, but then you can commit and see the change over time.

Brian Ardinger: I use a similar technique called Scheduling Your Senses. So, each week you think about what sense do I want to focus on? So, this week I'm going to focus on taste. And I'm going to really focus, you know, a particular time period on what I'm tasting. How does that make me feel? And so, each week you pick a different sense that you want to do, and, you know, it comes down to, like you said, changing your environment. And getting you out of the normal rut that you have.

You mentioned one of the obstacles to creativity is this idea of fear. And you know, when you think about WD40, having to try 40 times. You know, I'm sure they didn't go into it saying, hey, we're going to fail 40 times. Or going in with the mindset of I'm scared that I'm going to have to try this 40 different times to get to a solution. Talk about fear and the role of creativity. And how we can overcome that fear. Because I think that's one of the major barriers to creativity.

Monica Kang: I think fear is unavoidable. But I think some of the mis-notion we have is that everything always has to be fearful. And I think that's where we miss the chance to celebrate what that growth stage looks like.

The act of doing something different, sometimes doesn't always have to be fearful. Me listening to a different podcast, not a fearful thing. But I'm learning new insights. Me focusing on different senses might not be fearful. As it gets to certain decision-making of like, oh, because now I focused on the taste, I realized the way we're cooking right now in this kitchen is actually not good.

And I need to tell my boss about it. If the customers are unhappy. That's where the fear encourages decision is. And so, I think when we asked that question, I think we see innovation, creativity in this box of like, okay, we got to think of this new idea, and we have to present it. But actually, even before we get to that stage of fear, there's all these other elements that we built resilience and skills of thinking differently that got us there.

And so, the tip that I often share is like first recognize that being creative is you got to pass the fear bridge. But when you're there, remember that, hey actually even the parts to get there, there was a lot of courage into that. And you might not have realized. It might just not have looked as scary as that bridge you're about to cross, that looks really scary. But it wasn't as easy as you thought.

And actually, that street that you look back, if you turn around and literally look back at those moments, that became not as scary, because you actually built resilience. There's hemisphere of how much you can experiment has grown so much that it becomes less scary. And in fact, when you cross this bridge, now I'm going to have to tell my chef and my boss about this big, scary decision. Now, the next time you need to do that, it's no longer being as scary.

So, our horizon of what we feel we can continue to do will change and evolve, which I think is the part that is so fun to realize that creativity innovation mindset, just like our physical health and muscle is not a static thing. It's going to continue to evolve. Right. Just because I exercise every day, doesn't mean that I'm healthy and I'm done. I can be even healthier. I can be more cautious and same thing with my creative thinking muscle. And think those are the nuances that we miss.

Brian Ardinger: I like where you're going. You know, it's almost about how do you reframe the journey from if you think about a particular project and you think about this big project is going to make or break my career. Versus approaching it from the standpoint of like, hey, I'm going to try and experiment. Or I'm going to do this side project.

And positioning it in such a way that it frames it differently so that the things that you do learn and that when you do fall down, which are inevitably going to happen. It changes the way you perceive that falling down as part of the journey rather than the journey and the outcome of the journey.

Monica Kang: And one thing, Brian, if I can piggyback on that. I share this actually my book Rethink Creativity as well. That, you know, the thousand shades of fear, because one thing that I think is also key is just because I might not be scared of a certain decision, does that mean another person will feel the same way. And I think that's what's actually part of the fear. We need to talk more.

And especially as leaders, many of those who's probably listening. You might actually already be here and listening to this episode because you're already pre actually pretty good with it. You're like, no, I've got a good handle of fear. What might be actually harder is actually encouraging your different people. Encouraging your different colleagues.

Noticing that like wait, checking ourselves to let when that person says that that's a scary decision, am I actually empathizing and sitting with them. Or coming from the nose up and say, look, yeah, no, don't worry friend. You're going to be fine. That's not scary. And amplifying actually how we feel.

And so, fear comes in different shapes, sizes, different times. Actually, the very thing that I might not be scared with one person could be the very thing I'm scared with another person or in another situation. And so it's ever changing.

And so, by us having aware. Having fear simply means that we have the alertness. There's a reason why as human beings, we survive, right? We were fearful of the weather conditions. The animals attacking us. Got to protect ourselves. That's actually how we were able to thrive and still exist as an, you know, a being.

So, fear isn't just always a bad thing. It's helping try to kick in to protect you. So, look out for these different cues. And I think especially as leaders, it's so key that we don't just simplify. Get rid of your fear. And like stop being fearful. Can we take the time to process it? We need to actually acknowledge all of that and actually ourselves too.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into that a little bit, you know. How do you design this creative workplace or workplace for all? You know, how does diversity affect creativity and how are you seeing some companies tackling that problem from an organizational perspective versus the individual perspective?

Monica Kang: Well, let's first start with diversity. I think I'm really excited about going back to your very first question. Why so timely to be more creative. And I think the time is even better. We are now seeing more research. People are more aware. People want to learn. More honestly, as somebody who's specializing creative workplace building, it is an exciting time because more people are wanting to have those conversations and say help. I do want to do this. I don't know how.

And so, I want to know that this is really timely because no matter what stage you are as a leader, wanting to do this. That you making a commitment and taking one step at a time is part of the thing that will help change the company. So even if that simple decision is that we're going to start doing some one-on-ones. Or we're going to start doing some team building activities at the very beginning and check-in. Actually, that might be the change in itself. That might actually be the kind of activity that your people are missing to feel the courage, to speak up. To feel psychological safety. Which is very key to ignite and creativity and opening up people's mind and feeling that what they can bring up.

But if I come into the meeting room and I feel like, okay, Brian's going to be a little upset if I bring this up. Then it's one idea that I don't share. It's one problem. And Brian might be like, well, Monica might frown next time I share this, and he doesn't share one thing. Guess what? We're going to actually see, not only business consequences, but a lot of people, of course, who's going to be impacted because we stopped sharing.

And so even that simple decision of like opening up could feel simple. Everyone is testing out right now. So, this good time, this is another example of the fear stopping you. Start with what you're comfortable with, which might be that simply, maybe let's read this article and talk about it. Or, hey, I learned this cool thing from this podcast that Brian and Monica were talking about. I'm inspired. Let's try this out.

That could be the starting point. It doesn't always have to be like this big, humongous thing. That's going to lead to culture organization changing. So that's actually the very first tip I share with leaders to make it tangible relatable. And then two, as a result to know that this is a marathon.

Yes, we want results as soon as possible for order something. I wanted to get the delivery, right. There was time and effort put in to make that process happen. And I love Simon Sinek's video, where he talks about the intensity versus consistency. He talks about the people development in the workplace.

And the beautiful analogy he shares about is our brushing our tooth. If you asked me like, you know, what's the perfect formula to brush the tooth in life versus not to like prevent your mouth from having cavities. Like, I will not know the answer because, you know, maybe I skipped one day. Maybe I skipped three days. Like with that impact, is that the cause like, maybe, but we won't know.

But it's the consistent that I brush my teeth every day that I keep my teeth healthy. Same thing on organizations. It's the simple moments of like, let's turn off their phones. Hey, Brian, how are you really doing. Like, oh, Monica actually, this is how I feel now that we've connected. We now open up. You know, Brian, I know we're done with the meeting, but I have this really question I want to ask you. Can I bring this up? I feel would really appreciate cause you just shared about, you know, how you feel. Now, okay. Brian, he's already right now, you're listening, but like he already stood up and like, oh, tell me more Monica. Right?

The body language already brings up unconsciously. And I think he shares how it's the consistency that's key. And so again, the second tip I recommend for everyone is that no matter what, or the house solution you have for your culture and people development, the key is the consistency. Not just a one-time retreat of hurray and we're done. But what's the everyday routines that you want to embed.

And so, when you even do a retreat or innovation workshop, or you invite a speaker, the question that I hope you always ask yourself, if this is what you're really committing to and what to do, because I know what you do, that's why you're listening to this episode. Think of something that you can do consistently.

That is low hanging fruit. That is budget friendly, you know, got to be realistic, right? I'm not saying that you have to spend a lot of money, budget friendly. Implementable as well. And you might be surprised even in that five-minute activity in simply having rows of like no phones in the meeting. Log off. Something like that. So those are kind of tangible places I recommend.

Brian Ardinger: That makes great sense. The last topic I want to talk about is the world of work is changing. Obviously. You've been in this space for pre pandemic and now through pandemic. What are some of the trends and things that you're seeing? What are some of the best practices, especially as we kind of move into this new hybrid environment that you're seeing when it comes to creativity.

Monica Kang: So many, a particular point I want to highlight is actually generational. And I want to say this because when we see us wanting to express more creatively and we feel we can't. We like to figure out the cost. Right. And our consciousness is that, oh, it's because they're young. Oh, it's because they haven't worked in the company long enough.

Oh, it's because they don't get my industry. There's always a, because of. I want to give the courage to recognize that instead of channeling that voice of why don't they get it the way I do. I wonder why they feel that way. I wonder why they say they don't want to get back to the office?

I wonder why they say that? I feel fine. I can share all my ideas. I wonder why they say they don't feel comfortable sharing ideas? We got this fancy new office. We're doing all these breakout sessions. Instead of saying like, why are they not. Reframe that to I wonder why. And focus on the lens of listening and wanting to understand.

Maybe they're going to share some stuff that you realize, whoa, like we were not ready for it. We don't know how to solve it. And that's okay too. It's not about always needed to have immediately all the answers, but let's problem solve this together. Thank you for sharing that. I had no idea that's how you feel.

And part of this is them wanting to be acknowledged or appreciated and heard. And hey, ask them what they think is the best idea. They might actually have a really good idea that we completely missed out. And Brian to your question of what's changing is that more people are wanting to now finally try this. Which has always been important before. But not doing the consequence. Great resignation and even more has been greater.

I think it's great that we're finally, hopefully seeing more workplaces where we make this the norm. That, of course we should understand what people want. And of course, this is hard because everyone wants something different. And sometimes we say what we want, but we don't really maybe need it.

I might say I want ice cream, but maybe I shouldn't have ice cream today. Cause I already had my chocolate earlier. Right. Like we're people. It's going to be messy. But that's part of the beauty of it. Of feeling like we can bring out all our different insights. And sometimes the choice is that because we feel safe sometimes, I don't want to share out. And might just be like, okay, I just want to do work and that's it.

And that's okay too. And I think part of it's like, what's the choice that you're going to make each day as a leader. As a creator. And as an innovator in your workplaces. Even if you're not in leadership for those who's listening like Monica, Brian, that's great, but what if I'm not a leader. You start with setting your boundaries. And where you want to start planting the seeds of where you can do this. So, I hope that gives an encouragement of a starting point.

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Brian Ardinger: This has been fantastic. And I appreciate you giving these tactical tips that anybody within the organization can start making progress when it comes to creativity and innovation. So, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or your books or your company, what's the best way to do that?

Monica Kang: Find me in any of the platforms. I'm on most of the social media platforms, but you know, connect with me on LinkedIn at Monica H Kang. K A N G. And then also follow us at InnovatorsBox. I also recommend the book as well. I think you'll enjoy it. And if you go actually to my book's website, for both of them, we have a lot of free worksheets and tools.

Also because of our mission to make creativity, culture, and leadership accessible, we have a lot of free resources and tools. Including some of these topics. So, if you can't find it just simply email me, let me know. And also in some tools in Korean and other languages as well, because we want to make this globally accessible. So, we also make music as well, because not everyone's a reader or workshop person. You can find us at InnovatorsBox studios, where we create music to inspire creativity.

Brian Ardinger: Thanks, Monica. I really do appreciate you coming on the show and look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

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Have You Seen My Friends? The Adventures of Creativity

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Abhishek Nayak, Co-founder and CEO of Appsmith. Abhisek and I talk about the rise of no-code tools and some of the misconceptions and opportunities that no-code can bring to startups and enterprises alike. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Abhishek Nayak, Co-founder and CEO of Appsmith

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Abhishek Nayak. He is the CEO and Co-founder of a company called Appsmith. Welcome to the show.

Abhishek Nayak: Thanks Brian. Really excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I heard about Appsmith as we talk more and more about this no-code low-code space, that's developing in the startup and in the enterprise world. And Appsmith is an open-source framework that makes it easy to build and maintain internal custom business tools. No code for the enterprise if I'm correct.

Abhishek Nayak: Yeah, exactly. Think of us like WordPress, but for building internal user facing applications.

Brian Ardinger: I'd love to dig into how this got started, this rise of no-code technologies and that. Making it easier for the non-traditional technical person to build and create faster and that. So maybe let's take a step back and tell us a little bit of your journey of how you became a founder and specifically around, how did you decide to build a no-code app platform?

Abhishek Nayak: Been an entrepreneur for a better part of the previous decade. Appsmith is actually my third startup. My first startup was in the space of offline logistics. We were doing cash and delivery. So, we had around 150 plus people. Lots of custom software built internally to manage them. And to run the business.

My second startup was in the space of AI, where we were trying to automate customer support. And we used to have 10 plus customers and use to automate support requests for them. That again, we were building a lot of custom applications to train the data. Look at how a particular board or a particular model is performing. And just run all sorts of experiments and processes. That was my second startup.

And all of these startups, I had the same co-founder and CTO Arpit Mohan. And he actually got sick and tired of building all these tools. Our second startup didn't work that well. Our first one got acquired. Second one didn't work that well, and we had to shut it.

But he actually started tinkering with the idea of building UI builderbut for backend entrepreneurs. Because he was a backend engineer and he really disliked dealing with HTML/CSS. So, he started working on this side project. And this is why he was working at a different job.

And during this period, when he was working on a different job, I was working as an EIR at Excel partners. So, I was an entrepreneur in residence where my job was to meet new startups, talk to them about how to run their business. And just understand if it makes sense for Excel to invest in it. While at the same time, I was also looking at other ideas that I could start out with.

Now I couldn't find anything interesting. But I was helping my friend Arpit figure out if his idea for an open-source project had any legs. And during that process of helping him out, I started interviewing some of these startups that I was meeting on everyday basis.

And I realized that almost every single startup had this problem. That they need to build a lot of custom business applications, maybe to run customer support or expose some data to the sales team. Have a way for the marketing team to maybe generate coupons. Or maybe look up some customer data.

And they never had engineering bandwidth to build what they needed. And that was a problem, right? That's when I started telling Arpit, hey, maybe this can actually be a business. Maybe you just don't need to think of it as a side project. Maybe we should start a business together and do this like a startup.

That's how it actually got started. It was my co-founder's idea because he hated HTML CSS. And then we started working together to build this out as a company. We also have a third co-founder Nikhil who heads product. And he again has been an engineer for a really long time. But he's a front-end engineer and he was just sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over again.

So even though he has skills in HTML CSS, and he loves working on front end, he just disliked the repetitive nature that these internal apps generally have. And that's why he was excited about this idea.

Brian Ardinger: I love the story. Because you often hear entrepreneurs’ stories start with a pain or an itch that they have to scratch. And it sounds like that's exactly where you guys started. And it seems like the timing was perfect for this type of new tool. Because it's getting easier and cheaper to use multiple different tools and open APIs, et cetera, to make it easier to build and scale and test and try things than ever before. Talk a little bit about the early traction you got when you started the company and some of the early things you learned.

Abhishek Nayak: So, the first six months of app Smith was just building the product out. And we actually started pitching it to users and convincing them to use it. But nobody actually converted. Nobody wanted to use it. And that's when we began to question is the product quality low? Do we not have enough features or what's happening here?

When we started digging in deeper, we just realized that the standard style developers have for a product like this is really high. And we just had to go back and improve the quality. And add a lot more features to the product. For it to be ready.

So, after our first launch which failed, you know, we had this pivotal moment where we had to decide, should we start building this for a different audience. Because developers don't seem to like this. Or should we just continue to follow our vision and get this right?

So, I'm glad that we actually decided to continue following a vision, but just improve the quality and add lot more features. Because when he lost a year later, you know, one and a half years have gone by, since we actually started, it instantly took off. Like within the first week, I remember we had about 30 plus teams using us.

And the only thing that we had done was write a blog post announcing that this is live. We did not actually do any sort of sales or any sort of cold outreach to get the users. And we honestly weren't putting in that much effort because we launched, expecting completely failure. Because that's what we had experienced, you know, like a year ago when we had tried to launch. But this time we were pleasantly taken aback by the reaction the market had.

And that's when we realized that a product like this just takes a lot longer to build versus a SaaS product. And the quality that developers expect is just a lot higher versus today, we have around 5,000 plus companies that use us every month. And tens of thousands of people who use us every day. That's a different story today.

Brian Ardinger: When you were going through the process of determining which features to add, or which ones to improve, how did you work with customers or how did you determine what to build in that environment?

Abhishek Nayak: So, most of the early features that was very much decided by my co-founders because they had been engineers for a really long time. And we really just relied on their intuition to decide what should be built. And this is where I think we broke a lot of start-up rules. When a customer asked us to build this feature, if my co-founders disagreed, we would not build it.

And what that led to was the product ended up being simple enough for most users. And the base features that my co-founders were sure were important, actually turned out to be quite successful. And the product ended up not being so bloated.

Today of course it's a different story because now we do listen to customers a lot more and we actually end up executing it. But in those early days, it was so important to just stay focused on what we were sure they would use. I think the most amount of waste occurs in a startup is when you build something that nobody uses, and nobody wants. So, by just being hyper focused on the vision that my co-founders had said, we actually ended up getting to a product, which a lot of people really like. And it was high quality.

Brian Ardinger: Then of course, having co-founders that were in that customer segment and really understood because they were themselves customers. Or trying to scratch that itch. Probably helped immensely. So, let's talk about no code itself and sometimes it gets a bad rap. Especially in the enterprise. You see a lot of startups using it as they're testing or building out new things as a way to grow and scale and meet their own customer demand. What are some of the misconceptions about no-code that you've run in to?

Abhishek Nayak: The first one is that no code is only for business users. In my experience, the fastest adopters of tools like Zapier, Bubble, Backflow, were actually developers. They love automating work that they do not like. So I don't think no code as we know, put developers out of jobs.

Instead, developers love it. And they'll actually be able to focus on more custom and more complicated tasks. The second misconception about no code is the fact that you cannot build complicated things. I actually don't think that's true. What I believe is 80% of the software that the world needs is actually fairly straightforward. You need a simple, but something that works all the time. So no code is really good for that.

But I also see the fact that no code products like Bubble, Zapier, or Indi Nomad. They actually have evolved so much that you can actually build really complicated things on those. It's still very early days for most no-code products. Therefore, when you look at them, you might think, okay, these can only be used for building simple tools.

I cannot build something sophisticated on them. But the fact is all of these tools are going to evolve. And they're just going to get much better achieving complicated tasks. And at some point in time, you're not going to have full-time developers or professional developers working on these kind of applications, which can be completed by no code, because it's just going to be a waste of their time.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about some of the applications that you see are driving no-code today, and maybe some applications you see being on the forefront tomorrow.

Abhishek Nayak: With Appsmith, we see that the most common applications are generally applications with dealing with customer date. So it could be, you're looking at customer data or you're trying to do a customer support workflow, or you're trying to do a sales and marketing workflow. Most no code and low code apps that are built today, generally tend to be very close to serving our customer. Because those are the highest priorities for any entrepreneurial, small to medium sized business.

But those are the commonest use cases. In case of Appsmith, we see customer support as a huge use case for us. I am personally a big user of Zapier. And what I find is Zapier is great when you have to just do some of these quick and dirty sales and marketing workflows. Maybe I want every time there's a customer, who's signing up from a company with more than a thousand employees, I want to get personally notified on my slack. Or, you know, anytime there's a customer, who's at risk of churning out, I want to be notified on Slack.

For some of those things I found it incredibly easy to use Zapier for. And it has an immediate revenue impact because if I go act on those deals or act on those customers that are about to churn out, I can either rescue that revenue or I can generate more revenue. I think those are probably the commonest use cases.

Now over time, I do think there'll be more adjusted use cases, which are not linked with revenue to come about where you might be doing something let's say for HR or for internal financial processes. Some of those things. But as of today, I believe anything that's any process that's close to customer will probably be the first one that's used by users.

Brian Ardinger: Do you see a big difference between developing no-code internal tools versus no-code consumer-based tools or front facing types of technologies?

Abhishek Nayak: Yes, I do. There are quite a few differences when it comes to building customer facing tools, using no code. These generally tend to be less data heavy. And there are a lot more focused on visual design and look and feel and UI. Versus when it comes to internal facing applications, they tend to be more data heavy. And they tend to be more security oriented as well.

So, you're going to have rule-based access control, SSO. Some of these features which are necessary when you're building like a internal tool. Versus when you're building something that's customer facing, you're not going to focus that much on security. Because it probably doesn't deal with that much sensitivity.

Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is this role of community. I know that Appsmith's done a really good job of building an active community. You've got a Discord page, and a number of folks that follow that on a regular basis. Can you talk about how you built community as part of your startup? And how important is that to continuing to build a business.

Abhishek Nayak: Community has been very essential for the success of Appsmith. But the way the community grew was, they basically first needed support for using Appsmith. So, they started joining our Discord because they needed help using the product. And over time, the number of users and our Discord grew so much that even when we were sleeping and there was a question, another community member would go on and answer it.

So, the shared love that people have in our Discord community is the love for the product. And that's what binds people together. And over time we've seen people create like different language communities. As well as there are freelancers and entrepreneurs who build apps for other companies using Appsmith. They've actually started talking to each other and helping each other out.

So we are still in the very early days, but I believe like for you to start with the community, there needs to be a shared common interest or a shared love for a product. I think it's really difficult if there is no common interest and all you have a product, which is actually not love. If you focus on the product first, it's possible to get a community going.

Brian Ardinger: If people want to get involved in the no-code movement and that, are there particular resources or things they should turn to, to learn a little bit more about what's going on in the space?

Abhishek Nayak: The biggest set of resources are really available on YouTube. Because low-code, and no-code tend to be easier to understand and use when you watch a video. So, I would just highly recommend, you know, looking up YouTube tutorials instead of reading an article about it.

Some of these tools just sound very complicated when you're reading an article about it. But when you actually see somebody build something using it, it just clicks a lot quicker. That's the way I learned how to use Zapier and Indi Nomad. And that was a lot easier, than this reading of blog posts. Third, just highly recommend just looking at these YouTube tutorials.

Brian Ardinger: I highly agree with you on that. And quite frankly, just learning and playing with the tools themselves. A lot of them are not necessarily self-explanatory, but if you get in and you have a use case scenario, a lot of them, you can figure out yourself, even if you're not a developer.

Abhishek Nayak: Exactly. And there's always some YouTuber who's addressed that particular use case before. I'm not really found it to be the case that you can't figure it out after seeing what YouTubers were doing.

Brian Ardinger: So, Abhishek, if people want to find out more about yourself or more about Appsmith, what's the best way to do that?

Abhishek Nayak: So, the best way to find out about Appsmith is go to www.Appsmith.com. And we also have a YouTube channel that gets a lot of hits. So, if you want to just see the product before signing up. You should just check out our YouTube channel. And I'm on Twitter. You can just find me by searching, for Abhishek Nayak. You should be able to find me there.

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Really do appreciate your time. And love hearing about all the new things that are going on in the world of innovation. And I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Abhishek Nayak: Thank you so much, Brian, for having me. I loved this conversation.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquireand Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Andrew, and I talk about his entrepreneurial journey building MicroAcquire, and some of the insights he's seeing when it comes to buying and selling startups.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world. Accelerating change and its certainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses.

Interview Transcript with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Andrew Gazdecki who is the founder of MicroAcquire. And Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Welcome Andrew.

Andrew Gazdecki: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I'm excited.

Brian Ardinger: I've got my MicroAcquire socks on. So, thank you for that. I'm super excited to have you on to talk about the craziness that is the startup world. And you've had a front row seat for a number of years as a multi-founder. And now with MicroAcquire, let's talk about what MicroAcquire is and how you got into the business of helping startups sell to other folks.

Andrew Gazdecki: MicroAcquire, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the largest startup acquisition marketplace in the world today. We have about 150,000 buyers registered. We've helped over six hundred startups to get acquired that combined acquisition total is 400 million at this point. Almost half a billion. We don't charge any fees. So, you can sell your business on MicroAcquire completely free.

So, I started that business, candidly, as a side project. I just felt that needed to exist. I'd previously gone through two acquisitions, and it was just a mess. Everything from finding the buyers to, there's so much education today on how to grow your business. How to learn sales. How to recruit. And how to fundraise. But then there's nothing on the exit. Which is arguably the most important part of the founder's journey.

And when I sold my first business, which we can talk about, if you'd like, it was a business called Business Apps. Spelled BiznessApps, and kind of the light bulb moment went on when I sold it. I just got a ton of emails and texts from friends that we're also running startups and they were like, how'd you get acquired?

Like, how did you find the buyer? What was the process like? It was like hieroglyphics everyone. Including myself when I went through the process. So, what we're really trying to do at MicroAcquire is democratize startup acquisitions and just make the process easier and more transparent for founders. And also, buyers.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the types of startups that are being bought and sold on the platform. And how has that maybe changed since when you first launched?

Andrew Gazdecki: Well, when we first launched, lots of small startups, you know ranging from, we would sell business, and we still do today, but 5k startups, mostly side projects. And since then, we've really expanded, I guess, up market. So, our largest acquisition is just under $10 million.

We have buyers on the platform now that can facilitate acquisitions in the hundreds of millions if the value is there. Yeah, just started with humble beginnings just because I felt this was something that was so needed for the startup ecosystem. Because the other routes to sell your business, unless you're most founders think like Google shows up with a check and hey, you did it. Like you won the lottery.

There's this saying most startups are bought, not sold and that's just not true. You know, you really need to sell your business. And so, the other routes were expensive, borderline highway robbery, and that's, that was really kind of like the main purpose of me launching MicroAcquire to really give another option for founders of this other business.

And if you're curious about the other options, you can hire an investment banker. They're going to charge a big fee. If your startup is too small for an investment bank, because most investment banks will only work with you if your business is of a certain size. And you know, maybe you can get like eight, nine figure exit. And I had previously worked with an investment bank. And their minimum fee was $800,000 for a successful transaction.

The short story there, we got a few offers, but the fee was just, I still had gas in the tank, so I kept going. But it showed me, and I remember telling the bankers, I was like, you guys have the coolest job in the world. I do all this work. And then at the end, you come in and get, you know, a nice payday. So that always kind of stuck with me.

And then I stumbled on to business brokers. Business brokers, if your business is doing let's say less than you know 5 million in revenue. You can work with a business broker. They will typically charge 10 to 15% commission to sell your business. So, 10% to 15%. So that's like a small angel round. So, I just saw it. Okay. Business brokers don't do too much. You know, what would happen if we removed the middleman? And we let buyers and sellers connect directly.

And we help businesses ranging from SaaS companies. That's kind of our sole focus. But we also sell a lot of e-commerce businesses. Communities. Some crypto companies. Direct to consumer. Newsletters. We like to say, we want to be the marketplace for profitable startups. So that's mainly our focus is startups that have traction.

So, we don't list startups that are pre revenue. Content websites. Affiliate websites. Again, mostly focusing on businesses that have, you know, a lot of growth upside. Having a blast running it at the same time, too.

Brian Ardinger: I'm hearing more and more about people using the platform, startup founders, maybe looking to buy a side project or a side hustle versus building something from scratch. Are you seeing that trend happening?

Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Like one story that comes to mind is, there's builders and there's scalers. Where a lot of people love to build a business. They love to think of a new idea and bring something to life. And I think fallen, in both those buckets. Builders and scalers. And so people build these wonderful businesses, but they maybe build it to a certain point where they'd like to move on to something else.

Maybe they built it to a few million in revenue and now they're, you know, mostly managing. When they'd really like to be building. And so MicroAcquire is a great outlet for them to meet buyers within like hours. Like the fastest acquisition on my group, where I was within, quite literally hours. Those are obviously outliers.

Brian Ardinger: What are you seeing when it comes to valuation trends and things along those lines? How's the market changed or what shifts are you seeing?

Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah, good question. It really depends on the business. So, a good business will always trade at really good multiples. SaaS trades at high multiples and e-commerce. Newsletters communities also trade lower than, you know, a typical SaaS business.

So, there's so much variability. And when I get asked questions like I have a SaaS company, it's doing a million revenue. What's it worth. That's kind of akin to asking what a car is worth. You know, like, is there a 500,000 miles on it? Does it need a new transmission? Do you have a good team in place? What is your churn? What is the quality of your customers?

And then other little things like when you go to sell your business, do you have an understanding of kind of what your business is worth? And on MicroAcquire, we have two different things that we do to help with valuations. One is we have a directory within MicroAcquire where you can hire someone to get a real valuation done.

I highly recommend that. And then we also have a tool called MicroMRR. And you should go to micromrr.com and you connect your Stripe billing. And we'll actually give you a data-driven valuation based on what we're seeing from acquisitions happening in the market. So, acquisitions are a moving target. I'd say maybe there could be a slowdown coming.

I know the public markets for trading believe like 22X, and then they dropped down to 12X and this is April. Those might climb back. But the last year was absolutely borderline bonkers in terms of. It was record numbers in terms of private equity activity. Just MNA activity in general. So, it's a good time to sell your business if you're looking to.

Brian Ardinger: I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you came to create MicroAcquire. I mean, I know early on you even did some interesting marketing. Went viral. You had the Russ Hanneman character from Silicon Valley TV show, do a little viral stuff on Twitter. Talking about MicroAquire and that. Can you talk a little bit about your idea of how you got it started and the execution to get MicroAcquire off the ground?

Andrew Gazdecki: Honest answer is, so I like to work within a frame. I'm not a big fan of like mental frameworks. That, you know, maybe other people put forth. But so, I'm always thinking of what worked five years ago or what worked 10 years ago does not work today. And so that's why you'll see, I'm always trying to market in a way that doesn't feel like marketing. But it also adds value and maybe even makes you laugh and stuff like that.

A lot of startups today think that their main competitor is XYZ company. But it's really the 500,000 startups out there. So, you're competing for consumer attention. I'm a big believer in that. And so, we focus a lot on brand-building. Just sharing MicroAcquire story. Kind of everything.
So, when I first launched it, I was working probably like 4:00 AM to like midnight. And the only way, so going back to kind of like how I think about and what I recommend founders think about when they first launch a startup is this won't come as a surprise. But find something you're passionate about. So, and then also find something that you have a unique insight into.

So, I made a bet that entrepreneurship through acquisition was going to be a trend. And that was just through me going through two different acquisitions. And I was actually looking to buy a SaaS company. And I couldn't find anything that was specific to SaaS. I didn't like working with brokers. I wanted to speak directly to the founder because it's a very relationship type transaction. And it's not just here's the keys.

You know, I want to know about the founder. I want to know why are they looking to sell? And so, I kind of just created what I feel acquisition should be. And I kind of built MicroAcquire in a way that thinking back on Bizness Apps is a 10 million a year revenue company. What would it take for me to list on a marketplace?

So, we implemented things like privacy ability to connect. Financial metrics. You give buyer a good, healthy snapshot into the view of your business. To get it off the ground, I mean, a lot of podcasts. A lot of cold emails. Hanging out on live chat, 24 7. And I don't recommend this to founders, but again, going back to my previous point is before I launched MicroAcquire, I wrote down, what customer do I want to serve?

And I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I love startups. And kind of a startup nerd. I love looking at new businesses. And I built this company. And so when I work on it kind of feels like a video game. It's not work. And if you can put yourself in that situation with some unique insights into a market. It's a customer that you love. And then unique insights kind of fall in line with what I describe as founder market fit. So why you. So, I think of why now. Why you. As probably the two most important things.

I had a deep conviction that acquisitions are going to be increasing. And that proved to be right. So that was a non-obvious bet to a lot of people, but obvious to me. That became obvious over time. But when you're able to build a startup in a way that you enjoy playing, running, whatever you want to describe it. More than your favorite video game. You kind of want, cause it's really hard to compete against a founder that where it feels like work.

My best analogy there is if you, I see a lot of founders creating startups around what I'd call like opportunistic opportunities. Where, you know, it's a good idea, but maybe you build a CRM for dentists. But you hate dentists. And a big part of building a startup is talking to customers all the time. I'm a big believer that your customers have path to product market fit. They have a better roadmap than you do.

And so, you need to be able to talk to these customers and enjoy these conversations and really listen to them. Otherwise, there's someone out there who's going to love those conversations and it's just going to be really hard to compete. But it all kind of revolves around happiness. Where the founders that I think go the distance really enjoy what they do day in day out.

And that's not to say it's super easy. Like just cause it's fun, it's easy. Like a video game. Just because it's fun doesn't mean it's easy. I think that's kind of the key that a lot of the founders should be thinking about is, is this a business I could run for a decade? If so, why? And kind of dip your toes in the water.

Like when I launched my group, I didn't have grandiose visions for it. I just wanted to help other founders get acquired without these huge commissions. And then as the business grew, it became pretty obvious that the market opportunity was fairly large. Yeah, basically kind of grew forth. I knew this was something that the startup community needed, and I just worked.

I was doing customer support. Vetting the listings. Writing the newsletters. Managing the product. Going on podcasts like this. Social media content. In a weird way, and now I have a team that helps me with all that stuff, but in a weird way, I kind of look back and I miss those days.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's never really been a better time to be an entrepreneur because you have a lot of these new No-code tools. And ways to spin up experiments. And like you said, dip your toe in the water. And you have access to a lot more information. You know, I think 10 to 15 years ago, the whole VC world was not very transparent. But now, you know, you can read blogs and books and figure out that particular path if you're an entrepreneur.

It sounds like you're trying to do the same thing for on the acquisition side. Breathe some life into what that path looks like and that. So, let's talk a little bit about the book you just wrote, Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold my SaaS Startup. What can people expect to find in it? And why did you write the book?

Andrew Gazdecki: I started BiznessApps again, spoke B I Z N E S S apps. My mom, this is kind of a funny footnote, but everyone called it BizApps. So, I ended up chasing down owner of the domain, BizApps. When your mom calls your business BizApp, and you don't have the domain, you got to go get it.

But I started that business when I was 21 in college. And also going back to unique insights. I had a previous business that helped mobile developers connect to businesses. So, I saw businesses posting the same job requirement over and over and over. And I thought, whoa, they're paying like 50K to 100K for like a project like this?

What if I just built a template and the functionality isn't really changed too much. But we just changed the content. Imagery. Which speeds up mobile app creation. Makes it more affordable. There's do yourself website builders at the time. And I thought, what about a do yourself mobile app builder for small businesses?

So, the book is just kind of my story. I just journaled through the whole experience because it was very strange and surreal. I was 21 when I launched it. Just to give you kind of an idea of like the growth of it. And it was a right place, right time business. I got completely lucky. The iPhone had just come out. Android wasn't even there. Blackberry was still in the mix. We almost made a Blackberry app. I'm glad we didn't.

But it's just my candid experience building that company, from idea all the way to the invested. So, it's not a book of here's how to build a startup. It's more of a book of here's how I built a startup with mistakes. Everything from when I thought of the idea to when I sold the business and everything in between.

Brian Ardinger: Can you highlight some of the best or worst advice that you got on that journey.

Andrew Gazdecki: I was so young. So, I was 23, 24, and I personally didn't grow up with too much means if you will. And so, I remember there's a specific situation. We needed a marketing hire. And I was handling most of the marketing. And the salary ranges, now I'm two years out of college and they were in like the 150K, 200K range.

And I'm like, what am I going to pay someone that. Like you really need, one of my favorite quotes is, you know, talent wins games, but teamwork when championships. It's a Michael Jordan quote. So, I think, you know, hiring smarter people than me, was probably my biggest mistake.

Also, a funny story. This is a true story. We had a period where we were again, because we didn't hire a really good marketer that could track in our paid ad spend and stuff like that. We were spending over a hundred thousand a month on Google ads. The business grew from zero to let's call it 7 million in the first five years. So it was just, everything was just kind of like, don't touch anything. We don't know what's working. But it's working.

And it was so profitable. And our customer payback period was like 33 days. And for the first two years, our margins were about 90%. So, it was just extremely profitable. But when we finally hired someone to do analysis on how profitable is this pay-per-click ad campaign, we concluded basically we were burning about 90,000 out of that a hundred thousand. So, we call that era blowing up Ferrari's every month.

So, every month we were blowing $90,000 because we weren't properly attributing our marketing spend to customer acquisition. And blowing up a Ferrari every month probably would have been cooler. Maybe not that would have hurt my heart because I'm a big car fan. But and I share all of that. I share the ups and the downs. And I think it's just a candid story of just what it's like to build a startup. Mistakes and wins included.

Brian Ardinger: So, looking at the world today, what are some of the resources that you would recommend that startup founders be checking out or paying attention to?

Andrew Gazdecki: I get a lot of really good insight just talking to other startup founders. I'm not a big podcast listener. I read a lot. Like this was kind of some books I'm reading and there's my book on top, like Play Bigger. It's a book about brand-building. From Impossible to Inevitable, that's a great book on how to build a SaaS company end to end. It goes over marketing, building a sales team, just written by Jason Lampkin and Aaron Ross from Predictable Revenue.

And then a Tuned In, which is basically how to listen to customers. You know, you can talk to customers. But how do you really listen and get the insights you need? So, I always say that customers have a way better roadmap to product market fit than you. You just need to talk to them and listen.

So, I could give you a number of different books, but I'm an avid reader. That's kind of where I get a lot, but I will say you definitely learn the most when you launch a startup. When you kind of just, you can read all the books in the world, but when you finally launch a startup, that's when the real learning begins.

And also like you kind of get in a situation of, I launched a startup. Okay, now I really need to figure out marketing. And so now you're very motivated to figure out marketing and apply some of the concepts that's right, that you might read in some of these books.

Brian Ardinger: That's great advice. And I encourage anybody who's even thinking about it. The tools and the resources are out there to try things nowadays that maybe you couldn't have tried in the past. Even if you fail, you've probably leveled up your skills and game considerably than if you just read about it. So, encourage is that as well. My last question is what are you most excited about working on the next three to six months?

Andrew Gazdecki: I'd say just helping startups and founders get acquired. We have a goal to help a thousand startups, get acquired this year. So far, we're on track for that. We average about 100 a month. So, we'll probably beat that goal. And what's interesting about startups and you start something, and it goes really slow, but stick with it. And then kind of takes off because we've done more acquisitions this year alone than we did in the first two years of being in business.

So, what gets me excited is just helping founders. And we're building tooling to help acquisitions. To really streamline them and really educate founders on what is due diligence. What are the legal steps? How do I transfer assets? How do I do technical due diligence on code if I'm looking to acquire a business? How does escrow work? What are common deal terms?

So, if you go to MicroAcquire, click resources at the top. You can literally learn how to acquire a 100-million-dollar business. We have so much content. And that's just kind of like something I felt was so needed because it's such an opaque topic that not too many people write about. So, I definitely recommend checking that out.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Andrew, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. And sharing these stories and giving us some insights and access to some of these resources. I think it's very valuable. I really do appreciate your time. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about MicroAcquire or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Andrew Gazdecki: Definitely check out MicroAcquire.com. It's free to sign up. You can browse the startups. And then as a seller if you're looking to sell your business also completely free. You can list your startup. And instantly meet buyers. Sometimes within hours of going live. We do vet all listings. So, we have a process where we work. And we make sure that you are prepared when you go live on MicroAcquire. But follow me on Twitter, @agazdecki if you can spell that. Or just add me on LinkedIn.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thank you again for being on the show. And looking forward to staying connected.

Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Rachel Kuhr Conn, Founder and CEO of Productable. Rachel and I talk about the pitfalls and challenges facing corporate innovation and some of the processes and practices that companies can use to level up their innovation efforts. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Rachel Kuhr Conn, Founder and CEO of Productable

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Rachel Kuhr Conn. She's the Founder and CEO of Productable, where she is turning the innovation process into software. Welcome to the show, Rachel.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Thanks so much Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. I'm surprised we haven't had you on earlier. We have a number of mutual friends that have crossed paths. And we just only got introduced to recently. So, I'm glad to have you on the show. You've recently started a company called Productable, focused on the space of innovation and how do you create more repeatable processes and things along those lines.

You've just landed a deal with the US Air Force to expediate the innovations process at the national defense area. How did you get involved in this innovation space to begin with? And then we'll talk about how did you develop Productable.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Really excited to finally connect after all of the different people we have in common. So, a little bit of my backstory is I was a bright eyed, bushy tailed engineer, thinking that I was going to change the world with amazing products. And dreaming of all the impact I was going to make. And my research area in school was actually around predictive analytics for innovation success.

And so, there's actually a lot of data around personality type, team dynamics, methodologies that you can look at and actually predict what should be used and what the team dynamics should be to drive the best outcome.

So, in school, I was like, oh my gosh, industry must be amazing at solving problems. Like I just can't wait. And instead, I went into large corporation after a large corporation and just couldn't believe how politics and silos and just corporate bull crap for lack of better term, ruined every single opportunity I thought I had to ever make something awesome.

And so just personally, I got really, really tired of the amazing capacity that all these large organizations have. And I just could never quite create the thing that made it to the finish line. And so got involved in the venture capital world. Saw how things work differently. Got really inspired by it. And essentially started building our platform and what we call the Productable Way, which leverages VC mindset and built it more into a corporate friendly approach, if you will.

Brian Ardinger: And you worked with Mark Cuban companies, and some other folks, to build out this philosophy or build out this methodology. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: So, I got so frustrated in the corporate world. I actually cold emailed Mark Cuban while watching a bunch of Shark Tank. Cause I was like, they say yes to a lot of things that I think my boss would have said no to. And so, I just had to figure out, figure out what the difference was. And in the venture world, it's okay to take a lot of bets. You're supposed to build a whole portfolio of bets. And you understand that the outcome of a few is going to be big enough to pay for the losses of the others, and then some.

It creates this incredible culture of risk-taking and experimentation. And having the room to do that in corporates really is what's required to help large organizations overcome the disruption curves that are ahead. You know, you always have something that's eating these large organizations. And so, you really have to have a way of managing, how do you actually take a lot of bets on new ways of solving these problems and in overcoming these things to actually be able to succeed.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm curious to talk a little bit more about how you came about creating Productable. So, you know, there are a lot of idea management, idea capture, innovation software platforms out there. So, a lot of people kind of taking a swing at this over the last 20 years. What made you want to try to tackle this marketplace?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: For one, it was from the pain point. If one of those had solved the problem, I feel like I would've just run with it. I didn't really necessarily feel the need to be a founder. It was actually the pain that I couldn't go into corporate innovation yet again and face the same problems. And so, something about those tools just wasn't doing it for me. It wasn't solving that problem that you end up with ideas on a shelf.

And so, there's a lot of great idea management platforms that start to build that early stage of top of the funnel kind of solutions. But how do you actually move solutions through mid-stage and late stage of the funnel? And that's really where Productable comes of help.

Brian Ardinger: Well and that's one of the interesting insights is I think a lot of people think that a tool will solve the problem, but really a tool is just a tool. And what really makes this thing work as far as innovation within big companies, it's a culture of innovation. And its processes and that that are around the intake of an idea. So maybe talk about how does process play a role in the actual software itself?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Yeah, absolutely. And so, it's a hundred percent culture where just a means to help support all of those things. And one of the big things is the company has to be willing to really invest in innovation. And if you're not putting your money where your mouth is, you're not going to get the outcomes. And so Productable is really a three-pronged approach. It's portfolio, progress, and people.

And so what those three elements are, Portfolio Management is really about establishing and evangelizing a solid strategy that people understand. Making it so that you invest wisely in innovation, so that you're not throwing good money after bad. And you're making it really easy to expedite decision-making across the whole process.

Then I'm going to actually switch to People Management. So that's more of like the top-down strategy if you will. People Empowerment is about honing the innovator skill so that you can actually empower projects to go through the right methodologies and tools and ensure you're involving the right subject matter experts. So, it's a little more of the ideal, if I was building a product, and building a company, these are some of the tools and processes I might.

And then you would have to actually sync those together and that's our Progress Management. So, progress management, is like the way that a venture capitalist might get an update from a startup. And actually, here's our barriers. Here's our wins. Here's our asks. Here's how everything's actually going. Rubber meets the road. It's that kind of reporting so that when you're dealing with all the corporate stuff, that's preventing you from doing anything. It's how you actually manage all of those barriers and work through those pieces.

So essentially that top down, bottom up and that syncing are those three pieces that we use to leverage in our software to help people innovate.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think it's interesting. A lot of companies struggle first out of the gate, just defining what innovation is. And trying to come up with that innovation thesis. You know, do they focus on core optimization types of innovations. Or do they go for the transformational stuff? And what does that even look like? Some people only think of innovation as one side of that bucket. Which it's not.

So, talk about like how your clients and that use Productable or the approaches that you use to understand how to create that innovation thesis. And how to place bets across the different horizons of innovation.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Well, that's a great question. And I would say we're very agnostic. So, we don't care if you're doing a core innovation or a disruptive innovation. But what we're going to do is be able to show you the math. So, if you're doing disruptive innovation and you're wanting to put all of your eggs in one basket or two and you're essentially say, yeah, we're going to do these two really disruptive ideas. You're going to see that whether you invest in two ideas or you decide to invest in 20, the math is still going to be true.

That if you're going after a disrupting idea is probably like a 10% chance it's going to work out. And so, as long as you're okay with that, and you're doing two bets, great. That's your expectation. But maybe you should be going after 20 bets if you want disruptive. And in a core, it might be 90% success rate.

And so, there's a lot of great data around success rates that corporates really miss. And so, it's being mindful of taking that risk tolerance at the leadership level and setting that standard of this is what a bet looks like. This is the check size. This is essentially what we expect our decision criteria to be. Our traction metrics. The same way a VC would. And then making it really visible essentially, so that when it's time to make a decision, they can decide if something fits in their portfolio or not. And then they can actually get the metrics to see how it's going.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about how people are using it now. So, give me some examples. Or some people or places that are taking advantage of your software.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Sure. So, we're working with the Air Force right now. We work with the Vice Chief's Office, the number two of the air force. And a lot of the DAF, Department of Air Force leadership. And the Air Force is a 700,000-person organization. There are, I mean, just hundreds of people involved in innovation.

And it's really interesting at a large corporation, you tend to have a head of innovation and a group that works under them. And the Air Force is much, much more complex than that. I don't have a very straightforward answer of how it's all going. But the short answer is we're starting to look at how can we leverage portfolio management within the Air Force. And how can we build an ecosystem of portfolios to ensure that we actually have the right funds and system to ensure that ideas can go from idea to mid late stage and not fall into the valley of death along the way.

Brian Ardinger: What kind of differences are you seeing between like maybe public facing companies or like private companies. Versus like the government sector. Do they treat innovation differently or what are you seeing from the differences?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: I never thought corporate seems so simple. A 700,000-person organization turns out, I don't know if you've ever heard the rule of threes and tens. Things tend to get more complicated with three people, 10 people, 300 people, a thousand people, three, you know, so forth. And so, when you think about 700,000 people organizations, it's just what is a single approval at a large corporation is actually takes you to a different business unit that then manages the process that does that approval. That takes you to another business unit that manages.

So actually, putting your arms around any sort of portfolio decision is so complicated. And it's so needed to be able to solve that in such a large organization compared to a small corporate, if you will.

Brian Ardinger: And I imagine the stakes are different, depending on the specific ideas and that. Like, obviously if you're doing innovation in and around things that could kill people, or, have a significant different effect versus you know, the new color of a new product that you come out with. I'd imagine the stakes are slightly different as well.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Well, the interesting thing about the Air Force is that it's actually, I think it's 94 bases and every single base works like a city. And I didn't realize this until I worked with the Air Force either. So, the Air Force, like the pilots, if you will, are part of the scene, but to support those pilots, you have to have a base where there's hospitals, hotels, restaurants, education, gas, like literally gyms. Everything you can imagine has to be on base.

And so, the Air Force is actually in charge of having every single one of those kinds of businesses within the Air Force organization. So actually, the kinds of things that we're helping are everything from childcare, gym apps. Yes, there are some more serious ones too. But I would say there's a surprising amount of comparables to industry of solving those kinds of problems.

Brian Ardinger: That's quite interesting. So, talk a little bit about some of the trends that you're seeing in the space of innovation. Or what are you excited about?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: I think that people are really starting to see the need for portfolio innovation. Pre COVID there was a lot of, I'm talking about the corporate space. It was a little more okay to spend a lot of money and just see what would happen with it.

And so, I had a lot of connections that were in corporate innovation, they would get to try a lot of stuff. And then it was okay not to know what was going to happen next. Then all of a sudden COVID cut those budgets. And people got stuck. And they had to figure out what to do next. And I think we're, you know, everything was really held back.

But now I think we're in a really interesting space where people really want to innovate. They want to do something different. And they're saying, how can we make sure that we're going to drive real outcomes? And so I'm actually really excited for this new market that we're in. That I feel like there's a little more responsible. And also, proactive and engaged and really curious to see what they can do.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing the similar obstacles and problems being faced. Or is it different. Like has the mindset changed? Like when we talk about innovation, you know I think, and disruption specifically pre COVID, a lot of folks kind of understood it intellectually. But didn't really get it until everybody's lives had to change overnight. Are you seeing differences of how people approach innovation based on the world changes and that? Or what's different from that perspective?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: I think it's COVID, but I also think it's maturity of innovation in general. We've seen a lot of large corporations that have invested in, ahead of innovation. Where then the outcomes didn't quite reach the executive leadership expectation. And it's funny, I don't know how much people talk about this stuff, but I hear about it all the time.

People get the job of head of innovation and then they try to get a certain amount of money to move their idea forward. For a specific idea, let's say. And then leadership says, great show your progress, and then we'll give you more money. And it's a trap. Because you need a lot of bets to succeed at innovation.

And so, then there's like this problem that innovation leaders are put in this place where they're getting asked to prove success on something that is really a bet. And it gets really confusing. And all of a sudden, their neck is on the line for success. It generally doesn't end well unless they got lucky.

And so, there's been like this two to three year rotation that happens over and over again. People are getting tired of it. Having enough after working at a few large companies, seeing the same thing over and over. Company is seeing that same person go through and not getting what they need, that they know something has to be different.

Brian Ardinger: Is there a way to prep management on that particular process from the standpoint, like you understand when you're betting from an LPs perspective, like in a venture fund, that you're not necessarily getting those returns, and you know, for 10 plus years. So that that's a much longer timeframe when you put that money in. Is there a way to prepare management for that more of a venture-based model?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: We actually wrote an Ebook on that. So, I can share a link. I'm happy to share the Ebook on that, but yes. That's the biggest problem that we've actually seen. And we wrote all about it because yes, you need to get leadership in the mindset of they're really comfortable with index funds and mutual funds. Look at their retirement portfolios. They play this game all the time. They would never put all of their money in one stock. Why would they do that with their corporate money. So, it's really a mindset shift that we have to help drive.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing companies get better? Or what are some of the things that seem to be working that people are adopting?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: We're seeing companies get better at it. One we're seeing them care more. And being mindful of it. And starting to put all the pieces together. And having more fruitful conversations. What happens after the theater? What happens after the demo day? How do we actually make this into something? Why does it always fail? Because you can't really get away with that stuff much longer.

And so, the conversations are getting more real. I don't think people see the solutions yet, but I'm excited to see how Productable can help and really shift the industry of making that much easier for everybody.

Brian Ardinger: Curious to get your take on this concept of inside outside innovation. So, a lot of corporates are interested in trying to come up with innovations within their four walls and that. But there's another set of corporates that are looking outside to startups and investing in startups and things along those lines. What's your take when it comes to betting on innovation, either inside or outside of the walls.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Both are so important. You know, it's really interesting. I've worked in internal innovation and external innovation. The funny thing is they both kind of require each other and they don't really talk about it.

And so, when you're doing external innovation, it's really easy to get excited about a startup and then go force it on a business unit and tell them that they should go pilot this product. And the business units kind of like, Hey, we didn't even need this. What's going on?

And then it's really easy for somebody in a business unit to come up with a cool idea, but then they don't get any of the resources to do it. There's a little bit of this magic of empowering people within the company to act like intrepreneurs if you will. And allowing them to leverage external startups and external technology, and actually allow them to partner together to really be able to build something that's a little bit of a mix of internal and external. And depending on the solution, maybe it's a little more one or the other, but it's kind of a funny thing to me that they often get so separated.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we've seen that's been helpful is to get our employees actually involved in the startup scene. Just from being part of it, you know, going to demo days, going and mentoring at accelerators and that. If nothing else, it provides them that access to see how other startup folks with brand new ideas with no business models, how they move and interact. Versus how they would do it if they were inside their own walls. And I think exposure to the startup ecosystem, so to speak, can do a lot, not just like in finding actual innovations and that, but in the tool sets, mindset, skillset arena.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean getting from zero to one, if you will, is, is really important. How do we actually go from what we're used to as everyday business and actually start thinking of more exploratory ways? How do we start thinking about growth and getting that mindset in? And it's a really hard dance to figure out of how long do you let that soak in and then start to create some of those other methods and ways of actually turning that into deeper transactions. And your company has to be ready for those. And so, I feel like it's a little bit of learning to crawl and then walk and run, if you will.

Brian Ardinger: Are there particular resources that people should be following in the world of innovation? How do you stay up to date with all the stuff that's going on?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: I don't have a great answer for that one. I have a lot of people that I talked to. A lot of consultants and great thinkers that I try to involve in my day to day. But we do have a blog and we do have eBooks and things that we're creating on our end to try and spread that knowledge as much as possible.

I like to think that it's helpful and help drives all of that. But it is really hard to figure all of this out. I've been in this space for a long time, really trying to figure out what is expert look like. And it was really, really hard to get to the bottom of finding a lot of these pieces.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: If people want to find out more about yourself or about productive, but what's the best way to do that?

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Sure, they can go to beprodable.com. That's B E product able.com and I'm on Twitter. I guess that's probably the easiest way to do it. Design K U H R is my Twitter name and really excited to chat with anybody and see whatever they like to talk about.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Rachel, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Very excited to finally meet you and have a chance to talk more. Love to stay in touch and keep you in mind for further conversations about the world of innovation.

Rachel Kuhr Conn: Perfect. This was awesome. Thank you so much for having me. And I can't wait to listen and hear more about what people have to say.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel China, and Co-founder of the corporate accelerator GrowthX. Kapil and I talk about his journey from his early product development days at Apple working on the first touchscreen, to today where he runs Intel's award-winning accelerator. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel China

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Kapil Kane. He is the Director of Innovation at Intel China, and co-founder of the GrowthX Corporate Innovation Accelerator. Welcome to the show.

Kapil Kane: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Ardinger: You are calling in from Shanghai right now in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. Let's talk a little bit about your journey into the world of innovation.

Kapil Kane: I was doing my PhD at Stanford when I dropped out of the program to join Apple, to build the touchscreen. The very first task, I remember I was an intern at the time. And I was the very first engineer to actually make a drawing of the touch screen. Like a revision 0 0 1.

And my journey started from there. Although the touchscreen project failed. We had to hand it over to this other team, that was working on a secret project, which turned out to be the iPhone. But my last project at Apple was iPad. So, I came around full circle.

And then I left Apple and joined Intel to actually create a tablet version of Classmate PC, which was inspired by one laptop per child from MIT Media Lab, which is to create an affordable education computing device for the emerging market or for the less fortunate as it was envisioned. And then on, you know, I got into this role of Innovation Director at Intel China. And so that's my journey.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Tell us a little bit about how you got to China. And how you got to cofound this corporate innovation accelerator called GrowthX.

Kapil Kane: Coming to China was with Apple. This is when we were developing the very first Mac Book Air. And at the time, if some of you guys remember, it was called a Unibody. That means it was carved out of a solid block of metal. Whereas everything before that was sheet metal, and hundreds of parts joined together.

So, it was a completely new way of manufacturing a product. And so, we were designing the product as well as designing the manufacturing process at the same time. So, we thought it would be better to have some of the designers move to China so that we can do both designing product and process at the same time. And so, I volunteered. As a, so I was one of the first three product designers to move from Cupertino to China. And I've been here ever since.

Brian Ardinger: Let's fast forward to today, you're running this thing called GrowthX. How did the idea of a corporate innovation accelerator start and then give us some insight into what's going on with GrowthX?

Kapil Kane: Intel has this amazing culture of innovation. And it's something that I can think of it like the Google's 15% thing. Where we encourage our employees to spend a percentage of their time on things they believe is important for our future. And so, we have lots of this cool innovation that has been created in the labs.

And around 2005, that's when I took over the innovation at Intel China. We saw that there's lots of cool things happening in the labs, but we couldn't find those things being commercialized. Not lending into the market. When I took over this role, this role was created because until that point, there was lots of different efforts of innovation, like very vibrant culture. Even to the date, there's a very vibrant culture of innovation. And we thought we needed some streamlining.

And so that's when they created this position to streamline all the different innovation activities at Intel China. And we have around 10,000 people here in China. So, it's by no means small offsite operation. It's a pretty huge operation.

Brian Ardinger: Kind of a little bit different than a lot of companies. A lot of companies we hear about the fact that most of the core is not that innovative. And so, they created an accelerator kind of program. Or a lab to kickstart that. But where at Intel, it seems like the reverse it's like you had to kind of harness or extra harness some of the activity.

Kapil Kane: Exactly. And also, the concept of accelerator is, is quite different. Like if you look at the other corporates who are building accelerators, they are accelerating outside startups with the hope that they will get to know what they're doing. They may be able to acquire them or partner with them.

But for me, I didn't even know what an accelerator was when I took over this role. And in my very first week, I happened to be in a round table conference at American Chamber of Commerce. And the guy sitting next to me happened to be running China's very first startup accelerator, Chinaaccelerator. The guy, William Bao Bean. He's a legend in China.

And I just happened to ask him what he does. And he explained to me the concept of accelerator. And I thought, you know, maybe I can replicate this right inside of Intel because we are so much creativity. We just need to give them the tools to turn those cool innovations into viable businesses. And that's where the idea for accelerator came along.

And that was the, the birth of GrowthX, where we started up as accelerators. We pick the teams. We make them believe they are actual startups. We have the CEO, CTO, CMO, and we bring them in a batch of cohort. And we have business sprints. We have around eight sprints focusing on different aspects of business. We have mentors.

We have entrepreneurs in residence. And we run this outside of Intel from a coworking space. So, it's just like any startup accelerator. Just the thing is that all the startups are internal projects. And we've been running this for six years now.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about some of the differences or similarities that you've seen between entrepreneurs in the outside versus intrepreneurship. And are there key skillsets, mindsets, tool sets that are similar or different.

Kapil Kane: I think what we are seeing, and it may be different for different companies. For us, most of those innovators will come to our accelerator. They are techies. You know, they get very excited about the technology. And they have no real background in business. So, we spend a lot of time and effort to make them understand that it's not about, can you build it, but should you build it? That's where we focused on changing their mindset.

If we change their mindset, like, you know, typically they're of this mindset that I will build something, then I will show it to the customers. Or they think that customers won't even look at us. If I don't have some finished product to show to them. And this is where we turn it on its head and tell them that you don't need anything. You just need a sketch. You need a questionnaire. And you're not trying to sell something. You're trying to understand the challenges.

So, think of it that way as you engage with your potential customers is don't be ashamed or embarrassed, that you're not in the show. You are simply, think of it as if you're co-designing with them. Or trying to collectively solve the challenges.

So that's the biggest challenge we have. I think technically they're amazing, is this business mindset that we're trying to cultivate. Not just business mindset. The, the lean startup kind of a methodology, you know, is like build, measure, learn, do an MVP. Test it. Learn, iterate. So that's one big change.

I say, because like outside entrepreneurs, founders, I see they're more, I mean, again, you know, there's all flavors of entrepreneurs. But our guys are always very tech focused, and they don't understand about the fundraising and stuff. Although I have seen they're very, very good at tapping into the resources to move their ideas forward.

And even to the point that they sometimes feel like getting into our accelerator, and doing all the sprints is like homework, just to get to the seed money, seed funding, to build something. But in their head, they are still, you know, that's what they want. But they have to go through all the motions of the accelerator as something like, you know, they had to do in order to move their idea forward.

So, I still believe that's entrepreneurship, but it's in a different way. Because they still want to move their ideas forward. Right. So, I used to really get frustrated in the beginning. But now I think, you know, in the end, their goal is the same. It's just, they have a different idea of how to get to the goal.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk a little bit about how you go about identifying which people or companies, so to speak, to get into the accelerator? What's your evaluation process to identify who might be successful at this?

Kapil Kane: So, I think that's a very good question. And it took us some time to figure it out. There are a few things. The ideas, they aligned strategically to where Intel wants to go. That's one thing. Second thing we also realized is we are good at accelerating adjacent innovations. That means building something on top of something that exists, rather than this breakthrough moonshots.

There are two reasons. Just because we are in China and our employees, they interact a lot with our customers who are based in China, right? Like all the electronics are made in China. So typically, they come up, their innovation ideas are about how can we empower our customers. They're more customer centric. They're more something that, you know, hey, we have this product. If we tweak it this way, I can open up a completely new market segment, which can bring us millions of dollars. Rather than saying, hey, let's invent a new chip. Or let's invent a completely new manufacturing process. So that's the second thing.

The third thing we look at is like a founder accelerator fit is, are these guys coachable? And can we really help them in the short period of time of like four months. And the way we do that is before we do the intake, into the accelerator, we have only five slots per batch. And we do two batches a year. And we get anywhere from 30 to 60 applications. And we'll shortlist of about 15 to 20 and bring those teams into the bootcamp.

And during the bootcamp, we help them build their business case. And help pitch their business case in a very short time. And during this bootcamp, we also challenge our founders to go, and actually talk to the customers. Make cold calls. Or do a survey, right. And that tells us if these guys are really willing to get out of the building or not.

And we also see if they've incorporated the advice from the coaches into their final pitch or not. So, we also make our evaluation based on that. So, it's like, you know, the kind of innovation. The strategic fit to Intel and the founder accelerator fit as well.

Brian Ardinger: Are only teams coming into the accelerator or do they have to have a team, or can an individual founder apply?

Kapil Kane: Individuals can come in, but once they get into the accelerator on the very first sprint, their assignment is to resource their team with, you know, CEO, CTO, and CMO at the minimum.

Brian Ardinger: And that allows them to have enough people to actually run experiments and create something to move it forward.

Kapil Kane: Yeah. And also, the skill, you know, because typically like I said, if a founder is a very bright technologists, he may not really understand everything on the business side. So, we encourage them to get people from the sales and marketing groups to join in.

And we also give them enough budget to hire interns and MBA intern for example, to act as a CMO. And also, you know to hire tech talents as well for that short period of time to work on their ideas, so that they can focus on the business side of the things.

Brian Ardinger: So, I'd like to talk a little bit about the balance between this inside innovation versus outside innovation. So, companies that come through GrowthX are they expected potentially to spin out into a startup outside of the company? Are they been brought back in these technologies? Talk a little bit about this inside outside balance.

Kapil Kane: So, 90% of the companies are inside. We have only been able to spin out one company so far. After activating around 60. Okay. So very, very small ratio. So mostly you can think of them as internal teams coming to the accelerator to de-risk their business plans, to bring back to the business units.

Having said that we have accelerated external startups as well. And by that it's not to invest and take an equity in them. But to work with them on identifying a business opportunity for Intel and going to market together.

So basically, startups who are building on top of our core technologists, who are working in a field that we are never been to. So, this is a way we could test the market at the same time. We can help the startups as well by providing them with the technology, all our resources and jointly see if we can and like, you know, break new grounds together. So, we have done that, and we had some successes there. But our main focus is accelerating internal innovations and trying to line them into the market.

Brian Ardinger: That brings up a great question that is always asked, especially in the corporate environment, is like, how do you measure success? Because a lot of times corporates have a different way to measure outcomes because they're working with existing business models, existing optimization. Versus in a startup environment where a lot of it is unknown. So how do you go about measuring success?

Kapil Kane: The two ways we measure success. One is the business impact. That means what's the real revenue created from the projects that we accelerated. So, these are direct like revenue numbers. This is X million dollars created from this project. Second is the revenue potential that those projects create. So that's on the business side of things.

The second way we measure it is people impact. Impact on people. How we are helping people grow. And we actually ran a study where we tracked the people who went to our accelerators for two years. And we saw that on an average, we have anywhere from 1.5 to 6 times accelerated career growth for the people who have gone through the accelerator.

So, it could mean two things. There is no causation, right? There's a correlation. It could be one thing that are we are attracting good people. Our second could be that we are upscaling people. Which is both good because we know like if we had to do something really cool and innovative, we know who these people to count on. Right. And the second thing is it's good to upskill people. So those are the two ways we measure our success.

Brian Ardinger: And I think a lot of corporates have a tough time finding those curious restless entrepreneurs within their own companies. And this might be a great way to help figure that out. Obviously, a lot of startups don't make it. You know, the number of ideas that you think are going to make it, there's a large portion that fall by the wayside. How do you deal with failure? Or what happens to the teams and that, that don't get to where they were hoping to get at the very beginning?

Kapil Kane: That's the win-win part of intrepreneurship versus entrepreneurship. When you are an entrepreneur, you have your day job. Your paycheck. No matter what you do, but the payoff is also limited. Right? I think one of the great things about intrepreneurship and especially, let's say for the GrowthX are those who are not successful, they simply go back to what they were doing before. But if they are successful also, they typically go back to a day job. They will hand it over to the business units to take it forward.

So, for them, their goal is to come up with new ideas and bring those new ideas to the market. So that's the kind of people we have. We have people who have been through our accelerator three times, four times. And try to bring lots of ideas to the market. Some people have maybe succeeded once in three times. Some people have multiple projects that have been successful. But the trend we have seen is people coming in. Getting their idea to the next level. Going back, coming up with more ideas.

Brian Ardinger: Awesome. So, you've been in the trenches in Asia, looking at kind of what's hot. What's next? What are some of the trends that you're seeing that you're excited about?

Kapil Kane: Oh, man. I'm not really like a trend kind of a guy. But I see a lot of noise in metaverse. I see, you know, like this digital transformation is also pretty big here because there are lots of SOEs here who are trying to digitalize. Retail, new retail is a huge buzz in China. So, those are kind of the buzz things.

There's also like a lot of deep technology initiatives in China, especially zero carbon. Space tech is also picking up. Yeah. So, I'm excited more about like a long-term sustainable things. Rather than the short term, shiny things. The bigger problems.

They are the bigger problems. You know, but I think the China is definitely taking the long-term approach, right. With their five-year plans. With the policies, aligning the whole industry in that direction. Some of them may fail. Some of them will succeed. But at least we see like a huge effort going in those directions.

Like for example, in the past five-year plan, it was AI, Smart Manufacturing. Right. Also, there's this thing about the Smart Cities was also part of the last five-year plan. There was something called Common Prosperity. So, they want to make the second tier, third tier cities also prosperous. But I think the biggest thing, if you want to just think about China for the long run is the Sustainability, Carbon Zero and Space. Maybe even Quantum Computing. They are really going into this steep tech, rather than cute tech.

Brian Ardinger: The great way to explain it. Cute tech. Well, Kapil I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights and your expertise. Really do appreciate your time. If people want to find out more about yourself or about GrowthX, what's the best way to do that?

Kapil Kane: I think the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn used to be open in China until it was blocked a few months ago. So, if you guys want to reach out, best place is LinkedIn.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thanks again for coming on the show. Really appreciate the time and looking forward to staying connected and stay safe out there.

Kapil Kane: Thanks. And thanks for having me on the show, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Alex Young founder of Virti. Alex, and I talk about the impact of new technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence on the training and human performance space, and some of the challenges and opportunities facing companies in the changing world of work. Let's get, started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Dr. Alex Young founder of Virti

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Dr. Alex Young. He is the founder of Virti. Virti helps HR teams and organizations using things like artificial intelligence and augmented reality to improve and measure training. So welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex Young: Thanks so much, Brian. It's great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because youcome from a different background. You were a trauma and orthopedic surgeon before you became a entrepreneur founder. So how did you go from being a surgeon to being a founder of a virtual reality training type of company?

Alex Young: Yeah, so it's been a really interesting journey. I mean, my interests have always been around how to improve learning and the performance of people really in any sector. And my original degree, as you mentioned, was in medicine. And then I specialized in orthopedic surgery, working in the UK and also in the US for a little while.

And I've always, always been a bit of a tech nerd as well. So had a couple of companies when I was actually training to be a doctor. And taught myself how to code. Pretty terrible coding skills but managed to build a few companies around that. And then really with Virti, what I wanted to do was build a deep technology company, which tackled one of the major problems I was seeing. Both in healthcare, but also in every other sector, really on the planet which was how do we democratize and scale soft skills type of training for the workforce of the future.

And when I trained as a doctor and a surgeon, often we do communication role-plays and things to train people really how to be more empathetic. How to be better communicators. How to do things in health care, like break bad news to patients, or explain a diagnosis. And in the operating room about how to make decisions under pressure and lead teams. And often those sort of training sessions, were not very scalable. They weren't hugely engaging, and they were quite biased and not that data driven.

So, as you mentioned with Virti, what we do is we use AI and tools like virtual reality to put people into these very scalable, very measurable scenarios, where they can fail in a safe environment and run through lots of soft skills trainings senarios whether that's on a sales team training. Whether it's for managers or leaders, to understand how to deliver feedback. Or it's on your hiring or HR side, where we can actually find if people have some innate biases in the questions they ask during interviews. Or how they deliver team performance. So really, really interesting journey and lots and lots of parallels between healthcare and being an entrepreneur.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The whole concept of this metaverse and some of the new things that are coming in when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality, what are some of the things that you're seeing in that space? How has it changed and evolved since you've started the company? And what are you seeing?

Alex Young: I think the whole VR space has been on a bit of a rollercoaster. Really, you know, going back all the way to the 1980s when NASA first started using VR tech for some of the training that they were doing. And in the healthcare sector there's always been lots of, kind of, sort of use cases of virtual reality for things like surgical training. But it's never really seen mass adoption.

And I think now with some of the newer headsets coming out and with companies like Meta, which of course rebranded from Facebook. Putting kind of billions behind the type of technology. We're seeing some of these PR teams like the Metaverse really galvanizing businesses and people behind this idea of a shared space. Where people can go, communicate with others. Practice in safe environment. Or just go and relax. And, you know, play games with each other.

And I think on the back of the pandemic where everyone was very isolated and teams still work remotely, it's really, really interesting having that projection in a shared space where you can build rapport a little bit easier than perhaps that of over Zoom, looking at your camera. And you get a bit more inclusivity with team communication.

And I think, you know, for us as a training company, we were founded back in 2018. Really under that premise of how can we scale role play or in-person training. And make it more affordable, more scalable and more data driven. And for us, it's just been a great time to sort of execute on that vision and help lots of companies to upskill their people.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned you started the company before COVID and that. But obviously we've seen a massive shift when it comes to this change with COVID. And the fact that everybody's now trying to up-skill cross sell, figure out new ways to do work and that. Are you finding particular industries or jobs settings that are more conducive to this virtual reality environment?

Alex Young: I think it's really interesting, just the diverse views of kind of sectors and categories. Kind of find, you know, helpfulness from immersive technology. It can be used throughout absolutely everything. For us specialization, which is obviously soft skills, I think, you know, we're seeing a big uptake by people like sales teams. Particularly in industries like franchises, where they got to upskill new franchisees from a playbook and have a certain way of doing things.

The traditional method there obviously was doing in-person meetings or in-person webinars and, you know, live webinars and things like that. And it just wasn't either that engaging or that scalable. We've seen big uptakes there. Other industries outside of healthcare, where we've seen big uptake, things like aviation, which again, anything that kind of has infrequent, but very impactful hazardous outcomes. We found that putting people into virtual reality scenarios to be really, really helpful.

So, things like how to communicate with a passenger on an airline who might be rude to the staff. Or, you know, disruptive to other passengers. Being able to deescalate them. It doesn't happen too usually often, but, but it can be incredibly disruptive and cause flights to be landed in places other than their destination. That kind of thing is just great for running people through that talk of repeatable training,

Brian Ardinger: The trend of VR, seems to be just on the early stages of that. What's holding this back from companies being more focused on using this type of environment?

Alex Young: So, although virtual reality and the concept of virtual reality and the Metaverse has been around for a while. I think the technology now is only really sort of on that precipice of kind of mass adoption. As you mentioned, I think with anything new in the hardware space, whether it's an iPhone, whether it's a new type of computer, in this case, it's the VR headsets.

There is going to be a lot of speculation and a lot of blockers and barriers to adoption just because the hardware itself is expensive and people need to understand how it fits naturally into their workplace. I think what we're seeing now is some of the usefulness of the content. And the apps that sit on these pieces of hardware, really the things that are driving adoption.

And as they become more and more impactful, the quality of those becomes better. We're seeing people, you know, much more eager to adopt. And, you know, again, the technology as a whole, it's gone through a huge amount of technological change. Even just they've the last sort of two and a half years in terms of what the tech can do.

So, we've now got things like eye tracking. The headsets they need wires, that attach headsets to computers. You know, the chips and power of the actual headsets themselves is much faster. What we're now saying is we're still on that adoption curve. It's still very early. But we're seeing real impactful business outcomes being seen by people who are actually using them.

Say we've done a lot of research around how the tech works. We've seen people's learning retention increased by upwards of 200%. It's in confidence and employee's ability to action some of the training they've practiced in VR. Outperform in-person training in some cases. And we've seen the time for training reduced when you combine virtual reality with in-person training. So, lots of cost savings. Lots of better impact. Lots of better engagement. Some of the data coming out of it.

Brian Ardinger: What are some of the surprises that you've seen over the years of how your original assumptions were about how to build a company, or the features and solutions you were going to build out there? What are some of the assumptions that have changed? Or some of the surprises that you've seen?

Alex Young: We've been very lucky in that, you know, we spend a lot of time researching things back in 2018 when the company was founded. And we spoke to E learning development professionals and spoke to people in HR. We spoke to end users (employees) and really got a good understanding of what they were using at the moment in terms of either e-learning or in-person training. And then tried to pull out the critical elements of that into what we built.

I think in terms of what we have built at Virti, one of the big complaints that people made, which I've got to say I didn't realize until I sort of truly spoke to a wide variety of HR and learning development professionals was that if you deliver off the shelf content to, we as a company have our own scenarios, soft skills training, and other types of training, and that's great. And people can pick up and plug those, you know, straight into that training workflows. But actually, people want the ability to create their own content and they want a system that's easy to use in order to do that.

And for things like virtual reality and soft skills training, where a lot of it is conversational scripts, people aren't that intimidated by doing that themselves. And, you know, they've got their own experiences and their own ways of doing that. The big things that we did quite early on, on the back of that feedback was build out this No Code creation set of tools across both video and computer-generated scenarios so that people can actually create their own.

And that then throws out a whole host of, you know, real creativity, back to us as a company. And it's really exciting for me as the founder to look at what people create. Whether it's, you know, very immersive diversity inclusivity scenarios, based on people's previous experiences. Whether it's video training or onboarding training for that company. That's really, really exciting.

Brian Ardinger: I'm glad you brought that up because this idea, and we talk a lot about it on the show about no-code and low-code and democratization of some of these tools that makes it easier for people to spin things up, test things, try things. It's interesting to see that you're seeing that evolve in the virtual reality space as well.

Alex Young: We talk about soft skills. Or power skills as I like to call them, in terms of leadership training or helping managers deliver feedback. But there are lots of different ways to do that. And there are lots of different learning points. And I think the types of scenarios that you can put people through are almost limitless in some ways, in terms of the demographics of the people that you're communicating with. The actual setting. The types of conversation. People's emotions.

And even just from one scenario, you can tweak things behind the scenes and create a whole host of slightly different, slightly more difficult or easier scenarios that you can then run your employees through.

And that's where it becomes really interesting because the data of the system can then pick out some subtle changes and improvements. And it can also start to grade who your best performers are in the leadership space. In the sales space. And in the communication space. And actually, give people a gold standard or a ball that they can hit if they're looking to improve their soft skills, which is a really, really cool and really gamified.

Brian Ardinger: And that's an interesting point as well. When you talk about soft skills, I think one of the challenges is it's very difficult to measure that. And you're saying with technology and that, and you have an opportunity to collect data that you might not have been able to collect in the past and use that in different ways to really put some metrics or some insight into what's going on.

Alex Young: A hundred percent. And I think that the simplest way that I think about things is if I do an in-person role play like I did when I was a doctor or like I did, when I was, you know, practicing my own sales skills as the founder of a technology company. You will do a role play and then a third person, the coach will feed back to you. And they might say something like you started the conversation off well. Or give you some technical feedback on the content of what you're saying. Or they might give you some feedback on your eye contact or your body language.

But it's very subjective based on what they're seeing at the time and the assessors own personal experiences and their own abilities. And what the technology can do is it can actually track entire conversations. It can look at people's cadence of that tone. It can look at what conversational items, you know, that they're actually talking about.

And with some of the new hardware, you can also look at things like eye tracking. Physiological data. So, you can see if people are getting a little bit scared during parts of the conversation as well. And then you can feed that back to the user who might not know some of these subtle things, especially in the eye contact area. So, there's loads and loads of really interesting things that we can do. And the most important thing is then feeding that back and helping people be able to learn and improve in really kind of objective ways.

Brian Ardinger: Any type of technology adoption, there's this focus on innovation. And how do you get folks to adopt new technologies and things like that. So, you've obviously had an opportunity to see how companies take new technologies and the culture that's required. So, I wanted to dig a little bit into what you've seen when it comes to the culture of innovation. And how have you seen better companies adapt to this kind of new innovations. And what are some of the things that you've seen when it comes to the culture of innovation?

Alex Young: It's a great question. And I think we, the gamble operating in health care, is our sort of immediate or near target market. And that is something that is quite slow to adopt. Any type of technology because of any kind of patient safety concerns and things like that. And you've got to go through lots of rigorous procurement processes and so forth. But even there, one of the key things that I always look for is who's going to sponsor, you know, the adoption of this technology entirely in the new company. Who is that going to be?

Is it someone in the C Suite? Is it a champion in the L & D or HR Department? Who's going to really come on board and align with someone from our team who's typically on the customer successful or learning development side. And look at what the real goals and the outcome of introducing this tech is, both in the near term or say, you know, a year or two years.

And I think that's where we, as a company, forget a little bit about the technology and we say, okay, how can we help and align to your business goals? Whether that is just getting to payback of the platform as quickly as possible. You know if we can show we can make you money or we can show you that we are driving things like sales revenues or improving customer satisfaction and things like that through better training.

Or just by, you know, retaining your staff because we do a lot of onboarding training and, you know, there's some craziest statistics from places like Gallup or, you know, LinkedIn's workplace Survey, which shows that, you know, that people don't engage with our onboarding or if the onboarding isn't good enough, they will leave your company in like the first 45 days. Which is terrifying us as a business owner myself.

And I think it's those things that we really obsessed over. And then I think the next part is making sure everyone within that organization, that's adopting the software is basically understanding what their role is. That the users are incentivized to use it. And it's meaningful and it's going to be helpful to them. Rather than being a hindrance or just another password that they need to remember.

And most importantly you know, for us, it's in providing value to our customers and what they're doing. And collecting feedback and iterating on that. So, it's always an interesting journey. Every company is slightly different. Some people love adopting new technology and wants to be at the forefront of any innovation.

Some people want to wait until they've seen some use cases come out. And some people are just super cynical. And it's just human nature and different folks you know, different industries. But it's always fun working with lots of different types of companies and people.

Brian Ardinger: You have a podcast out called the human performance podcast. So, whenever I have a podcast host, I always like to get your take on what's going on in that particular space. Some of the things you've learned in this space of human performance. What are some of the best guests or some of the insights that you've learned from your podcast and the guests that you've had on it?

Alex Young: It's been absolutely fascinating actually. I mean, the podcast began really as a way to provide some stories to our users and our customers that sort of inspired them in their day-to-day lives. And some of the things that I was really, really interested in was how people's mindsets or how their own performance made them do, you know, extraordinary things.

On that podcast, some highlights, but for me personally have been, we've had a couple of astronauts who've been on, who've done, you know, multiple space walks and have to fix shuttle antennas, literally in the middle of the space. That for emergency situations, or sports people who've come back from injury and done amazing things.

But I think, you know throughout, the thing that fascinates me is always how people deal with some of these just enormous achievements. And by that, I mean a lot of people who do really, really well are actually the most humble and nicest people on the planet. And will bend over backwards to help out folks.

And I think a lot of that is about their mindset and it's about them really seeing themselves as a servant to the training and to what they're doing and being very, very coachable. And one great story is that fromScott Parazynski. He's one of the astronauts we've had on the podcast. He not only has done, I think over 40 space walks, but he's someone who is just always learning. And always wanting to challenge himself.

And has that in him. Which he's kind of learned over time. And he's also been to the top of Everest. He's been into a volcano in extreme temperatures. And he's just done some crazy, crazy stuff. And the thing that keeps him going is always that want and need to learn new things. To challenge himself. And to really sort of improve himself as an individual. And it's just amazing hearing stories like that every single week. So, I always think, you know, whatever podcast it's not about the host, it's always about the guests. Which really make it for everybody.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Thankyou for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk about your learnings and what you're seeing in the world. Both as a founder, as a, as a technology person and as a person who's focused on human performance. So, Alex, thank you for coming on the show. If people want to find out more about yourself or about Virti, what's the best way to do that?

Alex Young: You can follow Virti at @Virtilabs on all social media. And the website isVirti.com. And then I'm Alexander F. Young on all social media. And by all means, follow me. I talk about soft skills and human performance across every channel.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Alex, thanks again for coming on the show and appreciate the time. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Alex Young: Thank you so much, Brian. Really enjoyed it.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andy Binns, Coauthor of the new book, Corporate Explorer. Andy and I talk about the innovation imperative facing corporations today. And what they can do to foster an entrepreneurial environment, to create corporate explorers within their companies. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Andy Binns, Coauthor of Corporate Explorer

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Andy Binns. Andy is the Cofounder of ChangeLogic and coauthor of a new book called Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy Binns: Hey Brian, thanks very much for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been in this innovation space for a while with McKinsey and IBM. Now you have a new book called corporate Explorer, which is exploring a lot of topics that I think are near and dear to the heart of a lot of our listeners is how can we, as corporations, become better at this whole innovation stuff? Why is innovation becoming so important for corporations to figure out?

Andy Binns: That is really actually the point isn't it. And we try to open the book Corporate Explorer by saying, look, a lot of what we're talking about is really old. And it's been around forever, right? And even the notion of a corporate explorer didn't turn up in the last few years.

You know, one of the earliest ones that I know of is the creation of the ATM machine. The ATM machine, Della Ru a UK based currency printer literally has the license to print money. And it's like, well, surely people want to access this differently. And this guy comes up with the notion of the ATM machine somewhere in, Surry in south of London, with Barclays Bank in the 1960s. And this was a 300-year-old corporation.

This can be done by corporations, but to your point, it's got more important. And it's got more important because we know that digital is there. And transforming not only a business, but an industry. You cannot safely set within automotive and say, all those guys over in consumer devices no longer have anything to do with us. That's true there, but it’s there in a dozen other industries you care to name.

And so, this notion of disruption that Clay Christiansen taught us all about. It's kind of like it's present. We don't dispute it. And we certainly don't dispute it after the last two years we've had. This high degree of uncertainty is present.

And so, a lot of corporations, even those who are doing really well today, I think see that the dynamics of their industry are changing at such a pace that they can't ignore a bunch of different innovations. Either because they want new revenue streams and or they need new capability. Both of these stories are going on.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, they're being forced to. It's kind of spot on. We've got technology advancements that are coming on. We've got new changes in marketplaces. We've got a pandemic. All these things are colliding at once requiring companies to think and act to move faster than they've ever had before. And yet, we still find example after example of companies that are struggling with this. And overcoming obstacles that you would think that they'd be able to overcome. Because they have quite a few advantages from a corporate perspective.

Andy Binns: Absolutely. And that's why corporate innovations beat startups at the innovation game. Now they don't beat them every time. They may not even beat them half the time. But they do. And the point about assets is exactly why they do that. Right. It's when you can leverage brands customer access, technical capabilities, whatever it might be, then that's, what's going to bring you success.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into that a little bit more. What are the key advantages that corporations maybe aren't recognizing or aren't using to the fullest extent when they are wanting to do more innovation initiatives?

Andy Binns: One of the stories we tell in Corporate Explorer is that analog devices, a really strong technology innovation company, electrical engineers. Running around making phenomenal semiconductors. Worrying about the speeds and feeds of that circuits. And then they start to observe a change in the world, particularly the industrial markets where there's this opportunity to connect their sensors, accelerometers, and various other ones to the cloud. And to use analytics, to observe the functioning of the machine.

Right. It's a great space, a lot of startups are active in. And they build this product line around condition-based monitoring. They make some acquisitions to build it out so they can do acoustic sensing as well as motion and all the rest of it.

But if you're a startup and you go into, tell the same solution. No one's ever heard of you. You go into Analog Devices, you're 60 years old, and your brand is based on never retiring a product and always meeting your supply commitments. But totally different conversation.

The market access is a real opportunity in many cases for these corporations. And also, they can access customers in different ways because they matter as a supplier to a bunch of automotive industry clients or whatever it might be. So, I think that's a big area.

The other area is sort of some of the permission to play. So, another case that we give in Corporate Explorer is of the insurance company, Unica in Austria, where they move into sort of a digital insurance product. And again, they already have the actuaries. They can already design the insurance product. They already have the licenses from the relevant European authorities to sell insurance. So again, they can just move that a little bit faster when they are using these assets to make things happen.

Brian Ardinger: So, having said that corporations still aren't necessarily good at innovation. They stumble on the fact that a lot of times they get focused on executing and optimizing their existing business model. For fear of messing up that apple cart, they don't necessarily take the next steps and that. How do you create that culture of innovation such that they are willing to take risks and leverage those advantages they do have?

Andy Binns: We talk in the book about these being the silent killers of exploration. A term we borrowed from Mike Beer and the silent killers is that actually there isn't a deliberate agenda to stop innovators. Right? Sometimes it feels that way, but it's rarely the case. Mostly they're on autopilot.

They're on autopilot because they're focused on the short term. They wanted to eliminate risk to the degree that that's possible. They want to preserve the way they think business should be done. Right. Which is that power of sort of professional skills and identity, which has such an influence on corporations.

And so, I think what they need to do is to learn. It's a learning agenda for them. And I think we are those teachers. You are that teacher, the listeners on the podcast are their teachers. And what they've got to learn about is experimentation. Moving into small increments. Rather than spending a lot that needs to spend little amounts. So that they are in a position to find out where the markets are and where the opportunities lie.

I think that they need to trust their Corporate Explorers. Get off this notion that importing people who've been in a series of failed startups, that they're going to know how to get this done. It's very disrespectful for all the many people who've done fabulous work in startups, and then moved to corporations. Done spectacularly well. But why would you trust them? They failed, right?

The point is that inside the company, there are Explorers, and you need to give them the space, the license. We need to talk about what license means to make that happen. And then finally, the Corporate Explorers themselves need to see themselves not simply as innovators, but also as leaders of change. Too many innovators or potential Corporate Explorers in corporations go hide their project and try to get on with it without getting too much interference.

And what they need to do is build a movement behind what they're doing. They need to win allies. They need to win advocates. They need to figure out how to get that movement going behind what they're doing, so that when they hit roadblocks, which we know they always will. They have people who are willing to support them and explain what it means, why this is learning. Not failure.

If I had a criticism of our colleagues in that function in organizations is that sometimes they miss that change, that human social building this network inside the company toolkit. Which is actually one of those big things that's critical to success.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into the book a little bit. This idea of a Corporate Explorer. Can an average person within a company become a Corporate Explorer? Is there a certain skillset or knowledge or our mindset that's required? Talk a little bit about what it means to be a Corporate Explorer and tasks behind that.

Andy Binns: To a large degree, the Corporate Explorer is exactly the Samsung Entrepreneur. They see a problem in the world. They want to solve. They're dissatisfied with something that's happening. We tell the story of Sara Carvalho at Bosch. That Sara is out hiking through the Andes, the lovely sounding image, right. And she gets home to the home of the people who are hosting her. And she says, I want to take a hot shower. Well, they don't have hot water in Peru. That's not something. Essentially then sets about how do we use Bosch's technology to create a solution to providing hot water.

It could be Sara and these other examples I gave the same. We've told the story of Balaji Bondili at Deloitte. He gets involved in the tsunami relief in Asia. And he sees the power of the crowd. He's ah, the power of the crowd. This is something that could transform consulting. And like 10 years later, he gets into it right. So there's this passion behind something in the world you think you can fix.

And some way you think you might be able to do something about. And that's true in entrepreneurs and in Corporate Explorers, the same. What's different is this social ability. The corporate explorers that succeed, are those that firstly can articulate a case in wagon gets attention. They're really good storytellers. They can bring the possibility and opportunity of what they're proposing to attention.

And they do so not because they say, oh, we can just get a little bit better. Yeah. If you back me, it will be, yeah. There's a small piece of revenue that I can build. Know they've got ambition. They said this is transformative. And the thing is that that actually gets more senior attention than the safe I can do a little bit better. Because it starts to hit the scale of what a senior manager is interested in. So, they do that really well. And then they build out this network of support around that idea so that they're able to then execute it and sustain it.

That's the piece of differences, is this great ambition and storytelling, combined with the social network. So that their building. And I'll tell you, there's another thing, Brian, I've learned as I've met these people. I hope it comes out in the book as we tell the stories, is that they're humble. They don't mind if other people make them successful.

You go around Vienna, and my great friends at UNIQA Insurance. And there are a dozen people who think they help make Krisztian Kurtisz successful at building this digital community insurance product Cherrisk. And he just has a way of making other people feel they played a role that also is something, again,

I think different from an Elon Musk that defines the great Corporate Explorer. It sort of takes a community of leaders around it, not just those involved in the project, or the venture themselves. But also, the people who are going to be actively engaged in supporting

Brian Ardinger: If I'm in a corporation and I'm trying to understand, and maybe even find the Corporate Explorers within my own walls and that I can nurture and build that. Are there particular techniques or things that you've seen to help identify those Corporate Explorers within your company? And then what number of Corporate Explorers do you really need to have an impact?

Andy Binns: I think this is sort of the proactive and reactive if you will. Right. And the reactive model is simply, are you listening? Are you actually looking out for them? I'll tell you one of the most successful Corporate Explorers we talk about in the book is Jim Peck at LexisNexis, right?

He built a multibillion-dollar business in 10 years, inside and existing corporation, which does legal and news information. He builds this big data risk analytics business. And Jim saw the insight. He had the idea. He proposed, nobody gave him the responsibility. That this incidentally is true of Krisztian and UNIQA Insurance.

Nobody gave him, here go build me a billion-dollar business. He proposed it. So, there's a reactive side. Now are you listening. Are you ready to cope with that? Ideally, do you have an ambition. A sort of strategic ambition that says, this is what we want to do, so that if I'm Jim or Krisztian in the business, I feel I have a license to propose those ideas.

One of the great examples is MasterCard. And they had this ambition to wage a war on cash. That's actually a really empowering thing. That tells me I've got to find ways of converting this big number, like that point 85% of transactions on cash to digital. I know wow, those are the ideas, that's how I evaluate success, right?

That reactive piece. And that inspired. The proactive thing is go looking for them. And I think there your best bet is some sort of participative competitive approach where you're focused on solving customer problems. What are the top 10 customer problems you want to solve in the world? And invite people to come up with ideas.

And we can talk more about this. I think there's a problem in corporations of too much idea creation. But I think the, hey, how can we solve these customer problems? How can we add more value to different customer groups? What places are there, where there are customer groups we've identified that may have problems we can grow into. That kind of thing is a great place to encourage people to participate and then step forward with their idea.

And then don't spend too much on any one idea. Startups run through scarcity and so should corporate ventures. They should be, they should be begging for cash. As corporations, in some cases are, they worried much more, particularly in Europe I find, they worry much more about the size of their office. And how big the team is that they can hire. And all this kind of stuff. Which is complete nonsense in comparison to have you validated the idea. Have you done enough to prove out whether that's a really a market for it or not?

Brian Ardinger: Following on the incentives conversation, a lot of times we think, I mean, you mentioned there's a lot of intrinsic incentives that seem to be in play for the Corporate Explorers that actually have success within that. How does a company think about incentivizing folks to raise their hand and say, hey, I want to be an entrepreneur within the walls or, or I want to take my ideas forward? Are there things that seem to work better than others?

Andy Binns: It's a pretty complex area for sure. And there's a view out there, I think that what we need to do in corporations is in some way mirror the rewards of the, of a startup. So, Intel had this approach. Potentially ended after we published the book. And they said, okay, go and build a venture. We'll give you what you need.

And if it reaches an external valuation of a billion dollars, we'll give you 10 million or a business unit, will buy it out for 10 million. It didn't work. And it didn't work, also if you think about it, it introduces a perverse incentive to spin out the venture outside of the corporation. So, you don't get the value from it because you're going to get far more on the open market than you are in the corporation.

That's great for the individual Corporate Explorer or entrepreneurs. It's lousy for the corporation. It's a flawed notion of incentives. And most of the people I've mentioned, who've done this successfully, are ones who actually have received very little additional compensation. Now that doesn't mean that they haven't done very well for themselves. Because this is a great way to prove your career. To prove that you're a CEO.

Jim Peck ended up being CEO, not only of LexisNexis Risk, but also of two further corporations. He's now CEO Nielsen IQ Market Research Fund, and Krisztian’s career has blossomed. Others have blossomed. There are real opportunities. It's just not the same as an entrepreneur. And so, I think what we need to do is. The issue is less about what we pay them, and it's more about the environment we create.

That accepts that explore businesses are different than the core business. That how you evaluate them, how you manage the fact that there are high degrees of uncertainty around how fast they'll generate a return, that's the point. And if you make it so that that's accepted and understood and well-managed, then your corporate explorers will emerge.

If you make it, oh, you've got a great idea. I want to see a five-year cash projection on how you're going to deliver the same margin as the core business, then you going to throw them out, right? You're going to eject them over time. That's really the area of incentive that I think we should focus on much more than the individual payment.

Brian Ardinger: So, my question I want to ask about is how do you know if you're making progress? How do you know if your corporation is getting more innovative? What are some key measurements or ways to know if you're making progress?

Andy Binns: You know, I think that it is for me about how many revenue generating businesses have you created. Again, there are some who would say, this is about how many billion-dollar external valuations. This is nonsense. I know the valuations matter. If I had a billion-dollar corporation and I was selling it, putting in my money in my pocket, I'd be delighted. Many people would. Of course.

But that's not what corporate life is about. It's something else. And so, you've got to understand that that you're fulfilling different objectives. So, I want to see that I've got revenue generating businesses that in the markets I define on winning, we talk a lot about how, if you're going down this path of creating new businesses, you want to have a really clear ambition. Like this way to wage a war on cash.

And then you want to know what are the hunting zones you're going to play in. In order to achieve it. So, I want to know how many ventures have I got in my hunting zones? And how many of those are on track towards the kind of revenue goals that I have for them or the kind of milestones that I need in order to get that? Because it's all about ideating, incubating, and scaling ventures. That's success, you know, activity is not success. And so, I want to ultimately see that happen.

Brian Ardinger: And knowing that you can't bet on the winners at the very beginning. You have to have a portfolio of ideas that are coming through at all times. So that you can see the progress with evidence and, and, bet on the ones that are moving forward.

Andy Binns: Absolutely. And this whole area of portfolio managing your innovation is something that I think is critical. One of my colleagues NoelSoblemantalks a lot about this. And I think he's on the money.

Brian Ardinger: So last topic I want to talk about is we are in this great resignation. And this area where people are moving around and trying different things, and the world has completely changed. What are your thoughts when it comes to retention or hiring of innovators? And these corporate explorers?

Andy Binns: I think it's a tough moment for corporations. One where they should be fairly concerned that they're going to lose their best talent. Because if you look at the stats, what goes side by side with great resignation is a record number of new business formations in the U.S. Some of those are going to set up coffee shops, coffee roasters, breweries, distilleries. People who are enjoying themselves, doing something different from corporate life.

But there's a large number which are people seeking to realize their entrepreneurial ambition. And so, if I'm a manager in a corporate business or senior executive, and I'm seeing this happen, I should be asking myself, why am I losing my most entrepreneurial talent when I could be using that to sponsor growth in my business.

That's where I think that needs it. So, all of the stuff we've talked about, about creating the license to explore. Giving them customer problems, to solve. Investing small amounts and making things happen, and then scaling the ones that work. I think that actually is a key part. It's not the whole answer to this story of, of the great resignation, but it's a piece of it.

And it also is about, you know, people want a future. They want to believe in something. They want a why. And doing new stuff, demonstrating like in sustainability. Is one of the interesting things is that most of the ideas, you know, we do a little bit work with Wazoku is one of the idea management platforms. And Simon Hill told me that more than half of the ideas on the Wazoku platform across all of their client base has to do with sustainability right now.

And people want to see you're making progress on something like. And that's a story of innovation. How can you scale that to a level that actually has business impact? And I think again, that creates purpose, commitment, a sense of being a part of something that matters. Again, a key level of the innovation component.

Brian Ardinger: Like you said, it's really never been a better time to tap into new and exciting projects. There are far more problems out there that people need solved. And they're constantly changing. So, you're in a good spot, if you, again, encourage folks to raise their hand and find those problems and have the ability to solve them.

Andy Binns: Yeah. I think that's exactly right, Brian. Yeah. Very well said.
For More Information

Brian Ardinger: So, Andy, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book Corporate Explorer, what's the best way to do that?

Andy Binns: Yeah, you could go to thecorporateexplorer.com or changelogic.com and learn about us. Learn about our research. I've written this book with two professors. Mike Tushman from Harvard. Charles O’Reilly from Stanford. They've also written some other books on the topic. Lead and Disrupt in its second edition, is another excellent text to dig into this whole area of how corporations can win and do win at innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Andy, thanks again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Really appreciate your time. Really appreciate your insights and look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Andy Binns: Likewise. Thanks Brian.

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Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Harini Gokul, Head of Customer Success at AWS. Harini and I talk about the importance of working backwards to define customer success. And how companies can better understand customer needs to create better products and services. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change, and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Harini Gokul, Head of Customer Success at AWS

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Harini Gokul. She is the Head of Customer Success at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show.

Harini Gokul: Thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here. I've heard many episodes of your show and I'm so excited to have this conversation.

Brian Ardinger: Obviously, Amazon Web Services is one of those companies that we think of when we think of innovation. I first want to just start with, what is your role at Amazon Web Services and what is the Head of Customer Success actually do?

Harini Gokul: Yes, it's a great question. So, AWS is all about customer obsession. It is baked into the DNA of how we build products and go to market and take care of our customers. I lead what we call as the customer solutions function. What they industry sometimes also calls to as customer success for our next generation of customers.

What that means is we want to make sure that we are investing in our highly innovative hyper-growth customers to make sure that we are supporting them in their transformation. In their digital transformation and their business transformation. At the end of the day, my job is making sure my customers can take care of their customers.

Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into that a little bit. So obviously you, by working with a lot of different companies, you've seen both the good and the bad of how people focus on customers. And what are some of the insights or maybe biggest mistakes that you've seen from customers when it comes to interacting with customers.

Harini Gokul: There's certainly a lot of good and a lot of opportunities for us. Our starting point is how we define value and good with the customer. Right. And the one challenge I see is we start with our definition of what good looks like. And we are nodding. We are in customer conversations and nodding sometimes.

But not really actively listening or absorbing what the customer's articulating their problems. Because we so badly want our solution to fit their problem statement. So, I think the biggest hurdle is starting with what we think is good. And thinking versus truly actively listening to the customer and focusing on a customer defined value.

Brian Ardinger: So, are there particular tactics that you use when you start that first conversation with a potential customer to understand their needs and then subsequently what to with that?

Harini Gokul: Absolutely. So, my, my favorite, I've many tools in my toolkit, but one of my favorite tools is actually an Amazon methodology called Working Backwards. Many of our listeners, and probably you have heard about it, Brian.

Working backwards as an approach of creating a press release before you build a new product or a service, or you create a new program and what that does is it starts from the customer. And it says, when we do this, this is the problem we are solving for. This is the challenge we've addressed. This is the benefit we've provided the customer. And it's an articulation of value. And what good looks like when the job is done.

So, you work backwards and place the customer squarely in the center of what you do. And then work backwards from that to say, what do we build, create, stand up, create as an organization to deliver on that value?

Brian Ardinger: And through that process, I imagine you're not always right. Those assumptions that you make at the very beginning of what you think the customer needs and that. So, you need to, I would imagine to be agile or adaptable to how that works.

So how does that initial, I guess, take on the customer and that, how does that play out in real life when you're actually then executing and finding out that some of the things that you thought were correct. Some of the assumptions you had are now incorrect.

Harini Gokul: And, you know, it's two ways. It's one be, make flawed assumptions. Or we, like I said, we truly want to believe that some of our beliefs are true. So it's important to dis-confirm our beliefs. Also, especially in the past two years with the rapid growth and innovation we've seen, customer needs are constantly evolving, right?

So, we need a muscle to continuously listen. You listen first and then you create what you believe, what you've heard and have that document from working backwards. And then be constantly check in. You know, as we do the work with the customer, to dis-confirm our beliefs and understand if customer needs have changed. If what they are looking for has changed. If their customer needs have changed. So, there is a process to constantly check in and iterate.

It's about actively continuing to get customer perspective. And as we do our work, and also being open to going back on positions, we've made. Always sort of examining decisions that are being made. Commitments that have been made. And say, is this the right thing for the customer.

Brian Ardinger: I imagine you work with a wide variety of types of companies. So, startups to more established ones. And all kind of growing fast. Is there a different mindset from a brand-new startup, that's trying to spin up some new things in the marketplace? Versus an existing customer that's trying to grow and expand their existing business model?

Harini Gokul: It's such a great question, by the way, because I do work with the diversity of customers. And the more I see at the spectrum of customers. All from sort of more mature companies to born in the cloud companies, there are certain common foundational things that go across them that help them succeed.

One is this focus on customer defined value. And putting the customer at the center of everything they do. The second is making sure that there's a culture of innovation that is built into how you solve those problems, right?

And that goes back to creating an environment where your talent feels fearless. They feel like they can take risks. They feel that are two-way doors here, where they can make decisions, experiment, and fail fast. Those are the things that are common across these companies.

What is different, of course is the approach and the execution, right? So more mature companies have more legacy assets as an example. Or a mindset that needs to evolve. And born in the cloud companies have seen growth, but they're struggling with how do I sustain this growth.

Now that my product, is such a great fit. Now that I've seen such early traction, how do I build the foundations? How do I build the culture, the people, the scale that's required for me to sustain this growth? So, the leavers are slightly different depending on where you are, but there are a number of things that span across this range of companies.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some other tools or tactics that you use to remain competitive and innovative. What are some of the things that you're looking at that are changing the game out there?

Harini Gokul: Absolutely. I think we've been in a period of hyper growth, hyper innovation. And companies and customers are all thinking about a couple of things. They're thinking about how do I serve my customers better? It's becoming competitive. So, they want to differentiate themselves. So, a number of our customers are thinking about what do I need to do in terms of product, in terms of experience that can help differentiate.

And my role is to help them figure it out. A lot of the conversations we're having right now is working backwards from what they want to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, what they want to serve to their customers, and saying what are some decisions they have to make?

And that's really, to me, one of the most important things about what I do is helping companies place their bets. How do I determine where do I put my talent? Am I going to put them in sort of this technical, heavy lifting in the back? You know, this undifferentiated heavy lifting. Do I put them to build a product? What am I going to focus on? Is there a go to market I focused on versus building a product?

And so, a lot of my work is bringing in my product teams to sit with the customer to think about what good looks like for them and help make them the right decisions. So, if I step back, I think the element of helping customers place bets. Talent is hard to find. Resources are not finite. Infinite.

So, helping them place their bets and prioritize best to serve their customers is probably the most important thing we do. And that includes working closely with our product teams, working closely with our sales teams. And really up and down the stack to make sure our customers get what they need.

Brian Ardinger: You bring up an interesting point when it comes to technology and data and the fast paced that the world is moving. Such that companies have to be much more adaptable at understanding where their talent is and where they should be leveraging and that.

So, can you talk about some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to data and technology of where customers can get the most out of the new trends and the new things that are popping up there, and still remain relevant?

Harini Gokul: I think it's important to think about innovation. But innovation that is truly important to the customer. So, I would say start with what makes a difference to your customer. What problem you're solving. Then prioritize. And as you translate that internally create a culture that rewards making the news versus just reporting the news.

And to me, that's one of the biggest signs of a company that sustains this hyper-growth that hyper innovation, is creating a culture that scales beyond initial innovation. Culture that rewards its people for always looking around the corner. Picking up those signals. Knowing what's coming down the pipe. Knowing what's important to the customer even if it's just an anecdote they've heard. And then bringing it back in and translating that into a product feature into a go to market, into a sales play, that helps the customer meet their needs.

So, I think companies that create a culture of innovation that reward making the news versus just sort of delivering on what you've promised, are the ones that will truly be successful as you go forward.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned having a constant customer contact and that. And I think it's easy at the beginning when you're a startup, because one, you don't have as many customers. So, you can stay in touch and you're trying to figure out what they really need.

But as you grow, as you have customers, you have delivered a solution over and over again to them. I think sometimes get complacent, from the standpoint of you think, you know, what the customer wants, or you rely on the salespeople telling you what they've heard in their field rather than having that direct relationship with the customer.

Are there tactics or things that you've seen to continue that hunger of customer centricity, that you've experienced or that you've seen from your customers?

Harini Gokul: Hunger is such a great word for that, because you truly do need to be hungry to know what your customers are thinking. And really helping them, you know, thinking around the corner with them. And the one tactic that I've used in many, many roles that's really worked for me is called a customer advisory board.

And you can do this, but if you are a startup with five customers, or if you are a much more mature company with thousands and hundreds and thousands of customers. It's the importance of getting together a representative sample of your customers around the table, literally around a virtual table.

Or a physical forum and having a conversation that lets them do two things. One it lets each of the customers have a peer-to-peer connection. Because that's really the value add to bringing customers together is having them connect with each other and share insights and perspectives.

And second, having them share with you what they think is working and what they think could be better and what signals they are seeing. And to me, these forums, these customer advisory board forums are so critical to making sure that even when an organization matures, as it grows up, that we are keeping closely connected to customer signals.

Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is trends that you're seeing in the space. Obviously, the world is changing very quickly, whether it's technology or data and that. What are some of the things that you're excited about that you're seeing in the marketplace that are changing the way companies can work with customers?

Harini Gokul: I think there are multiple things any given day, I often say that since the great industrial revolution, this has been the decade of unprecedented change. Data is king right now, or queen. And I see a lot of focus on getting data. Understanding data. But what I've really liked is now that we are leveraging that data to pattern match. And draw inferences. And be proactive and predictive in how we can take care of our customers.

So, while data is great and I love the focus on it. What I love seeing is the step up. Is the transformation of using data as means to a better customer journey. I think that's important. I love that praise. What that is driving and what that has also complimented is sort of the consumerization of technology anywhere, right?

Our experiences are so driven by what we see around us in the consumer technology, that even enterprise more traditional mature spaces are starting to understand what good looks like from the consumerization of technology and where we can adopt it. So, I think that syndrome has become more spread.

The third piece I'll say is I've always been very intentional about privacy, security, data sovereignty. I worked in Europe for a while, and I was there when GDPR happened. And I could see that in order for this incredible growth in the Cloud to continue, we would need people to trust the Cloud. To trust that they knew our organizations had their best interest at heart. And I see that anxiety and I see that importance, come back again in a very significant way. Especially given the geopolitical environment we are in right now.

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Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Things are changing so fast. It's both exciting to be in this, but it's also one of the scariest times, I think, for a lot of customers and companies out there trying to figure this out. I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your insights. If people want to find out more about yourself or about AWS, what's the best way to do that.

Harini Gokul: LinkedIn, please.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Harini, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation. And I thank you very much for sharing your thoughts.

Harini Gokul: Of course. Thank you.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Liam Martin, author of the new book Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers. Liam and I discuss the challenges and opportunities of the new world of asynchronous and remote work. And what employees, managers, and leaders can do to be more productive and thrive in the new and changing environment. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Liam Martin, Author of Running Remote

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Liam Martin. He's the author of Running Remote, which is a new book. He's also a serial entrepreneur. Runs Time Doctor and Staff.com. And he's also a co-founder and co-organizer of the world's largest remote work conference called Running Remote, which is coming up here soon. So welcome to the show, Liam.

Liam Martin: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to get into this.

Brian Ardinger: As everyone has found out, it's a topic that's become a lot more on people's radar. In 2020, I think if you started before that talking remote work, you're talking about nomad life and they were the folks that were doing it, but it wasn't necessarily mainstream.

Now we're in this world where everybody's had some taste of remote work. You know, they've been working from their basement or someplace along the line. What are people getting, right. And what are people getting wrong when it comes to remote work? Now that everybody's been plunged into this deep end.

Liam Martin: Oh, that's a great question. January of 2020, 4.5% of the U S workforce was working remotely. March of 2020, 45 % of the US workforce was working remotely. And we're projected to effectively, as we moved from pandemic to endemic, be at about 30% of the US workforce working remotely. And if you make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, that number is 75% of the workforce.

So, we're talking about a transition that is probably the most influential transition towards work since the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution took about 80 years, and we did it in March. So, a complete change of the way that people work. And when people made that transition, I was getting crazy calls because I've been doing remote for almost 20 years.

I was getting all these calls from governments and from multinational corporations. And I lovingly call these people Pandemic Panicers. The people that were just like, okay, we're going to go remote at gunpoint. Right. We have no choice other than to go remote. And the biggest thing that people really get right, is number one, just allowing people to make that transition and putting away the fears that they classically had before that occurred.

And that was a really interesting opportunity for the market, because for me, I mean, I think I call myself like a fundamentalist remote worker. I'm really committed towards remote work because I think it actually makes everyone's lives significantly easier. Not only the employee, but the employer.

But when you saw this transition, people just said, okay, you know, we're going to try this out. We're going to see if it happens. I think a lot of people said, this is probably only going to be two months, it ended up being two and a half years. But the reality is that when everyone made that switch, it was putting away those fears. That was probably one of the best things that people could have done.

People did almost everything else wrong, unfortunately. And that's actually the goal of the book is to be able to, to make that shift. But the core piece that I would probably touch on. The most important thing that people don't recognize is there is an entire industry of people called Remote First Organizations. I was one of them. We have people in 43 different countries all over the world.

We do not have an office. And these people work all over planet earth, different cultures, different identities, and we all seem to get along together. The reason why we do that is because something that I researched or I came across basically during the book, which we call asynchronous management. Which is basically the capability to be able to run a business without speaking to anyone face-to-face.

So think about it in this context. You've got a company you want to be able to build out a massive company like Coinbase, as an example. Coinbase IPO'd at $141 billion. They entered number 89 on the S & P 500. And for the first time in the history of the SEC, they stated that their headquarters was nowhere because they said everything else would be a lie. And the vast majority of the communication is asynchronous. Meaning they don't do Zoom calls. They don't meet in person. The company basically just evolves on its own. And there's a bunch of mechanics that kind of connect to that, which I talk about at length in the book.

Brian Ardinger: What's the first topic that people ask you about or pick your brain about when it comes to remote working. Like where do people naturally go to that they need help with?

Liam Martin: You're hitting all my buttons, Brian. All right. So, the first question that people ask me is, should we be using Zoom or Google Meet, or should we be using Asana or should we be using Monday.com. Or Trello or whatever it might be. And my response at this point, Is, if you're asking those questions, you don't actually know what your problem is.

So fundamentally, the tools that we're going to use are not actually the way to be able to manage remote workers. That's an excellent way to be able to recreate the office. But when everyone's working from home and working remotely, it's actually a completely different way of managing people. So, I say as an example, just to kind of give you facts on the ground.

I meet with my direct reports about two hours a week. I literally have synchronous conversations with my company, two hours per week. The other, you know, I probably work about 50 hours a week. The other 48 hours of that workweek, I work asynchronously. And so does everyone else inside of the organization.

The actual systems, the platform, the process documents, those things are the manager. And we really focus on leadership, instead of management inside of these teams.

Brian Ardinger: That's an excellent point because I think a lot of people, again, like you say, they gravitate towards the tools. And the tools will obviously are getting quite good and much better than they were 8, 10 years ago when you probably started this. And things like even Google Docs were a little bit janky at the time. But when it comes to leadership. When it comes to putting the culture in place, what are some of the pitfalls that most people fall into when it comes to remote culture?

Liam Martin: So, this is the Friday at 4:00 PM. Everyone must report to Zoom, and we're all going to drink beers and playing Cards Against Humanity, not the fun version, however. The HR approved version, right. That no one really wants to be at. And maybe, you know, a pizza's delivered to you at the end of the week. Poll your people. Make that survey anonymous. Ask them if they like it. They do not like it. No one likes it.

So, culture can't be built. Culture is something that happens naturally. And what you can only monitor is the dividends from that culture. You can't actually measure the inputs. You can only measure the outputs of culture in my opinion. So as an example, we bought everyone Oculus Rift headsets, just recently. Virtual reality headsets.

And we said, okay, you guys have these virtual headset. Would you like to meet in the metaverse? Would you like to play video games together? We don't care which video games you play. If you want to play the most HR inappropriate video game, the one that you kill zombies with, go ahead. Up to you. And then what we measure is the dividend of that activity.

So how many people actually do it? How much time do they spend doing it? That's what you need to do when you build culture inside of an asynchronous remote organization. Because this forced version of culture building is again the same mindset that people have inside an office model.

The big premise is that when you think about collaboration as a core component of remote work, it's actually an incorrect premise, the remote pioneers, and the ones that I studied throughout the book, they actually recognized that instead of everyone paying this last cost of an hour and a half commute to a single place every single day in which you could have a collaboration buffet.

Remote First organizations have recognized, well, every time we meet is a cost that we have to inject, right? So, we can have a more of an a la cart method to be able to make sure that we can collaborate when we need to. The minimum viable dose to be able to move the business forward. And this all, once you understand that core premise, everything else that applies to work and how work should be done changes.

Brian Ardinger: So, as we're coming, hopefully out of the pandemic a little bit, you know, we're getting people back into more of a traditional office environment. Where are you seeing the challenges when it comes to that hybrid approach. And this back and forth of, we need to go back to normal, so to speak. Or we've got half the people now in office and half the people are remote. What are you seeing from that person?

Liam Martin: I will be again a little bit, I guess, outspoken in this context. Which is, I think that hybrid is actually the worst decision out of the three. So, I'd rather have people go back to the office, than be hybrid. And for many reasons, but the biggest one is something that in remote work, we call distance bias.

If you have an individual that is close to the decision maker or the manager. So, let's say someone that is in the office versus someone being remote. Inevitably the person that is in the office. If the manager does not actually have the discipline to be able to treat both of those employees equally, the employee that's closer to the manager will have more of their decisions moved forward than the remote worker.

So effectively the remote worker become second-class workers. And it's not within the interest of a remote worker, if they want to actually move forward in the organization to be remote. So, they're going to have to come into the office in order to be able to actually have that work done.

I mean, there's been actually a couple of studies done on this already. It's incredibly destructive. It completely destroys company culture. It destroys your EMPS. It is something that I think is a ticking time bomb as we move back to, the majority being a hybrid environment, because that's the way that it's currently happening, at least in the United States.

Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of folks resist going to the fully remote because of one of the main advantages of being in person is that ability to have those serendipitous collisions of people and that. And so how do you plan for that? How do you build for that? To get the advantages of that bumping into power that you don't in a remote environment.

Liam Martin: You're going through my greatest hits of things that we may or may not agree on.

Asynchronous work is the polar opposite of serendipitous collaboration. We try to, as an organization, remove serendipitous collaboration because serendipitous collaboration is a word for feeling busy, but not necessarily getting anything done.

So, there's a fantastic book by Cal Newport called Deep Work. And it is the ability for every single individual inside of an organization, to be able to have everything that they need at their disposal in order to solve difficult problems. And that actually is the core premise of what actually makes a company move quickly or slowly. It's their speed of innovation. It's their ability to be able to solve problems.

And we found through research. Again, this is because we've just had such a difficult mind shift where if you look at, open up any other MBA book, it's like collaboration is the most important thing that you can possibly do that serendipitous interaction effect.

But in reality, actually, the best work is done when everyone has everything that they need to do. Everyone has the tools in front of them to solve a problem. And then they can solve that problem. And the vast majority of that work is done by the individual. So, the more people that you can optimize towards deep work, and the more time that you can minimize towards the meeting and collaborative effects that basically happen inside of organizations, the faster that companies move forward.

I'll give you one example connected to this. One, someone in the book, his name's Amir. He runs a company called Doist, which is the company that builds the task management app ToDoist. Millions and millions of people use this application all over planet earth. He has people in his company he has never spoken to them face to face.

He's never done a Zoom call with them. He's never done an audio call with them. The most he's done is a little bit of instant messaging and the vast majority is project management. Like task management. Setting a task back and forth. Commenting on it. And those team members are incredibly effective. And companies like ToDoist as very wealthy, profitable organizations.

And they're done in a way that is completely asynchronous. And I actually think that this idea is going to proliferate throughout the rest of corporate America. As we move from this pandemic to endemic stage.

Brian Ardinger: It's fascinating stuff. I often think about, like, from the individual's perspective, we've not been trained in this. And you know, so it's a lot of new learning of what to do in new environments. Are there particular skillsets or toolsets or mindsets that people should be thinking about as they want to embrace more of this remote asynchronous type of working?

Liam Martin: Not many, to be honest with you. There are no books on asynchronous work, which is why I wrote one. The big thing that I can really point people out to. The ability to be able to work is really focused on, as I said, people solving difficult problems. And when you actually look at like, how do I actually solve a difficult problem? A lot of the times managers facilitate work, but they don't actually do any of that work.

So inside of asynchronous organizations, another thing that we discovered, or I discovered in my research for this book is the managerial layer in async orgs are about 50% thinner than they are in synchronous organizations. So, there are more people, there are more dollars focusing on doing work, then managing that work because fundamentally the platform, the project management system, the process document is the manager. It's not necessarily the individual.

And that's a real shift that again. It's very difficult for people to be able to recognize. I mean, I could point you towards a whole bunch of tools to be able to work that out. But if you're just simply recreating the office and saying, I have to tell you what my numbers are, Brian. Brian, you tell your manager what Liam's numbers are. And then that manager tells the boss what Liam's numbers are. No, all of those numbers should just be available to the CEO of the company and to Liam, actually.

Another big thing is asynchronous organizations have a concept that we've kind of coined as radical transparency, where everyone has the same informational advantage as the CEO. Very difficult for a lot of old-school organizations to be able to overcome. But then if everyone has the same informational advantage as the CEO, then everyone can actually make much better-informed decisions throughout the entire organization.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that is often brought up in our podcast is this idea of talent. And how do you get the best out of the talent? And one of the things that I think is, again, different potentially in this new environment is how do you go about hiring for talent and specifically hiring for folks that may be better at this type of work?

Liam Martin: So, one of the biggest indicators of success in remote work, and more specifically in asynchronous remote work organizations is introversion. I call asynchronous work really the rise of the introverted leader. Because when you go into a room of, let's say eight, incredibly intelligent people. Who's generally the person whose ideas are adopted?

It's usually the six foot two, all American guy, with washboard abs that's incredibly charismatic. And those are the ideas that we usually adopt. If you look at a bunch of corporate boardrooms and we analyze a thousand of them. I could bet you without even knowing what the ideas are, is the guy over six feet tall. Is he a guy? Is he good looking right? And is he in shape?

If you told me those variables, I could probably tell you whose ideas are getting adopted. And do those people have the best ideas? No, they don't. So asynchronous work actually provides for the ideas to be the most important variable as it applies to asynchronous work, because the bias of that charismatic individual doesn't permeate the organization in the same way.

When you are just simply debating an idea as an example, on Asana or on Trello, in the comments. The best ideas, actually permeate organizations. And there's a lot of data to be able to show that women and minorities rise throughout remote and asynchronous organizations, way faster because of that lack of bias.

Brian Ardinger: So, if people want to pick up the book, what are some of the topics that you'd cover in that? And what can people expect from it?

Liam Martin: So, the biggest things are, what can you actually do to be able to experiment an asynchronous communication? And again, you can do this inside of an office or outside of an office. There are plenty of asynchronous organizations where people attend the office every single day, and then they recognize they don't necessarily have to be in meetings eight hours a day.

They can actually just choose when they want to have a meeting and recognize that meetings are actually a distraction. They're not something that move you forward. They're actually something that slow you down, inside of organizations.

And talk about what actionable steps you can take to actually move your organization over to, as we call it the asynchronous mindset. Which has a bunch of variables connected to the process documentation that you have to put inside of your business. The ability for your project management system to actually take over the vast majority of your management. And then the documentation of all of those metrics. So that metrics are just automatic, and you don't necessarily need to extract them manually.

There's no more game of telephone, figuring out what the heck is going on in your business. And what this produces as a result, is a company that is number one, a lot less stressful for the business owner to be able to operate. But it's also scalable and can grow way faster than any of your competitors in this space.

Brian Ardinger: It's a fantastic topic. What's the best way to connect with you and more information about the book?

Liam Martin: So best place for you to just go torunningremote.com. You'll be able to check out the conference that we're doing in May. And then also the book that comes out right after the conference.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Liam, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share a little bit about what everybody's going to have to be dealing with in the near future. So, I appreciate your time. Looking forward to staying connected. Thanks very much for coming on.

Liam Martin: Thanks for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Cutler, author of the new book, The Game of Innovation. David and I talk about how companies can integrate creativity and gaming into their innovation practices. And we'll discuss some of the best practices, tactics, and techniques that you can use in the process. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with David Cutler, Author of The Game of Innovation

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have David Cutler. He is the founder and CEO of the Puzzler Company. He's a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of South Carolina. And I have him on the show because he's the author of a new book called The Game of Innovation. Welcome, David.

David Cutler: Thank you. It's so great to have the opportunity to chat with you.

Brian Ardinger: The book is very visual. And I would love to be able to show pictures of that. Maybe we'll put some of that in the show notes. Let's start about your background and how did you get into this game of innovation?

David Cutler: You know, so much of the work that I do is with different kinds of organizations, focused on all kinds of problems. Sometimes it's around culture. Or it's around trying to achieve certain results. But they're not sure exactly what to do. And so, we worked together to design some kind of a process or a game.

And then often we'll work on multiple teams. Where they'll come up with these great ideas and figure out how to design it. Often it is run as a tournament, so the teams will compete. But sometimes we do fusion rounds where parts of this idea are combined with parts of another idea or have all different kinds of formats.

Brian Ardinger: So, you've been working with a lot of different types of companies out there. What are some of the biggest obstacles that organizations face when it comes to innovation?

David Cutler: So, I think when it comes to innovation or when it comes to change, most leaders that I know have one of two fundamental beliefs. Or one of two fundamental leadership styles. And unfortunately, as well-intentioned as they may be, they often do not work.

The first is top-down leadership. This idea that, you know, I have the big ideas as the leader. That's my responsibility or maybe my inner circle. And over time, I'm going to impose any number of these big ideas upon the community. And look you or I, we might love those ideas as outsiders, but it turns out that most people do not like being told what to do. Especially if it's different from what they've always done before.

So as a result, people digging their heels. They push back or maybe they retreat. Morale plummets and the likes. And usually even if the change is implemented, it's probably not going to stay. And you know, most of those top-down leaders suffer one of two fates. Either they're fired or maybe they're promoted to a place where they can torment more people.

Brian Ardinger: Do less damage.

David Cutler: The other, the other perspective is this idea of bottom-up leadership. If we want change that. But if we want innovation to happen, it's got to come from the grass roots. Come from the trenches. And the problem with that is that most people have no idea that they are responsible for innovating the future. I think most of us believe my job is to do my job well. The thing that was outlined in the contract. So, if I'm supposed to serve French fries where I'm supposed to be the accountant, it's not immediately apparent that I'm also responsible for re-imagining the future.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about why games are so important and, you know, that's obviously the topic of your book and it goes into great detail. And again, I love the book because it's very visual and it gives you a lot of tactical things that people can do. But why games? Why is that so important in this innovation space?

David Cutler: You know, I consider any well-designed process to be a game. Whether or not it's particularly gamey. You don't need dice and concept cards in order to effectively solve problems. And yet there are many, many benefits of unapologetic gamification. Games unify communities behind a common and shared sense of purpose. There's accountability to rules and results.

Puzzlers, as I call them, problem solvers are often much more open to thinking creatively and strategically in the context of a game. Finally, though, the problems we may be solving are really, really serious often. People are more likely to bring their best selves if they're really enjoying the process. So, games can be really fun. Even though they're hard, hard work.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about how you go about crafting a game. And the importance of the different functions and that, of how you should do this in real life.

David Cutler: So, game is actually an acronym for a very, very loose and flexible system. So, game stands for G guidelines, an arena, M materials and E experience. It's not always the same. In fact, every time I design a game, or I encourage other people to do, I often want to mix things up, especially if you're working with the same community, but there are constant tools.

So, it just very, very quick. Guidelines G guidelines is about the parameters of your game. So, what's the most important challenge you're trying to solve. What's the problem at the core of things? What are the constraints? The non-negotiables that may not be challenged under any circumstances. Constraints are necessary to innovation. And criteria, what constitutes success.

So those are the guidelines. Usually those are written before the game has started. So, we really know what this game is all about. Arena is the conditions of play. It's about your puzzlers, period, and place. So, the puzzlers. Who is playing this game, what kind of people, what kind of experts do you need to best solve this problem?

Period. How long do you have to solve the problem and place? Where are you going to do this? And sometimes, you know, the arena before you start, and then you have to build a game that works within those conditions. As sometimes you know, this is the problem we have to solve. So, then you build the arena that will work with it.

And then materials are the tools of your game. Maybe you're in the physical world. Flip charts and crayons and prototyping materials. There are a whole bunch of things you can use online, in virtual games. And the experiences. What happens. What is the order of activities, in which order, for how long?

Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of people when they have gone through these types of exercises and different creativity events, and that, it's oftentimes boxed as like a training thing. Rather than something that you can do on a regular basis. So can you talk through how some of these techniques can be applied on everyday decisions. What's the everyday process that person can use with this type of technique?

David Cutler: To the point that you just made. I find sometimes that the people who use the word innovation the most, have never actually seen it happen in real life. It's a buzzword. They're not really sure what that means or what that feels like.

When you are working with a team for the first time you mentioned about this being training. Sometimes it's actually a good idea to have them focus on the problem that is not the most important problem facing the organization.

It's a skill like any other that can and must be cultivated. And if the first time you're ever working in this kind of format, you're also focused on something that you've been developing for 15 years and it feels very, very personal. It's hard to be open about it. So oftentimes the first time when working with an organization, the first game that they're playing is a good idea to identify something that resonates. But is not the biggest elephant in their particular room.

Hopefully, you know, through a great game, there is a focus on both process and product. So, we want them to come up with exquisite solutions. But also to be developing transferable skills that they can apply each and every day. So, we always try and find a balance of those two things. And in the game of innovation offer many, many tools that can be applied under a variety of circumstance.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit more about the book. It's a very collaborative effort. There's a lot of folks, it looks like from illustrators and that. So can you talk about the team and then talk about how the book came about.

David Cutler: So, there are four of us who worked on this book. I'm the primary author. And then I had a partner that we always bat things back and forth. And illustrator and a graphic designer. There's a saying that teams are better than solace. At least when it comes to creative efforts. When you work collaboratively, you'll just come up with bigger ideas, then if you're working alone. Because it's not just, what's in your brain plus what's in my brain, but also the parts of our imagination. That could only be even touched because our thinking intersected.

I've been running events for a long time where we bring in a graphic facilitator. Or someone, the woman who worked on book, her name is Patti Dobrowolski.And so, what she will do often when we're working with communities is instead of typing minutes on a computer, she will doodle things. She will draw things in real time. So, by the end of an hour or a day or a week, you have a visual representation of what happened.

It is true that a picture paints a thousand words. That an image can say so much more, than words alone. We live in a very visual society. So many people, I hear what you're saying, but I just, I just need to see it. So, we got this idea of if we're going to put this in a book, why not just talk about innovation, but make it look like innovation.

And hopefully the pictures help emphasize the message of the words and vice versa. When we started working, cause my other books are word books. And for this one decided that I wanted it to be visual.

But it turns out that when you were working in a visual context, you may have a profound word or a word of historic significance. Or word with a great sense of humor, or wonderful relatives. Or whatever it is.

It turns out too many words just looks ugly. In a visual context. So, I made a rule at the beginning of this that I was going to use short sentences, short paragraphs, short amount per page. And made Google docs, look, you know, one page on a Google doc would be like one page in a book. I'll never forget, I showed my work of concise poetry when I was starting this off to the illustrator. And she looked at it, and Patty said, oh, my God, David, you just go on and on.

And I'm like what do you mean? There are no words that here. What are you talking about? As she went through and slash slash slash. And so that was the challenge. I mean, it really changed my life. And the opportunity. How do you still tell stories? Still have clarity, still be specific. But with no words. Or with very, very, very words. It was an amazing process.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into some examples of some of the experiences that you've had working with companies using these particular techniques. First talk through how do people get on board or how do you get people on board with this particular concept? Because it is different than I would say the typical way folks approach innovation sometimes.

David Cutler: I think it's pretty easy to get folks on board once they just warm to it. You know, the notion of a game which just feels playful is appealing. But also, a little bit scary for a lot of companies that were pretty seriously and have their own traditions of collaboration. In fact, what I hear from, you know, so many organizations is that they are focused on problems. But usually what happens is they'll say, here's the problem. What should we do?

Of course, conversation jumps from topic to topic on the back of a frog. You know, someone has an idea. Someone hates that idea. Someone else loves it. We tried that 10 years ago. Someone else says, yeah, we should do that tomorrow. And of course, all of those ways of approaching problems are essential to the process, but not at the same time.

And so, one of the tools that we use, we call them Great Gaming Goggles. And the idea is that there are five lenses of problem solving. Each one is a different color. And it's paired with a word that describes the activity that starts with the same letter.

And the idea is that when you're working with a team, and you design a game to make sure that you're using just one lens at a time. So, they're all important. But not at the same moment. So, you can figure out are we wearing in this specific task or question or activity.

Are we wearing the purple lens, which stands for propose, which is about creative idea generation. Are we wearing the green lens, which is about gathering it's about detective work. About learning the way that the world is and that it has been. Are we focused on feedback wearing a blue lens? Which means boost is about positive praise for an idea. Or a red lens, which is ripping. Is about constructive feedback. Or are we wearing the orange lens, which stands for own. Are we here to make a decision?

Almost every organization I've ever seen is really good at some of those steps. And this goes for individuals too. And has a tricky time with other parts of it. So, there are some communities where they have so many ideas, but they can never decide on anything. So, they have all these half-started projects. They haven't actually gotten that much done. And then you see the flip side where they're very, very decisive. But they keep doing the same thing over and over.

And so the process often starts by just exploring. You know, where have you been and what do you need to do. And then trying to figure out what format would work the best for.

Brian Ardinger: Do you find it beneficial for this type of process to start from a team level? Or can anybody create a game? What are some of the best-case scenarios that you've seen of how to actually start using some of these techniques with an organization?

David Cutler: You know it's a skill like anything else that gets better with practice. So not only solving problems but designing problem solving games. I think it could be a good idea to start with writing shorter games. We call them sprints. Two hours or less. And to figure out, you know, in a standard meeting, most meetings are what, an hour, 35 minutes, 15 minutes, something like that?

I see meetings as a huge, overlooked opportunity. I think so many of us look at meetings as this necessary, but unfortunate evil. The bane of our existence. The low point of our week. And I think that a meeting should be the high point of your week. Because that's when you convene your talent, and you have the opportunity to work on teams and solve actual problems.

So, I think a good place to start, if you are leading a meeting, Instead of doing the normal information dump at worst. Or at best maybe question and answer. To really think through, okay, we've got a 60-minute framework. What could we do? What are the steps that we would go through? So that by the end of 60 minutes, we're not going to have a detailed prototype. But could we actually solve some small part of some problem in 60 minutes. And feel like we have achieved something.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and going through that particular exercise, I would imagine if nothing else, it gives people a different sense of time. And when you start seeing progress in a short amount of time, it makes other things possible for the next 60 minutes that you sit down. Things along those lines.

David Cutler: Nothing ever gets done without brilliant people, but not quite enough time. I can give you an example of a game that I love to do that's maybe you can do in 25 minutes. Something I call Disaster Storm. And it has four steps. So, remember, you're asking one question at a time. So, we start off Disaster Storming by asking a group, maybe we're talking about podcasts.

Maybe you're saying, you know, I have a good podcast. You have a great podcast, by the way. We want to make it even better. Right. Maybe that's the thing. I want to do something that's really going to catch fire and generate a lot of buzz. So normally what happens is you say, well, what should we do? Well with Disaster Storming the first step, you know, we often say in brainstorming, there are no bad ideas. But what about terrible ideas?

You know, there's something about an idea that just puts a pit in your stomach, where you have an emotional reaction to it. Whereas good ideas or bad ideas, you can be more neutral too. But awful ideas, borderline illegal ideas. They really get a reaction. So, what I'll often do, let's say we're working with a group of 20 people or 50 people, is to position different teams. You know flip charts around the room.

And the first question would be to brainstorm. Maybe we say, I want you to brainstorm the worst possible ideas you can imagine for Brian's next podcast. Right. Maybe to do it, you know, while sitting on top of a landmine. Or a while streaking through the halls or right. You know, face-to-face right after you eat some garlic. You know, whatever it is, what are the worst possible ideas that you can come up with? That's the first phase.

So, they're only doing one. Then I have them flip places in the room. So, they rotate, and they inherit a list of terrible ideas. The next task that could take place at maybe 90 seconds is to find the most offensive, most terrible one and put an X by it.

The next step is to start, and then we go through a process of transforming that terrible idea into an extraordinary idea. How do you go from something? And often they're very, very close. It takes something that has that emotional pull to get you to think of other kinds of extraordinary things. And then we go through a process where they design that idea. They figure out what's the big idea on top. What are some of the wow-ables that happen underneath? And then they share their idea.

And in 30 minutes or less, often we will get more incredible ideas that most companies have gotten after weeks of struggling with a problem and maybe coming up with kind of variations of what they've always done. And it's really exciting.

Brian Ardinger: Very interesting. One of the things that I always talk to our guests about is, and I get asked about when it comes to innovation, is they totally understand that the creativity portion of innovation and thinking differently and that, but a lot of it comes back to, well, how do we measure if we're on the right track or how do we measure these outcomes that we're actually making progress and that.

I would imagine you have this objection to overcome when you talk about games. It's like, well, it's fun and that. So, it can't be worthwhile. So how do you talk about measuring outcomes in this particular environment?

David Cutler: In fact, that would be a great topic for a game. Like to figure out how do we measure success as we move towards this goal. Those kinds of benchmarks are actually marked in the game. So, we often use criteria. I was talking about guidelines and how we designed the guidelines because the challenge, constraints, and criteria.

Criteria is by clearly articulating what constitutes success. We don't know what the solution is, but we know what the desirable outcomes would be. I would argue the opposite that so much of the time outside of a game context we haven't articulated what we need to be doing. Yeah. We want to make more money or have more customers or get more hits on social media. But how do you know when you reach more?

A great game will be very clear about what constitutes success on the front end without prescribing the solution. And there are actually two ways to write up criteria. One is with a shortlist and the other is with a long list.

So, the idea of a short list is to say, you must keep all the constraints in mind. You must solve this problem. But to be really successful, you achieve this criteria? And so, you'll have some way to measure it. A long list, the idea is sometimes what usually will have in a short list. It'd be like three or four or five at the most criteria items. Like bullet points that are very easy to understand.

And a long list you might have 10 or 20. Or 30 different criteria. And the idea is to hit as many of them as possible. So, in a well-designed game, you actually know how successful you've been at the end, because you've already defined that before playing it.

Brian Ardinger: That's very good. We're living in a hybrid world now. Obviously with, folks going back into the office and that. But a lot of these types of techniques and that, there's an advantage to doing them face-to-face and that. What's been your experience and how to use these techniques in a more of a hybrid world. Or in a world where we can't be face to face.

David Cutler: You know I'm an innovator to my core. I am nowhere nearly as creative as COVID 19. You know, I never imagined a world in which we had to be 6 to 12 feet apart. We'd be wearing these masks and the likes. And I view it, of course, it's been hard on all of us. And had very, very serious consequences. But I view it as a worthy adversary.

I have this viewpoint that when you hit a wall, when something goes wrong, how can you have it help you come up with even better solutions right then if you didn't have that obstacle that was there. And so that's been my whole perspective throughout COVID. How can this make us better?

Obviously, there are benefits to be online as well as deficits, but that's tricky because so much of what we do is, you know, very tactile and the likes. So, we started really leaning into, especially Zoom is the platform that we've used the most. And it doesn't do anything. We played a game, and it was for about 50 people. We had six teams that were on there and of course, one of the things that's great about Zoom is when you're in breakout rooms, everyone can come back and at the same moment everyone's back.

So, it takes them a little longer to go into their own room than if they were just sitting at a table. But if you're in a physical space at the end, you have to get people's attention two or three times. But on Zoom, it's just like, boom. They're back. So, I remember hearing afterwards from people who went there. And it was just amazing.

We wanted to show them, how do you make Zoom exciting? How do you make it work? Cause it's just, it's not inherently good or bad. It's just different. It's just a tool. And I think what happened when we went online, unfortunately, is that so many organizations, what they did was they took the worst parts of in-person, like the lecture, and brought it online. While losing some of the best parts, like the ability to interact and have side conversations. And the likes instead of, you know, saying what can this tool uniquely do?

So afterwards, some of the people on this game would call us up and they would say, yeah, so I was talking to some friends, and I said, what did you do this weekend? And yeah, I just got off an innovation game. We played; it was six hours long on Zoom. People like what six hours. That's crazy. That's ridiculous. How was that? Like, it was amazing. You know, we got so much achieved. More than I did all of six months before that. But we spent a lot of time.

We didn't have any solutions, you know, with a good game, you don't know what the actual solutions will be. You just designed in such a way that great solutions are almost guaranteed because of the kinds of questions that are. But we had to think about, you know, in a room when there's a question, someone can raise their hand and you can go over, and you can clarify that's trickier on breakout rooms in Zoom.

So, we had to figure out a system so that we would type up documents ahead of time. So, they always knew what the task was and how many minutes they had. Had that kind of clarity because there's no, you know, front white board, it was amazing though.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: David, I really appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to kind of share some of this stuff. I encourage people to pick up the book if they are at all interested in innovation and some really tactical ways to make some progress. So, the book is called The Game of Innovation. I encourage people to pick it up. If people want to find out more about yourself, David, or about the book, what's the best way to do that.

David Cutler: The easiest address I can give is www.Puzzlercompany.com/book. And that way you'll find out information. There's a trailer for the book and some sample pages and a whole bunch of other information about solving problems with your team.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, David, again, thanks for being on the show. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

David Cutler: Thanks so much Brian.

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The GAME of Innovation: Conquer Challenges. Level Up Your Team. Play to Win

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Grant Botma. Grant is the Author of the new book, Work-life Harmony. Grant and I talk about the common problems with work-life balance. And some tactical tips for how to create harmony through the inevitable changes and opportunities that people face each year. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and that certainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Grant Botma, Author of Work-Life Harmony

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Grant Botma. He is an entrepreneur and author of the new book called Work Life Harmony. Welcome to the show Grant.

Grant Botma: Hey, thanks for having me on Brian. This is cool.

Brian Ardinger: Grant with all the changes in technology and markets and environmental disruption that's going on in the world. We're trying to talk about what individuals can do to navigate and manage accelerated change. And I thought your book would fit in perfectly. This concept of work-life harmony.

Grant Botma: Yeah, I think balance is great. It's something that all of us need to have in various areas of our life. The problem is somehow our society has made balance the goal. And that's the wrong target. Even the best balancer in the world who holds the Guinness Book of World Records. He fell out of balance. There are times where we fall out of balance. And the biggest travesty I think with that is when we do fall out of balance, because it isn't inevitable.

We feel like a failure. We feel shame. We feel alone. And sometimes it prevents us from continuing to pursue the real goal, which is work-life harmony. Where we don't have a work life and a home life warring against each other all the time. But they're in harmony moving in one direction.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think a lot of folks are having to reevaluate that in their lives. You know, with COVID and all the changes when it comes to hybrid work. People are now both for good and bad trying to restart. Or we think about how they approach this particular topic. Why don't we talk a little bit about the book? And how you've outlined a number of different tactical concepts that people can go through to create this work-life harmony.

Grant Botma: The biggest concept within the book, is to try to invite your family and your work into this purpose that you are on. What I espouse is that no matter who you are, no matter what you're doing with your work, a business does not exist unless you're serving somebody somewhere with a product or service, right?

So, you are making an impact on somebody's life at somewhere down the line, through your business. And although profit is a great goal and a great thing to have with business, it's not the primary goal. You can still have profit, but not meet your purpose of genuinely serving people. And what we want to do is determine, okay, what does that impact we're making on folks?

Let's put that in something that's simple that everybody in my life that's important can understand. Including but not limited to my coworkers and my team at home. And then you want to create intentional systems and processes. And also have some very tactical things that you can do throughout your week, month and year. To make sure everybody's invited in this mission together. And you're all going in the same direction, and everybody has good expectations managed. That's kind of the big thing.

Brian Ardinger: I had a chance to skim through the book a little bit. And you do break it down for folks how to think about this, because I think it's very easy to struggle with. I know I have to manage my household. I know I have to manage all the work-related things that are happening. But how do I go about doing that? And one of the particular topics is you have what you call is like creating your ideal year calendar.

Grant Botma: Yeah, this has been a huge thing for me and my wife. But then also it's something I make sure all of my employees do as well. That's where you look at the year to come. And instead of putting things specific on this day, at this time. I'm going to go to go here.

It's understanding what are my priorities for this year, both in work and at home. And making sure that you say, okay, during this time of year, I'm going to focus in on this priority and make sure I do that.

But then in this time of year, I'm going to focus in on this other priority and make sure I do that. So, an example is I take my kids out on a birthday trip every year around their birthday. And again, this ideal year calendar I'm not putting the exact date of when I'm going to go on the trip with them, but I know it's around their birthday.

I'm going to say with my son Parker, his birthday, September 15th. Sometime in or around September 15th, I'm going to go on a trip with him. And it's not going to be something that lasts a week. It's just something where I spend one or two nights with him and maybe we go out of town. Maybe we stay here locally. Where I just focused on him.

And I ask him some intentional questions about how I'm doing as a father. I might have some intentional questions about him based on where things are going in his life. But really, it's just, I'm pausing and I'm focusing on him. And I have that priority for each of my three children, but then also my wife during our anniversary.

But I also have some priorities that work to where I get together with my other business partners and founders. And we do a trip. And we ask some intentional questions, and we focus in on what we want our business year to look like. I'd say the biggest thing with the Ideal Year Brian is understanding that I have busy seasons. Communicating to my family ahead of time. These are my busy seasons. So that I can get the support needed before, during, and after those busy seasons as well. Those are just a few of the things that are in that. Ideally your calendar,

Brian Ardinger: And so, the idea of zooming out and getting the big picture at the beginning of the year, so to speak. And blocking time from that. Is it blocking time? Or is it more along the lines of here's the ebbs and flows and things that are going to be part of the year that we know coming up. And then a plan from that?

Grant Botma: Yeah, it's expectation management. Brian, think of it this way. So, harmony, we're going to talk about music for a second. If I asked my wife and kids to sing a note, they'll do it because they love me, and they'll sing. And they'll keep singing and they'll keep singing. But eventually they'll stop. And when they stop singing, I'll look at them like, why did you guys stop?

And they'll say, well, I got tired. And you didn't tell me how long to sing for. But if I tell them ahead of time, hey guys, I need you to sing a note. I need you to just sing it at this tune. I need you just sing it for this long. Chances are there'll be able to sing it longer because their expectations were managed. But they'll perform a whole lot better. And I won't get upset if they stop singing because we have expectations managed.

That's what the Ideal Year Calendar is. It's saying, hey, during this time year, I'm going to focus here. And afterwards we're going to celebrate together because of that purpose that I'm on. We're going to talk about all the impact that was made during that busy season. And then at this time, I'm going to be focusing on over here with you guys doing our birthday trips and that. It's expectation management. Telling them how long we're going to sing notes for and what those notes are going to be.

Brian Ardinger: So in situations, obviously you're an entrepreneur, you know, very well a lot of this stuff can't be planned. And what happens beginning of the year, what is not necessarily what's going to happen at the end of the year from your expectations or otherwise. How do you go about managing the expectations of the fact that they're going to change? That these things are going to have to change.

Grant Botma: I love that. This is the reason why I actually rarely create goals outside of 90 days. Because the world changes so much that the likelihood that I will be able to make every single one of those goals happen over the next 12 months is very, very low. In the book, I repeat over and over and over again. Your goal is to do this at 70%.

If you can live out 70% of your Ideal Year, that's way better than zero intentions on nothing planned and you're just drifting throughout your year. So, you do expectation management and hey, this is what we would ideally, the Ideal Year, would like to live out. This is not the exact year. It doesn't have the dates in there. And we're going to do our best to live by this. But obviously life happens. And when that does happen, we'll make adjustments together.

Brian Ardinger: Do you see different tactics coming to bear? Let's say the beginning of a journey, for example, you know, you're just starting out with your startup or launching a new product or something along those lines. Versus maybe you have an established career. There are more knowns versus at an early starting stage. Are the tactics different?

Grant Botma: Oh, for sure. So, part of the reason why I went on this work-life harmony journey is my wife, her brother, is handicap. He's disabled. And he was injured in a medical accident when he was 11 years old. So, when I went to go ask for permission to marry her. When I went to talk with her parents, I also asked if I could be his caretaker when the time came.

So, my wife and I, we didn't have any choice to get good at work-life harmony. This was something that we've decided that we wanted to do. And we had to get better at it each and every year.

And when you're a business owner, you know, especially at the beginning, you've got to grind, and you've got to go. And there's a lot more busy seasons than there aren't. But we knew that we needed to be in a place where I could have as much flexibility as possible when the time came to be able to care for, his name's Daniel. When the time came.

Yes, it's a journey. This is a journey that my wife and I have been on for basically 17 years now. And every year we do our best to get better at it. And in the book, there's a chapter called evaluations. And with those evaluations, I say that there's four questions that you should be asking.

What can I do more of? What can I do less of? What can I add? And what can I remove? And if you look at your last Ideal Year and how it got lived out. You then before creating the next Ideal Year, can you use those four questions to evaluate on how you want to grow. And how you want to adjust. Based on that season of life or the season that your business is in.

I couldn't take a month off in the spring and a month off in the fall, like I do now, when I first started my business. These are things that have evolved and changed. And it wasn't like, oh, I just arrived and started taking a month off. It was okay, let's take a full week, unplug. One time during the year and see how that goes.

Right. And then we evaluate and adjust it and then we add it to that. And then, oh yeah, let's get to a point where I'm taking a full month off, at one point. I did that. And we adjusted it, added to it. Then we went from a month to a month. And then two weeks later on in September. The last several years has been two months off. And again, I've been a 17-year process to grow and get to that point based on seasons and proper evaluation.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about the business side of this. So, you talked a lot about how this can be played out in your family side for the work-life harmony side. But obviously work-life, work is a portion of that as well. How do these tactics change? And how do you execute on this in the work environment?

Grant Botma: Yeah. One of my frustrations with work-life balance type topics is they all basically equate to this. Hey, stop working so much. And I don't want to do that. I like working. And I'm good at it. And I enjoy it. I believe I was created to contribute.

And again, I believe that business is something that allows me to make a really great impact on people's lives. I find lots of joy in that. That's my purpose. I don't want to stop working. I just want to be as intentional and as efficient and as biggest impact I can possibly make. And just like I do evaluations, and focus with my family, birthdays and anniversaries.

I also do evaluations and focus, like I said, with my leadership and with my team. Every year, we're still asking those same questions. What can we do more of, what can we do less of, what can we add, and what can we remove? And as we evaluate our business over the past year and think about what we want our business to look like in the next year. We're taking that same intention and same focus that I do on my home life, that I'm also doing in my work life.

And the cool part is with the tool of the Ideal Year Calendar. It's not just something I share with my family. It's also something I share with my business partners, my employees. And it's something that we all do as a team. All of my employees do. So much so that we get to celebrate each other as they take trips with their family. Or they do take focus time with their family. But also, we all know when to support each other, when we are in our busy seasons. Or in that really grinding time to try to finish out a project or whatever it may be.

Brian Ardinger: How do you work in clients and customers to that particular thing? Because obviously they're not going to have necessarily access to understanding that. Sometimes their needs conflict with what you want to do. Or what the business wants to do. How do you involve the customer with this?

Grant Botma: The first thing, I make sure I do is I don't hide from the customer that I'm a real human, like they are. I want to connect with my customers as often as I possibly can. And sometimes that is as simple as, like I mentioned in the book, is if I'm on a phone call or if I'm in an interview or whatever else, if I get interrupted by my children or something, I'm not going to yell at them.

I'm going to ask for some grace from the client. And then I'm going to talk to my son who might've interrupted me and say, hey, I'm on the phone with Mr. Doe. And actually, we're talking about something that's really important. We to try to change his life through this advice. And through that thing. I'm going to finish this phone call with him and then I'll get back to you. Okay, buddy.

You know, I'm going to be intentional with how I communicate to my family when I'm on the phone with the client and let the client hear that. And I'm not going to apologize for it to the client either. Like this is life, right. But then also, for my role in my business and the ambassador of our brand, and I'm doing podcasts interviews like this, and I'm writing books and writing blogs and creating videos and YouTube and being very vocal on social media.

I don't have a delineation between my business and my home. It's one life that I live. And whenever I'm communicating in the public about this mission and this purpose that I'm on. Not like a different mission over here and a different focus over there. It's one thing, one focus.

I don't have a bunch of different masks that I wear as I'm engaging with clients or when I'm engaging with my friends on the golf course. Or when I'm engaging with my family at home. I might use a little bit different language here or there. Right. But I'm not going to be a different person. I'm the same guy everywhere. And that's super important too.

Brian Ardinger: So, obviously this is something very personal and passionate to you. And obviously you came up with some ways that could help you as an individual and as a family and a company live these values and live these tactics. So, talking to a company out there, or maybe some of our audience members who haven't thought about work-life harmony in this particular way and that. How do you start building that initial company culture or family culture around these particular initiatives?

Grant Botma: The biggest thing is you let them know you care. And the way that you do that is start small. So, an example that I give in the book. So, in every chapter I give what's called a quick win. One of those quick wins is something that I call One Kid Up. And this is awesome. It's a ton of fun. It takes next to no extra time and energy from you. So, I'm not going to tell you to work less remember. But it's something that allows you to let your kids know that you care.

So, we have three children and once a week we do something called One Kid Up. Where we put the other two kids to bed a little bit earlier. We don't tell them they have to go to sleep. They're a little bit older now, but we do tell them that stay in the room. But one of the kids gets to stay up with mom and dad.

And during that time, we might have intentional conversations with them. Or we're going to talk to them about drugs, alcohol, sex, all the things. But we also might just take the time to just watch their favorite YouTube channel. Or play a board game. Or make a fun dessert after dinner. Either way, it's just focused time with them.

And rather than putting everybody to bed, say at nine o'clock, I just tell two of them to go to their room at 8:30 and then there's 30 minutes that me and mom have with the kid and its focused time. And when we put them to bed after that focus time, the big thing that we want them to hear and know from us is we love you. We care about you and you’re important.

I think that's a great place to start. And weaving those little intentional actions in to your rhythms, another chapter in the book that you do every single week, every single quarter, and every single year. You can build on those every year. As you continue to try to get better at work-life harmony, this journey that we're all on.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's pivot a little bit and talk about your company, Stewardship. It's included a couple of times on the Inc 500 fastest growing company list. You have innovated in a lot of different areas. Why don't you tell the folks a little bit about what Stewardship is and some of the innovations that you're focusing on right now.

Grant Botma: Yeah. So, Stewardship is a group of several different companies. It's a independent mortgage brokerage. An insurance Agency. And investment advisory. They're all independent for purpose so that we can be true fiduciary to our clients and give them the best advice, products and service possible without any bias to us financially. We like to tell our community, we do home loans, insurance, and investments with wisdom and love.

And one of the new initiatives that we're working on right now is starting a real estate company. And the reason why we're starting this is because we saw a problem in our community. There was a need. And now we're going to fill that need. And it's not necessarily more real estate agents or competition with real estate agents.

It's actually a new program that helps people be able to buy their next home while still living in their current home. They'll get early access to the equity from their current home, for the down payment on the new home. For upgrades to the new home.

And they can have those upgrades done while they're still living in their current home. And they don't have to worry about trying to move twice or self first and then live with in-laws or storage and all the things that are associated with that.

And then they don't have to try to sell their home while they're living in it and be ready to show it on a moment's notice because somebody coming by to check it out and you have to make sure it's clean. And now my kid's napping. And then what I do with the dog.

It's a way of selling your current home and buying the next one in the most seamless way possible. It's been several years in the making. A lot of that has come through some of those annual founders’ events that I do with my business partners and asking the four questions that I mentioned before. And we're excited to be launching that here in a few weeks.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's exciting to hear again, that you're continuing to innovate and living the stuff that you're producing out there in the world. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that.

Grant Botma: You know, I'm very active on social media. You can find me on Instagram or Twitter @GrantBotma. Thank you for pronouncing my name correctly at the beginning of the podcast. Yeah. So, you can follow me there or on Facebook. And I'm very active in my direct messages. So, if anybody has questions, you can do that.

Brian Ardinger: We'll Grant, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Sharing your thoughts and wisdom. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Grant Botma: Yeah. Thank you, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Shameen Prashantham, Author of Gorillas Can Dance. We talk about the benefits, opportunities, and challenges, corporates and startups face when trying to partner, grow, and innovate together. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Dr. Shameen Prashantham, Author of Gorillas Can Dance

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Dr. Shameen Prashantham. He's the author of a new book called Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and other Corporations on Partnering with Startups. Welcome to the show.

Shameen Prashantham: Thanks so much, Brian. Great to be on your show.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show for a lot of different reasons. One is your book of course. But also, you've been doing a lot of research into the area of startup corporate collaboration as your role as a professor of international business and strategy and Associate Dean at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. So, I wanted to start off the conversation with what got you interested in researching this intersection between startups and corporates and innovation.

Shameen Prashantham: You know, Brian, I decided to go down the path of academia when I was in my late twenties. And then I did a PhD in Scotland. About how startups went international. And this was a topic that was gaining traction at the time. But I did my research in an international business unit that had made its names by studying large companies. Particularly large us multinationals that had established a presence in Scotland.

It appeared to me as I was completing my doctoral work, that we were making an artificial distinction between these two sets of companies. Certainly, they occupied very different worlds in a way and had very different realities, but I was beginning to see some weak signals of the prospect of collaboration.

And so, by about 2005, which is when I graduated with my PhD. I began to ask why are we studying these different companies separately. And in Scotland, there was a recognition by policy makers even, that for example, IBM, which had been around for a few decades or Sun Microsystems, they too were trying to actually do more innovation in their far-flung subsidiaries.

And one way to do that would be to connect with local innovative startup, that we're quite keen to gain some access to the commercial muscle of these large companies. And so that was when I began to observe this possibility, this potential. And I found it fascinating and just sort of stuck with it.

Brian Ardinger: One of the core premises of your book and your research is how do large companies stay innovative? And you're saying that more and more companies are looking at startups as a way to inject innovation into their core. Talk more about what you've learned through your research.

Shameen Prashantham: Initially when I started looking for examples. I think they were really happy accidents. You know, you had unusually entrepreneurial manager in a subsidiary of a multinational thinking, gosh, we've surely gotta be able to do more than we can in terms of innovation, but there's a chicken and egg problem.

Headquarters isn't going to give us the mandate to do more innovation unless we have the capabilities. But we are not going to be able to build the capabilities unless we have a mandate. Some of these guys were saying, well, let's just fly under the radar a little bit and try and dabble with some innovation by our collaboration with local startups.

And they were able to do that, fairly inexpensively. The local startups were interested to do this. And I published an article called Dancing with Gorillas in 2008. Mainly from the point of view of the startups. But from that point onwards, what I began to notice, interestingly was the big company is gradually started saying, well, actually, why don't we do this more systematically?

And the company that I have studied the longest is Microsoft. So coincidentally, 2008 was the year they introduced BizSparkwhich was their first major programmatic initiative for startups. Partly driven by a concern that the open software movement was going to cause problems. Give startups and alternative in terms of software tools. So, they were giving away software tools for free.

But I think that became an important start. This was managed out of Silicon Valley under the leadership of Dan'l Lewin who was a Silicon Valley insider brought into Microsoft to engage with startups. And then what I observed over time is companies like Microsoft, which were, I think pioneers in this area, had a combination of top-down initiatives run by people like Dan'l out of Silicon Valley and bottom-up initiatives championed, for example, by managers in Israel who felt they really ought to tap into the fantastic potential for entrepreneurship in their region.

And then things developed. And then I came across SAP doing something for startups out of Silicon Valley and so on. But the other thing that became interesting more in the last sort of five to seven years is that companies in traditional industries, automotive, banking, fast moving consumer goods.

Especially around 2015, I began to notice startup programs, being initiated by them too. Partly as a response to the digital disruption. And they too felt, you know, they recognize the need to be much more innovative, agile, and entrepreneurial while they were introducing intrapreneurship programs. There was no reason not to also tap into the entrepreneurial energy in startups on the outside.

Brian Ardinger: Well, you definitely seem to have this change, this rise of startups, and the rise of startup ecosystems I think helped bring this to the forefront of companies as well, where you saw more and more companies getting up and going faster than ever before. And the ability to start things, create things, build things, I think put a spotlight on startups in a way that hasn't been in the past.

You mentioned it started, you know, a lot with the technology companies looking at startups as a core opportunity and that. Now it's been moving on to other realms. Other industries and that. What are you seeing when it comes to what's working and what's not working when it comes to partnering with startups?

Shameen Prashantham: Great question. And just to briefly comment on what you said. I think I absolutely, right. My comments earlier, maybe emphasize more the demand side of things. You know, the big companies recognizing the need to be more entrepreneurial. But on the supply side, definitely we've seen more startups coming to the floor.

And I think cloud computing is one of the game changers, and I think that's how Microsoft became more and more interested as well. And you know, the fact that Satya Nadella ran the cloud business, when it wasn't a thing in Microsoft, and then later became CEO also made this much more central to what they were doing.

But in terms of what works and what doesn't work, I think in companies like Microsoft, but the other ones as well, BMW, Unilever, Walmart. So whole bunch of industries. I think what I've noticed is this. There is a Paradox of Asymmetry. That these big companies that have encountered at one point or another.

And the Paradox of Asymmetry is that the very differences that make it attractive to work together. For example, the startups of agility and the large companies of scale, those very differences actually make it difficult, or at least not straightforward for these very different types of entities to work together. For this to work companies have to overcome these asymmetries. And so, what works. It's basically the efforts to overcome the symmetries.

And I've identified three. An Asymmetry of Goals. These different companies want different things. And importantly, at different timescales. There's an Asymmetry of Structure. Is very difficult to find role counterparts. And what I call an Asymmetry of Attention, which is the big companies, the notion of startups out there. They aren't sure which ones are worthy of their managerial attention.

The startups have a different problem, which is how do I get the attention of the people who matter within the company? And so, the companies that have clarified the synergy, the so-called, win-win very clearly. The companies that have put in place partner interfaces, so that startups know who the first port of call is.

And the companies that have very deliberately intentionally cultivated success stories. Exemplars fairly early on. Are the ones I think that have met with more success. Because the synergy helps to address the Asymmetry of Goals. The interface helps to address the Asymmetry of Structure and having these exemplars, showing what success can look like to both parties help to address the Asymmetry of Attention.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important. When I work with startups oftentimes earlier on, I would say, don't even think about working with a corporation until you understand who you should be talking to. And because it can very easily take you off track. The timelines of how a startup executes versus a timeline of a multinational corporation are significantly different and can take a startup in the wrong direction if they're not prepared for that.

You mentioned that the companies that you saw that were doing the best work, had identified someone in the corporation or a group within the corporation to help be that Sherpa for a startup to help navigate that. Is that being driven by the locality of the locations? Is it being driven by business units? Is it being driven by the top down saying here's how we want to interface? Or talk a little bit about how companies have actually structured that Sherpa role.

Shameen Prashantham: I love that metaphor. I've seen both. For example, a BMW. It was sort of top-down because an initiative driven out of Munich in Germany. Where it was very interesting in terms of the people who are driving this. And there was a pair. So, there's this guy called Gregor Gimmy, who was really the public face of the initiative.

A BMW Startup Garage was created in 2015. In fact, I just sent an email, I think, to info@BMWStartupGarage and said I'm doing a lot of work on this. I've notice that you've started this. Can we talk? And Gregor replied immediately. And I would see him on the videos.

But only when I got to Munich and met him in person, did I realize there was this other guy in the background, Mathias Mayer. And they were such different personalities, but I think you needed both. Gregor had worked for IDEO in Silicon Valley. He was very gregarious. He was the guy that startups could identify with.

Mathias on the other hand, Dr Mathias Mayer. As you know, many German managers have PhDs. He was the BMW insider. I think who was the Sherpa for the interface in the company. To navigate the internal politics and so on. And I think that's why it works in that case.

So, that's an example of top down. But there's also been bottom up. I mentioned Israel in the case of Microsoft, but also here in China, Walmart came up with an interesting program called Omega Eight. To deal with Chinese startups to help improve the customer experience in the stores, for example.

But one of the things they were very clear was we have to do things differently in China. Speed, for example, is of the essence. And so they would put in place practices, like we will work with startups who can do only one pilot for us at a given point in time. And need to do it in 60 days. And that was actually very reassuring for the startups who were always worried that these big multinationals would be soon moving.

And I think the last visit that Doug McMillan, the Walmart CEO made to China pre pandemic, was in 2019. And they showcase some of the startups working with Walmart. And so really, I think both are possible. But I think the key is having people who can on the one hand show empathy and connect with the startups on the outside. But also have the ability to deal with the internal piece and the politics and the communication and getting buy-in from people.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's interesting that you're seeing different examples having success, but, but taking a slightly different take on it. For example, like, you know, the BMW Garage, my understanding with that program is when they came out, it was unlike your traditional corporate accelerator or corporate venture, where they would invest in a startup.

They would look for companies and then would help them become partners and basically get through the red tape of becoming a preferred vendor, for example. And helping that particular part of it versus just capital thrown at the startup.

And then you have other examples, like you said Microsoft, that are offering tools and services at a discount to start that communication and start that partnership with startups. What role are you seeing corporate venture playing in this?

Shameen Prashantham: It's a great question. And the honest truth is the vast majority of my work has been on non-equity partnering. So, offering that doesn't involve equity. And the distinction between what Microsoft is doing and BMW is doing can be thought of as a distinction between cohorts and.

And the way I explained this to my classes, a cohort is like an MBA class. You know, getting in is difficult, but once you get in, it's a time bound program where the curriculum, pretty much everybody who starts the program ends the program and peer interaction is a key part of this. And I think that's the way Microsoft went about their accelerators, for example.

But BMW's is more like a funnel, which is like the job search process. After an MBA, many fewer complete the process than begin. You get screened out along the way, and you may not know who else is part of the process. And each has its advantages and disadvantages. I think with the cohort type program, you're more likely to have serendipity. So, you may have two startups that didn't know each other from before forming a three-way partnership in the course of the accelerator program.

But I think with the funnel, you have more predictability and I think that's what BMW went for. And you're absolutely right. They pioneered this idea of being a venture client. And so one of the key things they were doing was connecting startups with business units or innovation teams within BMW, who actually would be interested to work with them, but also made sure that they got a supplier number. Which most startups would not be able to do.

Corporate Venture Capital traditionally has tended to come into play at a slightly later stage. BMW had i ventures, even before BMW Startup Garage, but the impression I got was the BMW Startup Garage were talking to people, startups with say a series A round of funding. i Ventures was coming in at B or later. That being said, particularly over the past year. I've seen corporate venturing now growing around the world.

And I'm seeing the non-equity partnering guys working with more and more mature startups and some of these corporate venture capital guys working with younger startups than before. And so perhaps going forward, we'll see a little bit of a blurring of distinctions, but just one last comment on this.

I asked a guy at Silicon Valley Bank who knows a lot about corporate venture capital at one point, what do you think about the role of CBC? And should I be involving that much more in my work? And his answer to me was you can partner without investing, but you can't invest without partnering. And so that's the important thing to focus on. And so, I guess whether you're investing or not, the key is to have this collaborative mindset when engaging with startups.

Brian Ardinger: When I talk to a lot of companies, they are interested in trying to figure out, like, how do we start this process? They know that they should be looking outside their own organization to start maybe partnering with startups and that. Or, or even just to keep their own workforce more in line with the entrepreneurial mindset and that. What are some of the early things that a company can be doing to start the process of becoming more adept at navigating the startup landscape?

Shameen Prashantham: I think it's a little bit like what Simon Sinek says. You know, think big, start small, but start. One of the things to do, whether it's bottom up or top down is to, especially for people who are relatively new to this scheme, which has now been going on for a while, is to look for shortcuts.

So back when Walmart decided to engage with startups in China, they took a little bit of a shortcut to get going. They made tracks to the Microsoft Accelerator and said, do you guys have startups in your portfolio who might be relevant to us? And of course, from Microsoft's point of view, this was great. Because they want their startups to use more Azure and things like that and do work for big other big companies.

So, they identified eight startups from their alumni who did retail tech. And brought them together with Walmart for the weekend. They call it a Hackathon. But I mean, it's basically interaction so that the Walmart people got to know these startups and vice versa. And then from that pool, they identified three startups that would work on a pilot within 60 days.

And so, within the span of a quarter, there was something pretty tangible that had been achieved to make a stop. And I think that's the sort of approach that helps to overcome the inertia to go beyond talk and start doing things. Because then you can assess what's working. What doesn't? Does this make sense going forward?

And you don't even need the blessing from above to be able to do this in the case of Walmart, this was a subsidiary level initiative. So, either way, I think it makes sense to start small to start specifically. But then if there is genuine intent to do this on a systematic large scale, then it becomes important to get buy-in from the organization as well.

Otherwise, these things just stay small and that's where getting buy-in from top managers, as well as other business unit managers, who can provide the meaningful opportunities and even building awareness more generally within the organization. Because you can get mentors into these programs from other departments just to help startups get a better feel for the company. And so I think it's a combination of making sure you make a stop, but then be if you're really serious about it, then building on it to replicate this and even do this in other parts of the company.

Brian Ardinger: You're based in Shanghai. And my question is what have you seen coming from different markets? Are the tactics or the strategies different in a newer startup ecosystem that a company is in versus a more established startup ecosystem, like the Valley or other places around the world? What are you seeing from the ecosystem perspective?

Shameen Prashantham: Both Thailand and India have actually been very interesting. Ecosystems with a lot of energy over the past decade. Yes, you're quite right. That these newer ecosystems have a slightly different vibe. I say this in a positive way. There's less maturity in the sense that you're more likely to find first time entrepreneurs here than say in Silicon Valley or Israel.

But on the other hand, they're also trying new things that populations have leapfrogged the PCE route in many respects. And so sometimes, with payments. For example, you find both in India, some innovations that are interesting and which Western companies find very interesting to be able to address.

However, because the ecosystem has the great appetite, but it's still evolving then to some extent there may be a little bit more handholding involved because the startups have less familiarity with working with the corporate. Also, and this is true of China, then most of the places. There might be some distinct local ecosystem players, like in the case of China, Baidu, Alibaba, TenCent.

And so, making sure that that is factored in, which is generally not a problem, it's just about recognizing that you have to take that into account. The other thing of course, is that in emerging markets, the rule of non-market players can be very important too. And I mean, by that particularly government and policy makers. And the other thing to note is that distinction between the national policymakers as well, and top policy makers at the local level and the latter are also very important.

And so, what that can mean is opportunities that you wouldn't necessarily think would be possible yet are off the beaten track. So, the equivalent of Silicon Valley in China used to beZhongguancun in Beijing, the soft, well it probably, when you were in Asia, was referred to as the Silicon Valley of China.

And now Shenzhen, also claims to this movewith a hardware focus. But in a place like Ningbo which is inZhejiang Province, the same province that has Hanjo the city where Alibaba is headquartered. Ningbo been known for entrepreneurship for a long time for centuries, but it's never been a tech entrepreneurship hub. Yet even there I've seen IBM partner with startups because local policymakers are so entrepreneurial. They leveraged their smart city program and brought these actors together. And that creates opportunities you don't necessarily see in other parts of the world.

And so, by being aligned to the differences, but also the novelty in these markets, both in terms of the technologies they're working with, but also the different parts of the region that has talent, I think companies with the global mindset, can actually tap into a lot of these emerging ecosystems. And Africa, I think is another very interesting story as well. And we are going to see more and more interesting examples from there too.

Brian Ardinger: You've been spending a lot of time in this space. What are some of the trends that you're looking to see in the coming years?

Shameen Prashantham: So, I think digitalization was the big driver of corporate startup partnering in this past decade. I think in the 2020s, sustainability might have a similar effect. And, you know, just before the pandemic hit, the United Nations said the 2020s is the decade of action. We need to accelerate. our efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals and then boom, the pandemic hit, which has made it a more challenging yet more important and urgent in a way.

And you know, in November, there was the climate change conference in Glasgow. Which is a reminder that whatever the geopolitical tensions and differences that exists on certain matters, like climate change, it'll be important to set aside differences and work together.

And I think climate tech startups working with large companies is going to be very important. A steel company had reached out to me and said, you know, we're desperately trying to engage with startups. Point us to any that you know. So to me, this is going to be actually the key driver and which is why regions all over the world, you know, the Valley, mature ecosystem like that. Or emerging ecosystems in Africa. And everything in between. And I think that's going to come into play and be very important.

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Brian Ardinger: The book Gorillas Can Dance is a fascinating book. Its got some great examples, great tactics. I encourage people to pick that up. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Shameen Prashantham: www.gorillascandance.com and I'm also on LinkedIn.

Brian Ardinger: Fantastic, Dr. Prashantham, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come and appreciate all your time today.

Shameen Prashantham: Thanks so much, Brian. I thoroughly enjoy it.

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Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jackie Miller, Program Director of the Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On Deck. She's also a former corporate innovator at Chobani and Chanel. Jackie and I talk about the ups and downs of corporate innovation and the benefits that a community of peers can bring to helping both startups and corporates navigate today's fast-paced world of change. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast, to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Jackie Miller, Program Director of the Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On Deck

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Jackie Miller. She is the Program Director of Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On Deck. Which is an accelerator for startups and careers. Welcome to the show, Jackie.

Jackie Miller: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about this amazing On Deck Program focused on Corporate Innovation. You've got some heavy chops in corporate innovation yourself. I know a lot of our audience is familiar with the startup scene and what's going on in corporate innovation.

And they may have even heard about On Deck. Because I know over the last year on-deck has been putting on a variety of different accelerator types of programs. And now this move into corporate innovation. Maybe start off with telling us a little about what is On Deck?

Jackie Miller: Yeah, absolutely. I was really excited to discover it existed. To your point, like working in the corporate innovation space, you're always a few steps away or immersed in like the startup ecosystem and world.

But I think that what On Deck is doing is something really unique and special. On Deck was founded by Erik Torenberg. He was early, employee number one at Product Hunt. And later founded Village Global VC firm. So, really immersed in this space. And started On Deck or the vision for On Deck as a series of live dinners for founders, founders in between, people, ambitious people, thinking about their next move. And started with some like in-person IRL dinners that quickly kind of grew outside of San Francisco. And clearly was filling a need.

Then in the pandemic, really accelerated this community to become a virtual global one. Right? The idea that there was such demand for this leveling up. Finding your next thing. And connecting with the right people, and ideas. So that really created the On Deck momentum that has brought us to today.

It started with founders. A community for founders. And then quickly grew from there. So, we raised our Series A about a year ago, and now we have a startup accelerator. Yes. Which we announced recently. But we see ourselves as, like you said, as a career accelerator. So, there are programs for Chiefs of Staff, Product Managers, Designers, Marketers, Business Development, and now Corporate Innovation.

Sort of designed to help people, whether you're starting a company or joining a company or kind of growing an existing company. How do you level up? How do you connect with your peers? And how do you find the safe space for digging into some of those ideas? And this is exactly the kind of thing I think, as you and your listeners probably know, could add a ton of value to corporate innovators.

Brian Ardinger: I've followed On Deck from the beginning. Has a lot of different overlap with some of the audience as far as things that we talk about as trends. Whether it's no code or podcasts, or angel investing. And all these types of multitalented types of people that have this intersection of building things.

And so, when you came to me and said, hey, we've got this corporate innovation fellowship spinning up, what do you think of it? I'm super excited to be part of it. And why is there a need for a corporate innovation fellowship versus anything else that's out there?

Jackie Miller: You know, as you mentioned, I spent some time doing this at Chanel, spent the last few years in this space. And will probably be a surprise to no one that innovation in a corporate context can be really challenging. Right?

The idea that every time I talk to people in this space. Both my colleagues at the time and my peers at other orgs. You quickly kind of realized that what people were looking for was moral support. Like this is almost envisioned as a support group, right? Like-minded builders who are navigating the same internal politics. Sometimes it's such a relief to hear.

I was talking to someone the other day who described it as like, I feel like a unicorn in a forest. Find the other unicorns. Where they live and what they're doing. It's a really comforting and motivating, energizing feeling. And, you know, you mentioned following obviously the startup space.

There sometimes it feels like we're drowning in startups, right? There's so many out there, but finding really good, vetted enterprise ready startups and having mutually beneficial outcomes with them is really hard too. As we all know, there's a big cultural difference there. So, there's a need for a better interface between corporates and startups.

We know both sides want to work together. But more often than not, it's hard to integrate those two worlds. Which usually comes down to the very, not so sexy part of innovation. Which is really like internal processes, infrastructure, and governance. I've always found that it comes down to this and none of us are reinventing the wheel with how you strategize and plan around that. But it's really hard to know what works and where the roadblocks are.

And to your, you know, No Code mention on some of the other trends, I think all of this is intersecting around emerging tech. And like trends that are impacting brands. And, and why they even have to think about innovation. So, all of this to say, like there's a lot going on here. We're all facing the same challenges. Wanted to take down the innovation theater and buzzwords. And create a space for real talk about what's going on.

Brian Ardinger: I think the other trend that this is really hitting on is this whole move to education. You know, this changing trend of education. And like you said, career paths. You know, we talk a lot about this slash career or this portfolio career that people are having to embrace because change is happening so fast. And you used to be able to get a degree and continue your career for 20 years. And that'd be good.

But nowadays, everything's changing so fast. You need to have outlets to learn new skills and things along those lines. So that's another thing I really liked about what On Deck's doing is again, it's not focused on one particular thing. Even though you do get the depth, but you'll also have the opportunity to see what else is out there and strengthen your skills in different ways. Let's dive into a little bit about what this particular program is all about. Who's it for? What's entailed. Things like that.

Jackie Miller: In terms of who's part of this community and who we're seeking to be part of the community, we're casting a pretty wide net with innovation, right? We're looking at people who are a little bit further along in their career. This is probably Director Level and above. People who have eight years, maybe more, of experience. They've been at this for a while.

And the title or duties could include everything from Innovation to Growth Strategy or Corporate Development. Labs, Venture, Transformation, the kind of Future of. You know, I joke that there's so many new titles in this space. My title at Chanel was Head Innovation Catalyst. It's a lot of innovation within innovation.

So, we're casting a pretty wide net. But the personas essentially are anyone who is an active practitioner in innovation. Which I think is an important distinction. There's a lot of service providers and other folks that are part of the ecosystem, who are great, and we want to work with, but for starters, we want to focus on those innovators who are actively in these roles at large companies or organizations.

And the three personas that we think they fall into are the culture and capabilities, which is that internal building, internal focused approach. And building and incubating new ideas, businesses, and ventures. And then lastly that investing in and acquiring more of your Corp Dev venture kind of side of things.

So, it's a pretty big umbrella. Sometimes as you probably know and have seen like one person is all three of those things, depending on like the structure of any given innovation practice. So, we recognize that it's broad. And there's a lot of variety there. We want to have lots of opportunities to bring those people together. But also segment and do some really curated sessions and content for different ones.

But I think beyond just those types of folks in those types of roles. What's important to us is, you know, I mentioned that innovation theater and avoiding the innovation theater trap, is people who really have a mandate to build and scale their innovation projects. Especially with startups. And I think that's part of the value of the On Deck community.

People who are really tasked with that. They have the budget. And the time and the mandate to do that. That's where we think we can have the most impact. And, you know, Spirit of Service is one of our core values. It's yes. It's about learning, achieving your goals, and growing and making progress, in your own career, but that's only possible in a community like this when you can support. There's a lot of peer-to-peer support, learning, exchange. So that kind of Spirit of Service and bringing things to the community, will be a key filter too.

Brian Ardinger: That's pretty exciting, because again, I've looked around and I haven't seen a lot of frameworks out there that really do approach and have that Inside Outside approach. I've seen a lot of people focused on internal innovation. And how do you do design thinking inside of a company, things like that. I've seen that these corporate venture sides where you're talking about investing in startups.

But very few really understand that the value of having that cross-politization between the ties and the t-shirts or the tucked and the untucked. How I like to call them. Folks that I think you learn quite a bit by seeing that exploration side of starting something brand new and building it.

And then on the reverse side, you know, startups get a lot from understanding what it takes to scale. And exploit and execute on something that they built. So, I'm excited about seeing that overlap. With this, how much do you see the programming being around specifically working with startups versus internal building? Or talk a little bit about the program itself.

Jackie Miller: The programming itself is designed around these formats, right? It's very community driven learning. But it's about both group sessions and curated connection. So, we do a lot of facilitating that in the format of deep dives, panels.

Something I'm really excited about that. I like to call a template potluck. Where we all ask our fellows to bring to the table, a pitch deck, a project strategy, a budget, even of things that have worked. For you, scrubbed of sensitive details. And a way to kind of just share and see what others are working on.

Lots of like social opportunities to connect and access to our platforms. Right? So Slack and the Directory, which is almost like our own internal LinkedIn. As well as access to the sessions for all of our programs. Right? So, if our Chief of Staff program is doing a deep dive on Web Three. That's something we can tap into the expert network of On Deck to take part in. So, there's going to be a lot of different formats.

In terms of the topics themselves into your question of, you know, how we take the broad topics and the specific ones. I think that certainly we'll do deep dives on things around like Open Innovation, Internal Culture, and Building. And the kind of specific challenges of Venture Building and certainly Building Corporate Venture Practices.

But there will be some broader topics that I think are, they're the things that light up when I have conversations with different folks, at least. Like one of these is that when we touched on of like internal processes and structure of an innovation team. You know, how do you interact with the business units? How do you create good communication between all your stakeholders and get buy-in on what is often a huge challenge in this space? Or even the small bets, right.

Brian Ardinger: Like measuring if you're on the right track in the first place. That's a big one. Understanding the metrics around it.

Jackie Miller: Figuring out you're solving the right problem. Right. So I think those are things that are going to apply across the board. I think there's things like leadership, talent development, hiring, and when that should look like for the future of an innovation practice. That I think will apply across the board.

And there's the founder mindset. I really believe that corporate innovators are at their core, they're founders, right. They're just not pitching to venture capitalists. They're navigating a much more constrained universe of what success looks like. But there's a lot of the same skillset mindset that a founder needs.

And one other topic, I think that has been interesting to see across the board is sustainability, diversity, and inclusion are some of these big drivers of innovation right now. These are some of the core pain points or challenges that businesses have to solve.

So, there's this intersection with innovation, that's exciting to me that I've heard from different founding fellows from Starbucks and Nike, JP Morgan, Walmart, who have all raised similar challenges.

Brian Ardinger: And that's the other interesting part about it is because it's kind of industry agnostic. Like I think a lot of us can learn from what's happening in another industry and apply that to our own industry and vice versa. And so, I think that's a big strength to this type of program that you're pulling together as well.

Jackie Miller: I think that's huge. I mean, I really think that in innovation, we already get stuck in a bubble sometimes. In your own echo chamber of the buzzwords. But then we do that in our industries too. When I was at Chanel, I can't tell you how refreshing and inspirational it might be to have a conversation with Pepsi, for example, right. This idea that it doesn't always have to be your exact peer to get really interesting new ideas and new insights.

Brian Ardinger: When can people apply? When does it start? Some details around that.

Jackie Miller: We just announced this in January. So still excited to see those applications roll in. The program actually kicks off in mid-March. So, applications are open. The deadline to apply is February 27th. You'll be tagged as an Inside Outside applicant, so that we can fast track your application. Once people apply, some will be invited to interview. And then they'll receive an offer to join us when the program kicks off in mid-March.

Brian Ardinger: And you and I were talking earlier that you created a special URL for IO listeners. If they go to go.odci.io/podcast, they can apply via this link and get fast-tracked.

You've been in corporate innovation. And you were with Chobani, and I think you launched a successful accelerator for early-stage food and tech companies there. And most recently, like you said, you were at Chanel. What's some of the biggest mistakes or biggest learnings, maybe that you've learned by being in corporate innovation. Where have you stubbed your toe and where do you think you can help others not.

Jackie Miller: It's a great question. I think that my experience on the spectrum of, you know, different approaches to corporate innovation is one that I come back to time and again, right. This idea that innovators, people in corporate innovation should almost be in the position of making their roles obsolete.

Right. Like putting themselves out of a job, in a way. Which is maybe a little provocative. But what I mean by that is, you know, it shouldn't be siloed. And you can see very clearly, early on whether or not a program is going to be a program or a practice or a department. It's going to be successful, if it feels siloed and stuck on to the side, rather than truly a top-down initiative. And then there's top-down buy it.

And it doesn't mean, not to get into like the details of the corporate governance or anything than that. It's mostly about like the right stakeholders and the right communication line with the stakeholders, right. This idea that you need to be in between the business units on the ground and the leadership at the kind of strategy and priority and decision-making. And really navigate between those spaces. And it's easier to do that when you have that top down buy in.

My experience at Chobani. Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani, really prioritized the incubator program. It was important to him. It was extremely founder friendly. We didn't take equity. It was just something that was part of his personal values and mission. And that, you know, shows in how he got hundreds of employees, internally, to be involved and engaged and really scale up that program.

That kind of top-down buy-in makes a huge difference. And yeah, you need that combination of top down and grassroots impact, right? So, I think that not every corporate innovator has an influence over that kind of strategy and structure of that team. But those communication lines with leadership, are just as important as the structure itself.

Brian Ardinger: The fact that the practice of spinning up something brand new, or working with a startup, for example, that doesn't have it all figured out. It doesn't have the business model all ready to scale, is significantly different than what most people are typically working in, in an existing business. Where they know the business model. They know what they're supposed to be doing. Their job is to scale and execute and make that better.

Fundamentally, there's a lot of knows. Versus the world of startups, the world of innovation, where fundamentally it's all unknown at the start. And so how do you manage those expectations on both sides. Expectations from the people who are building that. Whether it's a startup itself or the internal team that's building up something from scratch. And then communicating that to the upper management, like timelines may be different. The measurements may be different. What you're looking for may be different. It's all very important because they are fundamentally different worlds to some extent.

Jackie Miller: I think that's right. When you're pitching something new, it's sort of like, I think that empathy is at the root of all like change. And innovation at its core is about change. You know, it's about problem solving and introducing new kind of ways of doing things. Put yourself in the shoes of that person hearing that pitch. Right.

And this idea that, of course there's a preconceived set of KPIs. And how we measure our projects and our initiatives. Really setting the stage and then making the case for exactly what you're saying of, okay. We're entering the unknown here. And introducing upfront the, these are going to be different metrics for success. And really defining. That really primes people to be more receptive to change. It can be a hard thing for them to process

Brian Ardinger: So, what do you see are the biggest opportunities for corporates who can do innovation well? Why should they be doubling down on this?

Jackie Miller: There's a lot of opportunities here. Right? And like a few things come to mind. Corporate innovation more often than not can be found in a cost center, right. This idea that, you know, how close are you to the business impact. To revenue. To building something new. I think that every corporate innovation team or program should have an eye towards that possibility.

I think there are certain things that absolutely should be separate and are about experimentation and are about learning. It's something important for any department within a company thinking about what's the long-term sustainability and scalability of what we're building here. That should be part of the discussion part of the conversation.

Another piece is interacting with emerging technology trends and startups. It's very easy for corporates to feel like it's a foreign language or that world is so far away. And I don't know what I could possibly do or how I could add value to that conversation or that exchange. I think corporate innovators really kind of understanding the value they bring to those exchanges. And how meaningful those exchanges with a startup or a founder can be even if we're talking about really big cultural differences.

If you really go in knowing, and sometimes the things you wouldn't expect are the things that are super valuable. I can't tell you how many times what a startup really needed from me as a representative of the big company was like an org chart Sherpa, right. Someone would tell me, how are things organized? Who does this? Who owns that?

And like, yes, ultimately that may be just who do I sell my thing to, but more often than not, it's about learning. What are the priorities? How are things organized? How are things structured and how do things get done? That is hugely valuable to a startup. And I think we oftentimes undersell the kind of knowledge and insight and support we can bring to startups. That goes beyond just the petting zoo. But is actually like here's some actionable information to help them achieve their goals.

Brian Ardinger: What are some of the trends and opportunities that you're seeing out there in the marketplace? Whether it's technology trends or things that people should be paying attention to in this space.

Jackie Miller: Part of the reason I was so excited to join the On Deck team, and you mentioned it upfront, about the work we were doing in no code. The fact that we are a fully remote company. Future of work is obviously a big topic when you look at like innovation culture and capabilities. And I think things like No Code, the idea that, and this is very challenging for large enterprises, where there are a lot of IT, data, infrastructure limit to what kind of tools you can use.

But there is something fundamentally innovative about cultivating the skillset and the knowledge to use tools like No Code tools. And we're talking about like an Air Table or a Notion, or some of these. And while yes, there are enterprise platform challenges. I really think that the trend here is it's also that like talent wants to learn how to put on their resume and talk about how they were able to build things.

They may not be coders. But they were able to build things themselves. Like that's what talent is looking for. That is what truly innovative projects come from, that kind of mindset and that kind of talent. Trying to find ways to create spaces.

You can do this with Microsoft. Like when I was at Chanel, we use Microsoft and there are all kinds of interesting analytics and automation tools that you can experiment with. You don't have to be expert level. But I think there's something there. And future of remote working, right. Every corporate is navigating hybrid or remote, and what that looks like.

These are new demands in the idea of innovative talent and the war for innovative talent. So, I think there's sort of a must have in terms of exploration, that are not necessarily suited immediately to the corporate environment. But I think it's something that corporate should definitely be thinking about.

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Brian Ardinger: Yeah. We've talked about that quite a bit. And how, if nothing else just being exposed to some of these tools gives you a different appreciation for the speed at which disruptors could come on board. Or other ways that you could change the dynamic within your company or outside. Thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your experiences and that. If people want to find out more about you or the On Deck Program, what's the best way to do that?

Jackie Miller: The best way is to visit us at https://www.beondeck.com/corporate-innovation

Brian Ardinger: Well Jackie, thanks again for coming on. I'm excited to be a part of the Fellowship. I encourage people who are listening to check it out. Looking forward to having further conversations.

Jackie Miller: Thanks so much Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we host Jennifer Smith, CEO and Cofounder of Scribe. Jennifer and I talk about her journey as an accidental entrepreneur and the trends and opportunity she sees as she grows a software company on a mission to build the first operating system of know-how. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript of Jennifer Smith, CEO & Co-founder of Scribe

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jennifer Smith. She is the CEO and co-founder of Scribe. Which is a startup software company that enables you to automatically generate step-by-step guides for any process or task. Welcome to the show, Jennifer,

Jennifer Smith: Pleasure to be here Brian.

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to talk to you. Not only because what you're building. But you've got a pretty interesting background that I think our audience will get into. My understanding is you got into entrepreneurship as a, an accidental entrepreneur. You've spent some time at McKinsey and at Greylock. Degrees from Harvard and Princeton. And now you're developing and building a startup from scratch. So why don't we tell the audience about how you got on your path to becoming an entrepreneur.

Jennifer Smith: Yeah, I, I do say I'm a bit of an accidental entrepreneur, cause I, you know, meet so many folks in the valley who say, I knew since the age of 10 that I was going to found a company. And you know, if you had asked me even a few years ago before I started Scribe, I would have said no, unlikely not.

To me I fell in love with a problem. So, I'll kind of take you on a quick history tour. Imagine it's 10, 15 years ago, you know, when you're a leading global corporation and you want to figure out how work is getting done. Maybe you're facing a productivity imperative or you're scaling up your company. And so what do you do?

You probably hire some fancy consultants, right? And they probably come around. And they interview your people. And they create a bunch of PowerPoints. Maybe they document what some of your best practices are like. Anyone who has seen office space can maybe just think of the Bob. And, you know, I should know, I spent seven years at McKinsey. Doing exactly that.

I did mostly work in our Oregon operations practice. Which functionally meant spending about eight hours a day in an operation center, looking over the shoulder of agents, trying to figure out how they were doing things. And I learned really quickly the name of the game, at least as a consultant at the time was you figured out who the best person that ops center was. You sat next to them. And you said, what are you doing differently Judy.

And Judy would tell you. Right? Oh, I was trained to do this. And you know, she'd pull out a big manual. I'll date myself. It was a big binder at the time. Right. Here's what I was trained to do. But, you know, I found these 30 shortcuts. And here's what I do. And I would write that down and my team would sell that back to our clients for a whole bunch of money.

I always thought like, gosh, if the Judy's of the world had just had a way to share what they know how to do, they could have had really big impact on that ops center. Right. They didn't need me and my team to be saying it for them. And so that always kind of nagged at me, but I figured that was a problem for someone else to solve someday.

And then fast forward a decade later, and I'm working at Greylock on Sand Hill Road. And I spent a lot of my time there meeting with CXOs of large enterprises. So CIO, CDOs, Chief Innovation Officers. A lot of folks who would kind of come talk to VCs to try to understand how they could be more innovative.

I counted them when I left actually. I talked to over 1200 folks. So pretty broad sample. And what I realized was nothing had changed. The way that you still wanted to understand how work was getting out. You were still getting some version of a 28-year-old Jennifer with a Lenovo ThinkPad running around, interviewing your people, right?

Maybe it was an internal person and maybe now you're using a fancy Wiki instead of PowerPoint to capture it. But the idea is still the same. It was still very manual, not very scalable. And that was crazy to me. We'd had so much technological innovation and something that's so core. So fundamental to the way that millions of people, billions of people around the world work, hadn't changed. And so, I just got really obsessed with this problem and Scribe was born.

Brian Ardinger: So that's the impotence of the problem. It's like, okay, well, I've got this little nugget and ideas are great, but obviously you have to execute on that idea to make it an innovation or make something of value from that. How did you go from that nugget of information to finding a team or finding somebody who could help build or solve this problem for you?

Jennifer Smith: I believe in fast iteration around this. And so what we said was let's try to build the most basic MVP of a company and a product around this idea. And our idea was what if we could watch an expert do work and automatically capture what they know how to do? What if it was just like documentation as digital exhaust? Just a by-product of you doing your normal job.

And so, we built what was the very beginnings of Scribe. Wasn't even called Scribe at the time. And what we were focused on was just getting something very basic out there. That was for free. That people could test and use. And we could learn from that. And so, we kept the company very lean. Maybe a topic for another conversation. But I believe in running very, very lean as a team. Probably painfully so.

Until you really feel like the market is pulling something out of you. And so, we put our software out in the world. And sort of said, like, let's see how people use this. And what they tell us. And Scribe picked up some legs after a bunch of iterations and grew. And now it's being used by tens of thousands of workers around the world.

And that's because we really focused on a type of software that the end user would want. I think a lot of enterprise software today is focused towards a buyer. It's something that your boss tells you to use. And that's why you use it. And we said, let's flip this on its head. Let's try to iterate our way to a product that someone uses because they want to, not because their boss is telling them to. But because it makes their day easier, they're more productive. They get recognized for their contributions.

Brian Ardinger: It's an interesting approach because we've seen a couple of different companies that have taken that B2B approach and flipped it on its head. Like a Slack where, you know, again, it's a product team or something that starts to engage and use the product. And then through that word of mouth and through iterations, they start getting to the point where the boss has to take notice because that's the productivity tool that people are using. Was it always the model that you were going to go after? Or what made you think that this is the way to build Scribe.

Jennifer Smith: Yeah. It's because what you're trying to do as a startup is learn as fast as possible. We talk all the time about how do we just make our learning loops as short and tight as possible. And the way for us to do that was to try to get Scribe in the hands of as many users as possible. Right.

And so there's a few things that we did for that. One was we released a free version of Scribe. We just said, here you go. Go ahead and use it. Create a Scribe. Share a Scribe with anyone else. And we use to track this. We were trying to make it as easy as possible. The atomic unit is short and easy as possible for someone to use Scribe.

And so, we would clock it and see from the moment someone landed on our website to the moment, they were able to create a Scribe and share with one with someone else was under four minutes. And we had users who didn't even speak English. Right. And we hadn't translated the product yet. And they were able to do it under four minutes.

We said, how do we just keep this as short and tight as possible? And there are these natural growth loops in the product as well. So, whenever I create a Scribe, I send it to someone else. I share it with them. I can invite and collaborate with teammates. So, each user, be gets more users. That enabled us to learn faster and faster.

And that's very similar in many ways to what Slack and some of these other product led growth companies have done. Where they're really focused on driving that user value and cultivating user love. Which I think is great. The other thing we're focused on though, is in addition to this being a product that folks are pulling for. That they're telling their bosses, I want to be using. How do you also add value to the organization?

And so, what's interesting about Scribe is you've got people across your org who are using it because it just makes their day to day better and easier. But then there's value that accrues to the overall organization. Oftentimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you're starting to talk about making each person incrementally more productive.

And the knowledge that you're starting to capture from people documenting what they're doing every day. I think Slack has a similar model there. I think where Slack is a bit different and I've actually written a piece about this is their pitch to the enterprise is really just, your people are already using this. You might as well pay for it and get these enterprise security and features and all these things you want.

And we try to think about it as like, no, what's actually the value add to the organization. Like, it's great that all of your people are getting this value, but then there's also additional unlock that comes at the organizational level.

Brian Ardinger: You talk about Scribe as you're building that first operating system of know-how. How is this different than the way people have tried to solve this problem in the past? Wikis or other ways? There's always that challenge of capturing information and then making it easy and accessible when you need it. How's Scribe a little bit different?

Jennifer Smith: The Wiki was born in 95. I remember at the time we're all very excited. You know, everyone contributed, you saw the rise of things like Wikipedia. What's interesting. If you look at the staff even around like a Wikipedia. It's the idea is this, this big democratic open source, everyone contributes to this hive knowledge of the world.

Actually, there's a very small percentage of contributors who represent the vast majority of knowledge on Wikipedia. And they tend not to be pretty diverse too. I think you see this same thing within companies. Which is you have the keepers of knowledge. I call it knowledge with a capital K. Like the set of people who contribute to the Wiki or the knowledge base, whatever you're using.

And, you know, they spend a bunch of time. They have great intentions. They spend a bunch of time putting information. And that. It's highly manual to do. But there's a bunch of difficulties. One of the main ones is that it's very manual and takes that time. So, unless it's that person's job, if they're just doing it out of the goodness of their heart, it becomes very difficult to maintain.

And what you end up with is a downward spiral. I mean, anyone who's been part of a company can recognize this, the documentation goes stale. And then you stop referencing it because you know, it's stale. Then the person who created it forgets about it because no one's ever talking about it. And downward spiral from there and it doesn't become valuable.

With Scribe, we were trying to say, hey, how do you make this instead automatic. How do you make this so no one has to do any additional work? Again, this idea of digital exhaust. It's just a by-product of you doing your normal job. So, you hit the record button and you work as usual. You just do the thing you normally would have done anyway.

And you're automatically getting the step-by-step documentation that is up-to-date and current and accurate. And reflects the way work is actually being done. Because I think it's changing this model of knowledge is something that you have to go produce. To something you already have. You've already done the hard part of knowing how to do something valuable within a company. Our view is that your knowledge around that should just be automatically captured and shared with other people who shouldn't be taking time away to have to do that.

Brian Ardinger: How do you account for the fact that as the world is changing so fast, things are changing such that what you documented two weeks ago may not be what you document or how you do that task today. How do you keep up with the pace of change?

Jennifer Smith: I think this is really important, right? Because things are changing even faster within organizations. You now have a great resignation where maybe even the people who are doing the work, its changing even more. They're changing their physical location. Potentially they're remote right now. You have a lot of differences. And I think this is why it becomes more important than ever before to really tap into this collective know-how within an organization.

I almost think of it as like popping someone's brain open and pulling out what is it that they know how to do? Which is really the lifeblood of your company, right? We're talking about the knowledge of what are people doing when they show up to work every day. Nine to five, fingers on keyboard, trying to create value for your company.

And that knowledge walks out the proverbial elevator these days. Maybe not literally, you know. Every day at five o'clock and you got to hope that it comes back. I think it's more important than ever before that companies actually find ways to capture this knowledge and then be able to share it across the right people at the right time.

If you think about it, there's so much kind of reinventing the wheel happening within a company today. You're either when you go to do something, you know, popping your head over the cubicle and asking someone or trying to search on your own, or just kind of figuring it out. And there's so much productivity loss that comes from that.

Brian Ardinger: You alluded to a couple of trends that I want to talk to you about. One is this democratization of innovation where anyone can really have an impact in the organization because of the tools that are now there. So, things like no-code and low-code tools and things like Scribe that give power to the individual to create value in different ways. Talk a little bit about how you see that trend evolving and how it's going to have an impact in the business world.

Jennifer Smith: Yeah, I love that you bring this up. And as we say democratization. I find with some of our customers, they get very excited. Some of our customers get very scared. And I think it all depends how you think about it and frame it. The best knowledge on how things get done within a company or how to do things better really come from the people who are doing the work day-to-day on the frontline knowledge workers.

And so how do you really tap into that, and both understand what those people have figured out, but then be able to share that seamlessly across the org. There are increasing number of tools that make that better. I think it's easy to point to a bunch of the collaboration tools like Zoom and Slack and others that make it easy to communicate. The kind of flip side or downside to that is that ends with collaboration overload. Which I think we've all heard a lot of talk around, especially, you know, post COVID. And it's very real.

And it also is usually a disproportionate burden on your best people. Who are the ones that everyone always goes to to ask, hey, can you show me how to do this? And so, we think a lot about how do you scale those kinds of people who really are your best or your most experienced, or sort of have found a better way to do something.

In the way like code or media, which are infinitely scalable. We think about Scribe as the atomic unit of just how do you pull that info out of someone's head and make it infinitely scalable across an organization?

Brian Ardinger: It's pretty interesting how the world is changing such that again, we have that ability and how that's going to change. Both the speed of change, this layering effect of, as you give more productivity tools to folks, they become more productive. And therefore, changes the dynamics and moves from there. You also talked about this hybrid and remote working. What are some of the good, bad, and ugly that you're seeing and how does Scribe and the tools that you're building play into that.

Jennifer Smith: I think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over time. Obviously, a lot of companies have now moved into hybrid or fully remote. And I think that's worked really well in instances where folks have built in-person relationships. And then they were able to move that on to remote. At least in the first few months and year of the pandemic.

What's interesting is you're now seeing a lot more turnover within companies. You have new people who are joining for the first time. And may have never met any of their colleagues in person. Right. And so how do you start to build that knowledge. That sort of informal knowledge of how work actually gets done within a company.

And what you find is when folks were in person, they often understood like, oh, Cheryl's the one who knows how to do this. She's the person I go to for that. Right. Or Bob knows how to do this, or Benkit knows that. So that becomes much harder to replicate when you're not all sitting together. We think a lot about how do you similarly try to like tap into this collective knowledge when people are not sitting face to face or next to each other, where you're able to just pop your head over the cubicle and ask someone, you know, a question on how to do something.

We talk about it as just drinking our own champagne at Scribe. Because we're hybrid ourselves. Right? We have a team here in San Francisco, but then we have folks distributed around the U S and world too. We use Scribe ourselves to share all of that knowledge around how to.

You've got three kinds of knowledge and accompany. You have historical knowledge. What date did we release this product? You have policy knowledge. What days off do we have with our PTO policy? And I think you can even kind of ask HR. And then you have this procedural knowledge, which is the thing that tends to be least documented. And it's all of that knowledge around, how do we actually do work?

What is the day-to-day processes and business functions that happen to make this thing go? And that's the part that you see documented the least. And that's the part that we're focused on most with Scribe.

Brian Ardinger: Whenever I have a founder on the show. I'll always like to ask do you have any go-to tools or resources or hacks that we can recommend to other fellow founders or products builders?

Jennifer Smith: Yeah, I believe in time management. And being really, really thoughtful about how you spend your time. And I'd say even more importantly, your energy. So, I've talked to my team a lot about thinking about where do you get sources of energy. And what drains your energy. And you need to manage that within a given day or week.

And so, I always say lean into your strengths. And as you look at the way that you're spending your day, make sure that it's disproportionately focused on the things you are good at. And that give you energy. You should feel like you're pushing a boulder downhill. Building a company is really hard. Don't get me wrong, but it should feel like pushing a boulder downhill because you're doing the things that you love doing.

And you've got a bunch of momentum from the market. And your team. And your product behind you. And if it doesn't feel that way, then you need to be changing the way that you structure your day.

Brian Ardinger: So last question. What's next for you? And what's next for Scribe?

Jennifer Smith: We're building the team and the product really aggressively right now. The next two years for us are just continuing to scale out. As I mentioned, we have a free version of Scribe that tens of thousands of organizations are now using. I think in over a hundred countries. We've offered now a paid version of that as well, for folks who want to upgrade. And we're selling into large enterprises also.

And so, we're really focused on how do we just make it as easy as possible for anyone to be able to share how to. For us as a company that's continuing to grow the team. That's investing more in R and D. And then continuing to build out on the distribution.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: If people want to find out more about yourself or about scribe, what's the best way to do that?

Jennifer Smith: Yeah, you can check us out on our website, Scribehow.com. Feel free to sign up there directly. We also have a promo code available for listeners, if they're interested. The product's free, as I said. But for the paid version, if you want three months free, it's insideout30 as a promo code. But invite you all to check it out and try it out and drop us a line with some feedback.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Jennifer, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Really appreciate the time. And look forward to seeing where everything goes in the future.

Jennifer Smith: Yeah. Thanks so much, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Ben McDougal, Author of You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship in the Connected Era. Ben and I talk about his portfolio-based career in entrepreneurship from founder to 1 Million Cups organizer, to his current role as entrepreneur In residence and ecosystem developer with Techstars Iowa. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Ben McDougal, Author of You Don't Need This Book

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Ben McDougal. He is author of the new book, You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship and the Connected Era. Welcome to the show. Ben.

Ben McDougal: Thanks, Brian. It's great to catch up with a friend and looking forward to connecting with your audience.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. You and I have known each other for a number of years in the startup ecosystem building world. You hang out in Iowa. And I hang out here in Nebraska. It's been fun to see your journey. You joined Techstars Iowa as kind of a hybrid role as an entrepreneur residence and ecosystem development person. So how did you get involved in startup ecosystem development?

Ben McDougal: Thanks, Brian. Yeah, I've always been an entrepreneur. I came out of school, admittedly, thinking that we got expensive pieces of paper to go build someone else's dream. But startup, wasn't a word back in 2004. I got a computer science degree wanting to develop video games.

And so looked at that industry. Which led me to web development. When I look back at it, it was pretty entrepreneurial. I mean, talking with endless different industries on how to build their business online. And so, while I was in somewhat of a traditional kind of business development role. I don't know what spawned the entrepreneurial spirit besides just recognizing an opportunity.

So, I created a 3v3 soccer tournament. I had played soccer. I was in a web development shop and could make a nice live event come to life. Ended up having two years of that before selling it to a local soccer club, as we had launched a social network for gamers. It was interesting looking back using entrepreneurship to wedge myself into an industry I was always passionate about. But there's a whole community side that was emerging.

And so built Jet Set Studio. It's still a small sliver of my career portfolio. Doing video game events around North America and building community in person and online. That was some of the early interactions of community building. I would stay in web development for eight years and retire out of that and go into another kind of traditional role inside the home building industry. Never really touched a hammer and kind of avoid manual labor, genuine.

In that home building world, we found a disconnect between Home Builders and Realtors. So, we built an open house scheduler, knowing that it's not hard, but it's recurring when they're connecting that open house schedule. So that's Open Open. Alongside of that, that intrapreneurial spirit was fed with that parallel entrepreneurial spirit ended up building Flight Bright in the craft beer industry, which was an electronic beer flight paddle.

It translated and continues to be that type of electronic serving system. But we added a beer festival app. And so that's Flight Bright and that story continues to be written. And you think about this diversified career portfolio that has a mixture of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activities. And the glue that brings it all together, along with myself is the community. Leaning into community and recognizing the energy of accelerating others.

And so that's where you see my work in 1 Million Cups long ago. Like I was a part of a 1 Million Cups every Wednesday as an entrepreneur. But when the opportunity to lead emerged, I rose my hand. Got involved. That led to the chance of being a regional rep. So, we built this role to help support all of the different organizing teams across the United States.

And so, I've been the Midwest regional rep now for the last four years. And that has been remarkable. Supporting and connecting 45 different 1 MC communities across 12 states, has created an awareness when it comes to entrepreneurial ecosystem building, at a rural, medium, and large size environment.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. 1 Million Cups. I've mentioned this on the program, a number of different times, and I know a lot of people in the entrepreneurial startup side have maybe heard of 1 Million Cups. But on our corporate innovator side, it's, it's one of those programs that I think that more corporate innovators should become involved and that.

Maybe give a little bit of background about 1 Million Cups and why that's so important, not only for the entrepreneurs in your community, but the companies and the other organizations.

Ben McDougal: I think intrapreneurship at existing companies, small, medium, and large is a critical component to any entrepreneurial ecosystem. Having employees that are the champions of change for their existing company, plugging into community activities, helps them stay in front of the innovation curve. Fuels like their innovative energy. And creates opportunities to collaborate with entrepreneurs that in a way that helps their companies.

And so, whether it's the energy. Kind of the network and human capital that can come from this type of active. All the way over to the financial capital and opportunities for those companies to benefit from their interactions with startups is real. One quick tactic, Brian, that catches my attention is larger companies treating activity within a startup community as volunteer hours.

So, removing the barrier of PTO for someone who wants to go to 1 Million Cups on a Wednesday morning. Or to that startup event. Instead of restricting that type of activity by saying they need to take time off. It's celebrating that activity, knowing that while it's a little less time outside of the office, the energy, the activity, the connections, the progress that has made through that activity, benefits the company, perhaps even more. There's some value when you think about giving intrapreneurs, the freedom to explore their curiosity.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. And that's one of the things that we talk about a lot is not only entrepreneurs have to get out of the building, but intrapreneurs as well. And you can't build anything without actually getting out there and trying things and testing things and being a part of the communities.

We talk about this concept of a portfolio career and more and more folks I believe are going to have to be transitioning to this concept of, you know, you don't do just one job for 20 years of your life. It's a series of different side hustles and projects and people you work with and that. As an early adopter to this portfolio career type of lifestyle, what are some hints or suggestions you could make for people trying to transition into more of a portfolio type of approach?

Ben McDougal: Yeah. The Diversified Career Portfolio is something that allows you to use energies from different activities to maximize the outputs. And sometimes that means it's the full-time job paired with a couple of side hustles. Complemented by some volunteer roles. Knowing that those kind of shapes within that pie chart, that's how I like to visualize it. Are always changing.

And the interactions between them are something to be conscious of. And so they don't necessarily need to directly connect because they connect through you. And so, recognizing that even if they're different activities and completely different industries, that passion that you're feeding translates into good things for other areas within that pie chart.

Another thing to always keep in mind is your personal bandwidth. I write about this in the book, a complete section for side hustles. And knowing that your personal bandwidth is something, if you can do a lot, then everyone's going to be asking to do a little. You know, and so all of a sudden you can potentially get diluted to mediocrity.

And I think there's a good exercise of imagining that you have timed to swinging an ax 100 times. With those hundred swings, are you going to hit 100 trees once? Or perhaps a strategic collection, a few more times to make the impact. Knowing that it doesn't just need to be one tree. You might be able to make a positive impact on a collection of trees with those hundred swings, keeping your eye on that personal bandwidth as you add, or remove things from that career portfolio.

And lastly, I think the value of transparency. There are other things to talk about here but being transparent with the way that you spend your time avoids the exhaustion of secrecy. And so, whether that's an entrepreneur sharing that side hustle with their boss and exploring that interest. Or it's easiest from the beginning, right. So, as you bring on a new project or enter a new contract, being very clear with the way that you spend your time, so that there's not tension down the road.

Brian Ardinger: So, Ben, let's get into the book a little bit. It's called You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship and The Connected Era. What made you decide to write a book? And give the audience a little bit of background about what they should expect from it?

Ben McDougal: There was a time where I started to feel a sense of potential regret. I had enjoyed some fun ventures on my own. But really it was the stories from thousands of entrepreneurs that I had interacted with. Whether that was on my own journeys or within 1 Million Cups. And learning from these different perspectives and the activity of so many remarkable entrepreneurs, it became to the point where if I wasn't able to pass that on to my little one, right. My startup that pays in love that this experiential wisdom would just be lost.

And so that was kind of my why. To synthesize everything that I understood about entrepreneurial. But specifically, within our connected era. Driven by community and the ability to do so much more with less, through the network of a global economy.

And so, I crafted an outline. It sat on my phone for a while, and I was encouraged by Victor Wang to build into it when it started to keep me up at night. And that's where I had reached. And so crafted the manuscript. Had a beautiful forward by Victor, that explains that moment. But also, a contribution from Brad Feld in the very thick community chapter. Which is number two out of 10. I think it's such an important piece.

And so, it's been called a nice guide for first-time founders and entrepreneurial ecosystem builders, exploring that professional field. Whether it's the ideation process right out of the gate, all the way through to what I would consider a wild card. And that is persistence. And so, you know, marketing is in between research, customer discovery, and like I mentioned, community. So, it's really provided a strong sense of peace and I'm so thankful for how it's coming from.

Brian Ardinger: What I liked about the book is a lot of startup books are about the tactics of how do you increase your sales or grow XYZ. Yours brought in not only those tactical aspects, but also the bigger picture of it's not just about the entrepreneur. It's about the team they bring together. It's about the community that they have to support. And that are supporting their efforts. And it gave more of a holistic approach to what it means to be an entrepreneur, rather than just the blocking and tackling of the business side of things.

Ben McDougal: Yeah. The amount of activities as an entrepreneur is kind of like everything, right. So, I talk about the term Career Nirvana. Which is where, you know, your work feels like play to you, but looks like work to others. It is in balance with your community, with the team that you're working within and with the life that you live. Entrepreneurship is not something that you learn. It's more of a lifestyle. It's more something that you just bring into your daily life.

And the practice can be, become something that leads you to maybe the first time that you need to pivot, right. You either succeed or we learn. Not being afraid of failure, knowing that you're continuously optimizing that career portfolio to have the right slivers in that pie chart. And tweaking the size of each sliver along the way. So, I appreciate that, Brian. It's definitely fueled from learnings, from people like you. From remarkable entrepreneurs and community builders that have taught me so much.

And it's been neat to hear their responses. Similar to what you shared. There's some heart within it that explores the tactics, but also some of the mindsets. Some of the community aspects, that will give you the resiliency to play longterm games with long-term people.

Brian Ardinger: Great advice. You hung out with a ton of entrepreneurs. And you've seen them at the earliest stages and that. What are some of the biggest myths about entrepreneurship that you've uncovered or things that you wish that early-stage entrepreneurs would know earlier?

Ben McDougal: You'll see it in the book. I call it the Headline Trap. We see entrepreneurs raising a million here and a kabillion there. Right. We see them in the media and that is a well-deserved and of course, an important recognition of people's own successes. But that can also become paralyzing for someone who feels as though they're not allowed to tinker.

The opportunity of a side hustle or a startup, or even a full-time effort, doesn't always need to rely on financial capital or global impact in order to positively impact your life and your career portfolio. And so, giving the permission, that's not required, but sometimes needed in order for people to explore their passions. Without the weight of feeling like this has to have this huge global impact to make it something that really provides purpose and provides a sense of gratitude with someone's career portfolio. The way that they spend the limited time. And so, I think the Headline Trap and avoiding that is one way to get started now, instead of like the dreaded someday.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Trying to line up the perfect plan and then launching the perfect plan is never the perfect way to make it happen. I mean, the plan is never going to be perfect from day one. You've got to go out and stub your toe and figure it out most of the time. You don't seem to have much fear from the standpoint of, you're always willing to try something. Swing a different bat. What gives you the confidence to do that? Or what have you learned that gives you confidence to step out in the unknown and try something different?

Ben McDougal: I don't know if there's one thing that would be like, this is how I have become confident. I think it's a mixture of having stepped out and it doesn't hurt. It's exciting. You know, the enthusiasm of building something that you care about. And that can lead to the resiliency we've spoken about. You know, I think there would also be a collection of skills that give me confidence. And I write about that in the marketing chapter of You Don't Need This Book. Because it makes us dangerous as individuals.

Linebacker doesn't play wide receiver. Right? So, recognizing your role. What you're good at and filling the gaps so that you're not cloning yourself when you're building as a team. Or working with contractors as lone wolf. But there are six skills that I think have given me a lot of confidence and abilities to build on my own, knowing that adding more fuel to the fire along the way is always possible.

I start with writing. I think writing is a powerful skill that you can learn just by doing. I think of photography. Videography, not just taking the videos, but being able to stitch things together so that it's digestible and tells a story that connects to a broader narrative. Graphic design. Right? Bringing all those multimedia things together.

Creativity, knowing that everyone can take a photo, but it's that angle or it's that ability to publish, is what separates with that creativity. Organization is another one that comes to mind and knowing that as you collect this mountain of media, being able to keep track of all of it in a good way is another valuable skill set.

And then lastly, when it comes to content creation is just bringing it all together and recognizing that there's a practice in staying creative and building the content. So that you can create stories that sell and having the ability to do that on your own allows you to do a lot with a little, even if you don't plan to do all of it hands-on. You'll recognize what needs to be done for whatever the project is next.

Brian Ardinger: You've been around in the Midwest Startup Ecosystem since the early days. You know, a lot of stuff that's happened in Iowa has gotten a lot of traction over the last four or five, six years. And now you're involved with Techstars and that. What are some of the trends that you're seeing when it comes to startups in the Midwest? And what are you most looking forward to?

Ben McDougal: Yeah, so the Techstars role emerged from that community building that we talked about earlier. And I was already an entrepreneurial ecosystem builder. And so, when there was some room to get involved with the accelerator, I jumped at the opportunity to partner up with Techstars. And leaned into that Entrepreneur in Residence role paired with Ecosystem Development.

And so while I'd always admired Techstars, this was a cool kind of side door to sneak into the rocket ship that is Techstars. And so, when you see these founders coming in, wherever they're from, and you start to think about the Midwest entrepreneur, I think that we could talk about things that everyone always talks about.

Right. We don't have quite the access to people that are interested in getting risky with their financial capital. We can talk about some of the resources that may or may not be the same as some of the larger hubs like Boston or San Fran or some of the other ecosystems. But one of the things I find liberating is using a framework that we see in the Startup Community Way, by Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway, the Seven Capitals.

And releasing ourselves from thinking that we have to have money. Okay. What do you have? Right. It's that abundance mindset and leaning into that holistic kind of positive sum approach to entrepreneurial ecosystem building. Allows us to use what we have to attract more of what we want.

And so, I see a lot of entrepreneurs almost being set free. To think big. To build something that can be scalable. Not being afraid to tinker and fail, right. But also knowing that it's going to be a process. And one of the easiest things that I would say we have in the Midwest is almost natural. Give first mindset. Without preconception or without alternative motives.

When I talk to someone, I almost have immediate, almost natural, positive, intent. That I want to see you succeed. That type of give first positive sum. If you win, we win approach is prevalent around the Midwest. And it allows us to do more with less through the connected era.

And so, while there might be less of certain types of capital, in some cases, there are also more types of capital in the Midwest that allows people in rural, medium communities, and even the larger cities that we have throughout our Midwest region. Knowing that we can connect to the global community and make an impact no matter where we're at.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I think it's so important and we see it every day. And you guys sent a message to some of the folks here in Lincoln saying, hey, we want to come out with Techstars to promote the fact that our applications are open. Can you set up some meetings and that? And you guys came out last week and toured some of our ecosystem.

And we've done that back and forth over the years. And it's nice to have an ability and an environment that fosters that type of relationship that it's not just about keeping everything in my own backyard.

Ben McDougal: It's still inviting. Cheers to that group that we enjoyed time with there in Omaha and also in Lincoln. And that type of interaction, like you said, is not uncommon. A couple of friends who want to show you around leads to an entire day of inspired activity. In fact, not knowing when you're listening to this, but our applications oddly enough, open today, Brian.

And so, if you are building a team. You've got this startup and you're ready to scale. I did not come onto the conversation, planning to promote such a thing, but the applications are open and the Techstars experience is remarkable. It's really geared towards those who are looking to scale up. Maybe looking to raise venture capital in order to support a growing system. And the amount of mentors at a global level. The amount of give first and kind of Techstars for life. That culture is real.

And our hybrid program allows folks to participate in Des Moines, Iowa, but also online throughout the hundred-day program. And boy seeing these entrepreneurs and their teams, and their companies emerge and raising serious capital and going on to continue to do big things is another way that I've energized my own career portfolio. Because I'll say it again, folks. The energy of accelerating others is unmatched.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your enthusiasm and acceleration path. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Ben McDougal: It's very easy. Benmcdougal.com. Has my activity throughout the social media landscape, but also has my weekly writings that are called Roasted Reflections. And there's a quick link to take a look at the book, whether that's in the signed soft cover format or the e-book, or most recently released the audio book that I narrated. And so, you can enjoy You Don't Need This Book and I'd love to hear what you think.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Ben, thanks for coming on the show again. Looking forward to continuing the relationship and seeing you out there on the field as well. And I appreciate you coming on the show.

Ben McDougal: Hey, may the best of your today's be the worst of your tomorrows and keep building.

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You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship in the Connected Era

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jim Euchner, author of the new book Lean Startup in Large Organizations. Jim and I talk about the underlying fears companies have when trying to change and implement innovation initiatives. And what they can do to initiate and build Lean Startup methodologies to embrace change and stay competitive. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Jim Euchner, Author of Lean Startup in Large Organizations

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Jim Euchner. He's an honorary professor at Aston Business School in the UK. Editor in chief of Research Technology Management Journal. Former VP of Global Innovation at Goodyear. And he is author of a new book called Lean Startup in Large Organizations. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Euchner: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to dig in. You've been involved in Lean Startup for a long time, specifically around this idea of corporate innovation, which I think when you hear Lean Startup, at least in the early days, you didn't think about it from a corporate perspective.

I found, like when I talk to establish enterprises and you bring up the word or the term lean startup, a lot of times it has baggage around it. They dismiss it or think about it as you know that startup term. How do you define or talk about Lean Startup?

Jim Euchner: I think about Lean Startup, in its basics the same way that the founders of it did. You know, Eric Ries and Steve Blank and so forth. I think it's a way of taking a high-risk venture from a very high-risk place to a place where it's something that you can bet on. It's a way of iterating your way toward a great customer value proposition and a good business model.

The challenge in large corporations is that each of the practices of Lean Startups in its own way, sort of sparks an antibody inside the corporation. So Lean Learning Loops. They are a wonderful way of learning. Business experiments is another term for it. But if you have a lot of experiments and pivots, it can seem very chaotic to people inside the corporate setting.

So, you have to do what I would call an impedance match between the corporate setting and the Lean Startup practices. The central Lean Startup practices are still very valid. But the way they're managed, there are some complimentary practices that make them effective inside large organizations.

Brian Ardinger: You bring up a great point. It really doesn't matter if you're building something brand new in an uncertain environment as a startup or within a corporate environment. The same principles can be used to navigate that unknown or that uncertainty.

In your book you talk a lot about, I guess, the common fears that leaders and organizations have when it comes to change or Lean Startup and that. Can you talk through and outline some of the key fears that you talk about in the book?

Jim Euchner: Yeah, sure. So, the first one is this sort of fear of chaos. That the innovation program will just be out of control. And one way that's effective in doing that is to create what I would call an Innovation Stage Gate. So the practices of Lean Startup are still practiced, but they're inside a discovery phase, a business model development phase, and an incubation phase.

That gives people inside corporations the chance to learn, to comment, to review at very critical stages. So, review the customer value proposition and the customer value. Review the business model. And very importantly, the effects that the business model will have on the core business. And then before scaling, understand how it works in the real market.

The first fear is the fear of chaos. The second fear is a fear that the innovation team will disrupt the operations of the core. Everybody they're working with has a day job. Right. And you're asking them to take exceptions, to move quickly, to do stuff that you know, that really on the financial side, doesn't matter a lot in the near term. But it still has an urgency. And it may be outside the bounds of their usual experience. So, it's risky. Helping people manage that is important as well.

Brian Ardinger: This fear of distraction. I hear it all the time. We don't have time to innovate. You know, we don't have time to try these new things and that. What are some of the ways that you can get people to overcome that mindset?

Jim Euchner: It's a combination of things. And I really think that each company has to look at their own culture in order to decide. One thing that people do is, and it's the first thing to do, is just try to get corporate air cover. Someone says it's okay to do it. And that gives a permission. And then if they don't do it, it gives us permission also to escalate.

The problem with that is escalation wears thin very quickly. And you make more enemies than you can afford to make. One of the things that I found most effective in my experience is to bring the functions along as you go, but to have no expectations of them in the early stage, other than that, they'll just provide the support you need to get something done.

So, if I'm talking to procurement, I don't want them to do a full RFP. I don't want them to take a risk with their own career on something, but I need their help in putting together a contract that will meet our requirements. And if I have to sign off on that or I have to provide them some resources in order to cover the cost that that will have to them, then I'll do that.

The very important one is legal liability. Legal liability is very important to protect the core corporation. But when you're doing experiments, they can seem awfully risky. In that instance, you may need to raise the issues, explore the issues, understand the implications, and then co-sign off. They may still say, I don't like that liability risk, you say, okay. But we'll take it in this one instance. And I'll take that on myself.

The core thing is just to not keep people in the dark because you're afraid they'll jump in. And to give them at the stage of incubation, really a chance to rash through all those issues. So, if you're a non-standard IT organization, what are you going to do about the final product? And you can thrash that out in incubation, not during the early experiments. And the same kind of thing happens across the company in sales and procurement and everything.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I find that if you have this almost side project mentality, it's like, oh, we're doing a side project to test or iterate or try something. And then by the time it gets to the point where you need to escalate it, a lot of times you have additional evidence or insights that you can then get that buy in from the higher ups.

Jim Euchner: And that's exactly what you're trying to do. You're trying to get the evidence and the learning so that it's worth it for people to do whatever they have to do to support you. But in the early stages, if you don't share where your portfolio is, what you're doing, and then people are just going to get nervous that you're doing something that's going to cause them problems.

A specific example is if you're in IT and someone's building something in a non-standard environment, they're afraid you're going to get up to incubation, you're going to launch it. And then they're going to be stuck supporting it. They won't even know what it is. Right. So, they want to control it early so that, that doesn't happen. You have to give them assurance that there will be a time. You have to adhere to it. You'll really address their issues fully when you're in that incubation phase.

Brian Ardinger: Let's continue on with some of the other fears that stop or inhibit folks from implementing some of this Lean Startup methodology.

Jim Euchner: The next ones really play out more at the executive level. One of them is just a very direct concern. This business will succeed by cannibalizing the core business. So, it'll look like your business is doing great, but your business is actually only succeeding because it's hurting the core business.

So, in that instance, there's just a fear of an overall net loss. And to deal with that when you're developing a business model, and when you're incubating, it's very important to sort of keep track of what is happening to the core business as the result of what you're doing, as well as keeping a PNL for the, for the basic business itself. So that's one. Another is a concern that this whole process will lead you into a place that the company can't even recognize.

We were in the document management business at Pitney Bowes. We worked to move into document management in healthcare. Eventually once we had a client and we were ready to go forward people saying what are we doing in healthcare? You know, how did we ever get here? And so, there's an identity issue. And the best way to deal with that is for the executives to just be very clear about the opportunity spaces they're willing to bet in.

And then go beyond that. If they're interested in health care, for example, spend some time there. Learn about the customers. Learn about the industry. Learn about the other players. There's always the risk that the new business, as it grows, will bleed resources from the core. And they'll have to somehow make it up. The result of that oftentimes is that you under invest in the new business and people implicitly or directly try to smother it.

The best solution to that is to separate the growing business from the core business. But to have very clear and negotiated relationships between the two entities. Which is something Govindarajan and Trimble proposed. Those are some of the fears. They're real fears. They have legitimate basis. They're also emotional and that's why I call them fears. But given that you can start to address them.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's interesting also because if you think about an organization and what they've effectively done is figured out a business model that works. And their job is to optimize and execute on that particular business model. So, they hire for that. They measure for that. They do all that.

And so, you have what is an effect, a group of people that are not designed or not there to explore and try new things. And so you have that constant tension, I think. Talk a little bit about incremental innovation. And how does that play in with some of the launching of these new, bigger business models or ideas in Lean Startup.

Jim Euchner: I actually think of innovation, what I would call type one innovation. Which is innovation inside the core business model. And there's type two innovation, which is creating a new model and new revenue stream. And I make that distinction because you can have really breakthrough innovation of type one.

Intel is in the same basic business it's been in for years. But it does some of the most fantastic technological innovation way ahead of the game. Still, if it's successful, it's not challenging the core business. If you do it well, it will move through the pipeline. If you're in the, at Proctor and gamble and you develop a new consumer product that fits within their basic brand, it'll flow through whether it's a radical product or line extension. A new business on the other hand, challenges the assumptions. And this is just what you were pointing out.

It challenges basic assumptions about why we're here. What we're doing. What matters. How I get compensated and so forth. That kind of innovation really has to be managed differently. So, I think that the type one innovation can be managed with less executive attention. Much more integrated with the core. The type two innovation oftentimes requires entirely different structures.

Brian Ardinger: And I think that's important because I think oftentimes, we hear the word innovation and we immediately jump to one end of the spectrum or the other and having that common definition. And how do you look at this particular innovation? Is it type one innovation? Or is it something that we're trying to build a brand-new business around? You know, I think having those conversations early and often probably help set the groundwork for executing on it as well.

Jim Euchner: Absolutely. And I think there are multiple stages where you do that. So, you do it at the beginning and you know where you're trying to understand what am I about? When you get to the stage of incubation, you have to make a decision. Do I incubate this as part of a business or independently?

There are techniques for deciding what you need to do and engaging the stakeholders in doing that. And then when you want to scale it. It's a decision again. Am I going to integrate this with one of my businesses? Am I going to take parts of existing businesses and combine them with the new to create a new venture?

Am I going to acquire something to grow the business? Or am I just going to grow it organically? These are big decisions. So, you need to ask those questions repeatedly. And I've seen all three, even at Goodyear, all three types of scaling methods.

Brian Ardinger: So, a lot of this comes down to culture, it seems. How do you start building that culture of innovation inside established companies?

Jim Euchner: It depends on what you're trying to do. And of course, as it always does. Sometimes people are already in the midst of an innovation program, and they're not satisfied with how fast it's moving. Right. And it may be an incremental or an employee innovation. They're maybe not satisfied with the scale of the ideas that are coming out.

Then I would say, you'll look back. You try to say, why. Why are people not collaborating? Why are people not proposing good idea? Why are people turning away ideas that are good ideas, but maybe outside the norm? And you just keep asking why until you get to that cultural reality which is what we believe about what should happen or shouldn't happen.

Edgar Schein, who's really the father of corporate culture, he made people aware that it exists and that it matters. He would say that at the core, there are a set of beliefs about who we are, what we do, what's acceptable. And even if we were trying to change and we articulate a whole different way of operating, those beliefs won't change just because we've articulated different view. They're like the compiled wisdom about what works for a career inside a company.

If you want to change those, you have to do it very deliberately. First, you have to identify the ones that have leveraged. And then you have to deliberately put in place counter behaviors and supports that help people and remind people to exercise those behaviors.

If you do that and it succeeds, eventually the culture will change. But you won't change the culture by telling people, by training people that this is now the culture. By espousing a different set of values. It just, it happens over time, in a very deliberate way, I think.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, you got to walk the walk. Another big topic that I always run into and people in the audience ask us about all the time is how do you incentivize corporate innovation efforts. And how do you measure them? How do you know if you're on the right track?

Jim Euchner: I have maybe a different view than a lot of people do about the incentives part of the question. I think people who are in the field of innovation want to innovate. And the biggest incentive you can give them is a place where that can happen.

If you don't give them the elements that are necessary for that, they're going to be gone. Or they're going to be frustrated and they're not going to be productive. If they feel like I'm working someplace where I can make a difference. I can make something happen. That's more important than, you know the bonus structure or something like that.

The metrics I think, need to be there for metrics, both of how the project's going and how the organization's supporting it. I think the best metrics for big innovation is at a portfolio level. You look at a lot of ideas. You test them. Only a few may come to the value proposition stage. Fewer go into incubation. And you measure on aggregate are we moving stuff through the pipeline. Are some things getting into incubation? Are we launching any of those businesses? Are they hitting profitability targets?

But it's over a period of years, not a particular year. You get rewarded in year eight for work you did three years ago, oftentimes. Right. And they're at a portfolio level. So you're not saying this team got an award and that didn't because it's the overall portfolio that's driving success. And we use something called 10- 3 -1 at Goodyear. Over a period of five years, we wanted to put 10 businesses into incubation. We wanted to decide to scale three of them. And then we had a revenue target for what we wanted to get out of the aggregate.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's very similar to, I guess, venture capital-based model. Betting on a portfolio. Knowing that some are probably going to fail. Others may return some capital, but you'll have those outliers that eventually returned the fund and then some.

Jim Euchner: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's the way executives have to think. A difference between inside a corporation and outside is, a venture capitalist is playing with his or her own money and they can make a bet to win inside a corporation. There's often a reluctance to make a big bet to win. Because you got to explain it to the street and it might not succeed, or it might take longer than you expect to succeed.

And so, there's this asymmetry between those two worlds, even if they're about the same objective. Amazon doesn't worry about that. Tesla doesn't worry about that. They've got credibility and cash and they can make it happen. If you're a company that's been around a hundred years and people are watching quarterly earnings growth, and they're worried about dividends, it's a harder play. But I think in the new world, executives are going to have to get good at betting to win, not betting to minimize the, the downside loss.

Brian Ardinger: You've been in this space for a number of years. Have led it in corporations. And now on the outside as well. What are some of the biggest changes that you've seen over the years?

Jim Euchner: The first big change I saw was really you would call it design. That's really part now of the practice is a part of the lean startup. But it's being customer centered in the way you're doing innovation. So, identifying a space that you're interested in. And then spending real time. So, some places borrow tools. I have in my career from the field of anthropology to really understand customers from the world that they're in. And to innovate into their needs instead of from your technologies or from your idea of what customers want.

I think that's been a pretty profound change. I think a lot of companies do customer centered approaches without trying to short circuit the deep anthropology or the deep ethnography. And I think they miss a lot. They'll get good stuff to make a better product, but not necessarily the kind of insight that will let them create a new business.

So that's a big one. Another is Agile. And iterative and business experiments. The idea that you don't need to do this stuff in the lab. You need to do the stuff in the world, right. You need to get out of the building. And that's difficult for a lot of R and D people especially. Getting out in the world and framing business experiments the same way you might frame a technical experiment and learning from them. And pivoting from there.

I think that's a big shift. And then I think people are now thinking more about business models and about the difficulty of them than they ever have before. That's a still, I think, a very difficult subject. I think there are systematic ways of developing business models. But it's dicier. But I think those three things focusing on the customer. Focusing on an iterative experimental prototyping way. And worrying fairly early about well what's the right business model. Not just what's the easy business model.

Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. Are there any trends or anything in the future that you're excited about?

Jim Euchner: I'm very bullish on innovation right now. And part of the reason for that is there are so many technologies that are growing so fast. Every time you have a new technology, it opens up the design space. It opens up the way you can address customer needs. And sometimes in a really fundamental way. AI is particularly interesting to me. I think there are some archetypes of companies that are born with that perspective in mind.

And they're productive and efficient and fast and customer centered. And I think they're a new model. I really think there is a new template for what the corporation of the future are going to look like. And innovation is much more at the center of it. Amazon is a wonderful... there are a lot of detractors of the way it optimizes the workforce, and so forth. But I think the way it focuses on customers and what you experience every day, if you use it. The way it experiments to create new businesses.

In particular, the way it uses its assets to enter a new realm and just pivots all over the place. So, who would have thought, you know, a book seller is going to be a movie producer and a cloud services producer, a logistics provider on the scale as FedEx and UPS. It's amazing. I think companies are going to need to really learn from that example. And it's a, I don't know they'll all be grown from the ground up or whether some companies will be able to adapt. But I'm excited to see which, what the innovation companies of the future look like.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. We are living in accelerated times, and it'll be interesting to see where it all ends up. I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your knowledge and that. The book is called Lean Startup in Large Organizations. If people want to connect with you and or find out more about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Jim Euchner: They can go to Leanstartup.biz. So that's a website and, or they can connect with me on LinkedIn.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Jim Euchner, I really appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation today. We're looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future and then have a great day.

Jim Euchner: Thank you. Very nice to talk with you.

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLS

You can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.

For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.

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Lean Startup in Large Organizations: Overcoming Resistance to Innovation

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Allison Weil, Senior Associate at Hyde Park Venture Partners. Allison and I talk about some of the latest trends in venture capital in places outside the Valley. And we dig into some of the tips and insights for new founders.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Allison Weil, Hyde Park Venture Partners

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. We have Allison Weil; she is a Senior Associate at Hyde Park Venture Partners. Welcome to the show, Allison.

Allison Weil: Thanks for having me. Really excited to chat today.

Brian Ardinger: Have you, we've had a chance to work together a little bit. You were panelists at the IO 2020 summit and helped look at a lot of the startups that we had at the startup showcase. And you and I were on an investor panel for the Pipeline Entrepreneurs about a month ago. I realized we hadn't had a chance to sit down and talk more in depth about the life and times of venture capital here in the Midwest. So, I figured I'd have you on the show. How about you tell the audience about Hyde Park Venture Partners and what do you focus on?

Allison Weil: Yeah, absolutely. So, Hyde Park Venture Partners, we are a seed through Series A, venture capital fund, based in Chicago, that exclusively invests in companies in what we call the mid-continent. And we define that as the traditional Midwest plus Toronto and Atlanta. Most of our investments are in software companies. A lot of it is SaaS, but we're also investors in marketplaces and tech enabled-services and companies that we invest in can be anything from free product, you know, with a great team, all the way through a few million dollars in annual-recurring revenue.

Brian Ardinger: The new world that we're living in, the post COVID world, let's take a step back and over the last year, what have you seen? That's changed the dynamics of venture capital in this now post COVID world.

Allison Weil: Yeah. Great question. So, I think, you know, the first and most obvious thing is the shift to entirely remote investment. You know, prior to this past year, we really actually emphasize meeting our founders in person.

You know, you learn a lot when you meet someone in person that you can't over Zoom call, you know, or a phone call. And I think that's still true for the record. So, it's not a thing that I think is going to stay permanently. I'm not on a perma-Zoom bandwagon, but you know, obviously that was kind of the first thing is a shift to fully remote investing and investing without meeting our founders in-person at all.

The thing that, that enabled that's been different particularly in the Midwest, is it means that investors and founders don't have to be in the same city or location, which makes it easier for coastal investors to spend time with interesting companies in the Midwest. And so that's been a trend that we've certainly noticed a little bit.

The other thing that we've noticed, frankly is that investment hasn't slowed down at all. It might've slowed down for a little bit in March and April is everybody, ourselves included, took some time to like orient ourselves to this new world, like personal life, professional. Like what in the world is going on right now? Let's figure it out. What's going on with our portfolio companies, get everything stabilized.

But past that, investment's been going on rapidly and at high valuations, and the markets are shockingly hot. All of that is what I'm seeing, which is certainly, probably not what I would have anticipated, if you would have asked me, you know, the second or third week of March, like what's this next year going to look like.

Brian Ardinger: A number of questions come to mind after what you just talked about, one being, so you mentioned investing remotely. What have you learned about how you can read a person or what specifically is different about investing remotely versus in person and how have you adapted?

Allison Weil: What investing remotely requires you to do is spend a little bit more time just on having those conversations with folks over Zoom, right? So typically, you'd invest in person. You might go to lunch with somebody or dinner, you know, in the city, and just build that rapport. Right? Early-stage investment report is actually pretty important because you're building your relationship that can last a really long time.

And so, you don't want to cut that time short. You still want to spend lots of time with the entrepreneur. You still want to get to know them and you can do that over Zoom. Right? Like you can still learn about like who are you as a person? How do you lead a team? You know, how do you interact with people who are different than you? How do you make decisions and all of these things that are still important, you can pick it up via Zoom.

There is some stuff that you can't. I think some of like the interpersonal chemistry is a little bit different over Zoom versus, you know, in-person, but you still have to spend all of that kind of time getting to know folks. It just might be more sporadic than the concentration that you had, you know, when you traveled to their city.

Brian Ardinger: Have you seen founders address it differently or different ways that they've come across better in that particular environment?

Allison Weil: I rely more on quality decks than perhaps I did in the past. So, in that first conversation, if it was in-person, it's a little bit easier to interject and kind of read the room a little bit more and people over Zoom, the really good founders, are doing that over Zoom effectively. So, they are using a deck, but they're using it as a prop rather than as the center of their conversation. Right.

They're still reading my facial expressions. They're still figuring out, you know, if I have a question that needs to get asked or where to pause and where to keep going and things like that. And they're effectively guiding the conversation much more so. I prefer those kinds of intro conversations to be more like a conversation than a pitch.

Like I prefer folks to tell me their story, rather than walk me through their pitch deck. And so the best founders are using Zoom and are using their pitch deck to enable them to really tell their story, versus tell the story of their pitch deck. Those are two different things.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing more cold outreach than that? Or are you still seeing the same deal flow from other founders recommending or other venture partners and that recommending?

Allison Weil: I'm probably seeing marginally more cold outreach right now, but I don't think that that's a function of Zoom. I think that's a function of just some other things that we, as a funder doing and I'm doing. So, most of our deal flow is definitely still coming from referrals, from our funds, or for me doing outreach.

I certainly do a significant amount of cold outreach to new folks that I find a mountain ecosystem. I welcome cold outreach. Anybody who's listening to this, who wants to send me a note, who is a founder in the Midwest and is like, I would like to talk to Hyde Park, like don't wait, send me an email.

I love cold outreach. I'm not scary, please do it because that's something that I welcome. Frankly, I think is a great quality in a founder because it shows a boldness that's going to be pretty important.

Brian Ardinger: The other thing you kind of mentioned at the initial question, you see a lot of talk about founders and companies moving from Silicon Valley to other cities like Miami or Austin or Denver, Chicago. What are you seeing on that front? And are you seeing a shift from the tech hubs to the other places in the world?

Allison Weil: You know, I find that that's probably a little bit more buzz than reality. You know, I'm actually originally from South Florida. And so, I see all the leg VCs moving to Miami talk and it's December and January. And like, that's a lovely time to move to Miami. Talk to me again in August and I'll welcome them to Chicago. Because I'm sure that's when the shift will come out of here.

I think that there is a shift, but it's a marginal one. You know, I think at the end of the day, most folks are still, you know, for better or for worse, going to concentrate in the same place as they've been concentrating.

And it might be a 5 or 10% movement out of Silicon Valley or New York or something like that. And now 5%, 5 or 10% is, is certainly not nothing that that is, you know, potentially a pretty significant shift into other ecosystems and can make a pretty outsized impact. I don't think 90% of folks are leaving Silicon Valley or will anytime.

Brian Ardinger: Are founders talking about it as far as like, they're no longer thinking, well, I've got to actually go out and find money in Silicon Valley or open up an office out there. Are they actively saying, well, it's now on the radar that I don't have to be there?

Allison Weil: The founders that I talk to in particular are the ones that never were planning to like initially open an office in Silicon Valley. And our whole thesis is that you don't need to be in Silicon Valley to start your company and to build your company. And you can look at our portfolio and see that there are great companies in it that don't have any office presence out in Silicon Valley.

They might raise funds out there, but that doesn't mean that you need to have a significant office presence out there and you need to find talent out there. I just fundamentally don't think that that's a requirement. I think it's even less of a requirement now. And I think what we are seeing is founders having an increase in their distributed teams and really building more fully, remotely and open to that because obviously, you know, everything is really fully remote right now.

But I think in the long-term, I am on the more skeptical side about the long-term impact there. Right. I am someone who believes that people will return to offices, kind of, as soon as it makes sense to. The network effects of being in an office and being around your coworkers are too great.

And that It's a lot easier to get promoted when you're in front of your boss every single day, all the time, then it is, you know, remotely as much as you kind of wish it. And then as we returned to do those kinds of environments, that's where I think the world's going to go.

Brian Ardinger: You do a lot of outreach to find startups in that. What's your favorite way to find or research startups? How do you go about analyzing the deck of opportunities out there?

Allison Weil: So, I find opportunities, a lot of accelerators, incubators, pitch days, et cetera. You know, anytime a startup does something like that, there are VCs trolling it, looking for the interesting ones. So, I certainly do that a lot.

I like local media, a fair amount, actually. Particularly because I tend to be sourcing in secondary markets. The kind folks at Startland News, for example, are going to report on a startup pretty early on once it starts getting momentum. And I certainly read that all the time to make sure I'm on the pulse of what's going on in the Western Midwest.

As far as analyzing a deck, the first read of a deck of like, whether it's interesting or not. You know, my first question of anybody is who are you and how did you get there? So I look, I go straight to the team page and I'm like, what's going on here? Why is this a good team for this kind of company? And a good team can come in a bunch of different forms, but that's kind of a core question that I want to answer.

And then it's, is this an interesting problem? Is it an interesting solution? And I don't mean what I'm about to say next in a bad way, which is then my bar is actually pretty low after that, right? Like, which is, I am optimizing on I want to talk to every potentially great founder in the Midwest and every potentially great company in the Midwest.

That can be hard to tell off of like a website or a deck or a LinkedIn page or whatever it is. And so I want to have that conversation. And so, anytime I'm on, there's like a spark of anything, I'm going to reach out and I'm going to want to have that conversation.

And I'm going to want to spend 30 minutes and see, Hey, you know, is this something I want to spend a little bit of time on? Because the upside for me is significantly higher than the downside would be.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's switch gears and talk about what are some of the trends that you're seeing? What are some of the industries that you're looking at? What are some of the changes that you're excited about?

Allison Weil: We're generalist investors. So, I take a look at everything across the spectrum. I look at healthcare, I look at FinTech. I look at e-commerce, I look at drones, you know, whatever. Whatever it is, I look at it, which is awesome in a lot of different ways, but it makes it really hard for a question like that.

But I think the trends that I am watching in particular, I think the biggest one is e-commerce infrastructure. You know, obviously over the course of the past year, e-commerce as a share of the total, like retail has increased dramatically. It's something like, you know, 10 years of progress over two months is what happened in March and April. And so, we at Hyde Park have a number of investments in e-commerce infrastructure.

We just made another one announced yesterday in Blackheart, which is a Toronto-based company, that's enabling try before you buy, which we're really excited about. So that's kind of one area. The other area that gets me excited in the FinTech space is around financial tools for folks that like don't have financial tools that really work for them.

The banking system, as it stands, kind of works for a subset of the population, but it doesn't really work for lots of people or businesses. And so, anytime I see a FinTech company that is working towards building a better financial reality for the broader population, that's something that gets my attention.

And then the third thing that I get excited about are picks and shovels for industries that are still emerging. And things that kind of get my attention there, e-sports is a big one, you know, fast growing, you know, already a pretty significant share of users is the big one.

Another one is drones, as I mentioned. So, like not so much a drone company, but a company that will enable drones to do deliveries. And a company that will enable the data to get off of drones, more easily. Stuff like that could be an area that I would get pretty excited about and same goes for other kinds of autonomous vehicles or whatnot.

And so that's the sort of third area that I love spending time in. And then I get really excited about. There's more, but those are three highlights.

Brian Ardinger: And the last topic I want to talk about is, so you've been on both sides of the table. You've been a founder with a startup. Now you're on the other side as a venture partner. What's some of the best and worst startup advice that you've seen from both sides of the table that you'd recommend to our founders out there that are listening.

Allison Weil: The best advice that I will tell you from my own failed startup is make sure that you are building a team around you that you can excel with. Right? You need to make sure that everybody around the table, at the earliest stages, when it's two, three, four people, every one of those people needs to be working in sync and effectively and at their best and entirely committed. Without that, it makes everything else really, really, really hard.

And so, like really making sure that you've got a great team and that you're working with a great team that you want to be in the trenches with is probably the biggest piece of advice I would give from my time as a founder.

And from my time as an investor, the other side of it is, and like, there's part of me that really hates this advice. There's part of me that like, doesn't want to say this, but it's also really true. Make sure you know how to tell your story. At the end of the day, you only fundamentally get like 30 minutes with me most of the time or, or other venture capitalists.

In that 30 minutes, I need to be able to answer a number of different questions about you and what you're building. I need to understand it well enough to share it and share what's exciting about it with the rest of my team if I find something interesting. And it can be hard to do that if you're not effectively sharing your story with me. Who are you? How did you come to this problem? Why are you passionate about it? What are you doing to solve it? You know, what's the status of the business and how's it going?

And like quality answers to all of those in a short period of time can be difficult but practice it and really make sure that you're doing it. Because the last thing that I want as a venture partner is to have a great business in front of me that's just not good at like, making it clear that it's great. Because that's heartbreaking to me.

Like there's something here, but if I can't see it and I can't like wrap my hands around it. Then I'm not going to be able to kind of keep digging in or it's going to be really difficult for me to keep digging in.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's an important point that being able to, the founder being able to translate that to the venture partner, so that they can translate that to their other partners and get feedback and that. I think that's the hardest thing. Oftentimes you see a nugget there, but if you can't clearly then re-communicate that back or transfer that enthusiasm the same way the founder does, it oftentimes dies right there.

Allison Weil: Completely or the founders will get stuck on like one part of their business. Actually, one of the biggest problems I see sometimes in a pitch is folks that are solving big, hairy, important problems, get stuck on the big hearing important problem, but they forget that like, I know that it's a big carry important problem.

Like I live in the world too. And like, I see that the financial inclusion one is a great example. Like I see that this is a huge problem, and I don't want to spend 20 minutes, of my 30 minutes on it. I want to spend one minute of my 30 minutes on like the piece that's like, here's there's this big problem. And then I want to spend 29 minutes on, and this is how we're going to solve it so much better than anybody else that you talked to about it.

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Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, Allison, it's great to talk to you and get some insight what's going on. I'd love to have you back on the show and tell us in the future, what you're seeing and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or about Hyde Park Venture Partners, what's the best way to do that.

Allison Weil: Our website is www.hydeparkvp.com. And my email is Allison, ALLISON@HydeParkVP.com. And I'm always happy to chat. And as I said earlier, love cold outreach. So please, please do it.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well thank you for being on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your thoughts. Looking forward to continuing the conversation and have a great week ahead.

Allison Weil: Thank you. And you as well.

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Originally published February, 2021

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Jason and I discuss what it takes to innovate during a crisis and how United continues to adapt to evolving customer, employee, and market changes. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcription of Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United Airlines

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jason Birnbaum. He is a SVP of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Welcome to the show, Jason,

Jason Birnbaum: It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Jason, I am excited to have you on the show. You are in an industry that is in the midst of disruption as we all are. But I think the travel industry is even facing more dilemmas. So, I wanted to get somebody on who's focused on innovation in this trying times, to see what it's like to be in the trenches in this world. So, tell us a little bit about what's your role at United and how it deals with it.

Jason Birnbaum: I really am responsible for all of the technology associated with our employees, but also all the customer experiences that you would have at the airport, on board, really anywhere that you're physically involved with United Airlines.

So, if you like the kiosks or you don't like the kiosk, that's what we do. All the signage in the airports moving you around. That's all part of my team as well. So wide scope, but lots of fun.

Brian Ardinger: And when we had a chance to be introduced, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because the United Airlines takes a broad approach to innovation. You know, I think a lot of companies focus on innovation and think about it from a, like a product perspective only, but you seem to focused on more holistic. Talk a little bit about how you perceive innovation and what goes into making those particular types of decisions.

Jason Birnbaum: First of all, when you think about the airlines, our product is the airline. And so our product is the employees. And the product is the experience, and so for us, almost every part of it, including people that actually work and fix the airplanes, people that actually, you know, load the bags and all of those are so intimately connected to the whole experience, that we have to think of innovation in a broad way.

And so, when we started thinking about it, we realized that we needed to enable our employees to deliver great service. And connect that to the way our customers traveled. So, a lot of our innovation was really employee focused so that they could deliver great service.

And when you start thinking about it in that thread, it really opened the door for a lot of really, really amazing innovation, whether it's freeing up employees, so they can actually spend time with customers. Right. Or it's just giving them information or data to anticipate your need, or if it's making that technician able to get the plane going faster. So, you are not late, like all of that fits together. And the way we think about innovation,

Brian Ardinger: I imagine you get bombarded with new ideas and challenges and problems that are coming from their employees or from your customer set saying, hey, fix this or make this better. What's the process to go about looking at, across the ideas, and doing something about them.

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a great question. There is a lot and we do get bombarded. You know, I, I think one of the pivots we made as an organization was moving from thinking of more of a traditional information technology organization that really took orders, got prioritization lists, to thinking of the whole group as a really like a product development organization.

We had a much stronger opinion as to what the next steps were going to be. And really partnered and drove an agenda. And so, for us, the transformation was really about, I have a team of product designers, design thinking experts, people who help us build those roadmaps, whether the product owners are on our team or in some other place, and really lay out, not necessarily a prioritization process, but what's the road map.

And then from there we've moved very quickly to how do we prototype, test the theory, move quickly, move in small pieces, to get to the product. We've tried to get away from two-year projects. Four-year projects. You know, we try to think about how do I solve a problem, get something going, start it and empower.

And I think when a big company, especially companies have been around for a long time, you know, they built a lot of control mechanisms and we've really worked to strip those out and say, hey, if you're the decision maker, if you're in the front, You've got the product. Make the change, see if it works, and let's move forward from there.

Now that's certainly for the customer experience and for efficiency, obviously, you know, when I think about things like safety and those things, obviously all those controls are really important, and we take those very seriously. But there's a lot of places where experimentation can really lead to innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk about some examples of where you've deployed technology and some of the changes that you've made over the years to make the experience better for employees and customers?

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah, no, we have so many great examples. I'll hit two things. The first thing we realized, and this was a few years ago is none of our employees sit behind a desk. They, none of them have seats. Yet we built all these applications and all these tools for them on a PC. And so, we started to say, well, how do we un-tether is the word we used, our employees from these desks.

And so, we rolled out one of the first innovations was creating and building a mobile ecosystem for our employees. Where, whether you're a gate agent, a technician, you're on the ramp, pilot, flight attendant, you had a mobile device and that mobile device, first and foremost, gave you tools to do your job. So, you could board a plane, help a passenger, take an order for a drink. That was like the base case.

Then we said, well we've got this mobile ecosystem, what else can we do? And the second thing we said was how do we give people data to anticipate what they're going to need to do? So now I've got this delivery mechanism. How do I say all right, this passenger is getting ready to reach a milestone on their mileage. So why don't we thank them? Or this passenger has had a couple of bad flights. Take care when you're on this flight. So, we started giving that information.

And then lastly, and this is where the real excitement came in. We connected everybody via just communications and chat functionality. We created a product, we call it Easy Chat, that connects everybody involved with the flight. The pilots, flight attendants, the gate agents, the catering company, everybody together in one chat space so that everyone knows what's going on.

And that's been an amazing advantage for our employees. And it's really created the capability to deliver unbelievable customer service. I was thinking about it. I got a note from a customer, and they said, you know, my father was 80. He was traveling on the plane and he got on the plane. He realized he left his bag in the lobby, like at the gate.

Right. And in the old days, like that would have been a myriad of phone calls and radio calls and running back and forth. And so, the flight attendant just typed on the chat. Hey, does anyone see a bag out there? And the gate agent got it and brought it back on. And it was just a much better experience. And they were really happy for that level of customer service.

And I think the other thing we're really excited about right now, I mean, there's many, but the other thing we're really excited about is, we call it Agent On Demand. In a COVID time, one of the things we're seeing is that one people don't necessarily want to be face-to-face as, as much.

And two, with a lot of different staffing shortages and things going on right now. And just general air travel, you know, there can be problems. Getting a hold of somebody at an airport can be tricky and there can be lines and it can take some time.

And so, we said, well, what if we could scale it by creating just a way that I can hit a QR code or walk up to a kiosk. Push a button and speak to an agent who maybe isn't at the airport, you're at, maybe they're in another airport or some other location, but maybe they aren't as busy as the ones happening right now, where there's a storm or a disruption.

And we started really simply and about eight months ago, and we started testing it. Caught on fire. We've gotten it in all of our hubs and another handful of stations and we're continuing to roll it out. But customers really love it because it marries the technology and the ease of using your phone or kiosk with an actual person.

And so, they do get the personal touch, but they do it in a way that the technology really supports. So, it's been a big win for us. And it's certainly something we're going to see more of that kind of innovation.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned customers playing a role in that innovation process and giving you feedback in that. How do you go about rolling out a new product like the agent on demand? Did you do that across everything all at once? Or how did you go about testing and building out that particular example?

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah, look, we go out and we test, like, we send our people out to the airports and our designers and our researchers. We'll prototype something. We'll grab our employees and our customers and just test it out. And we use our airports as labs almost. Living labs. And we learn from it. We're very transparent about what we're doing. So, we will tell our customers, Hey, we're trying a new process or a new technology. We'd love to get your feedback on it.

We stood up a kiosk for Agent on Demand. We sort of had some of our people standing around. We said would you like to try this? What do you think? Did it work? Did it not work? And it just grows from there. So, it's a pretty organic process, but it's certainly not going into a conference room for six months. Emerging with the answer, the answer. What we find out is we're not very good at solutioning in that bubble.

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Brian Ardinger: Well, you mentioned COVID. Obviously, that's affecting all of us, but it's affecting the travel industry quite a bit. What have you seen over the last 18 months of how fast your processes have had to change or what's the impact been on both the industry and how United reacts to it?

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. It's been, obviously for our business, the most disruptive event in the history of the airline industry. And I think travel in general. So, and a tragedy in terms of the loss of human life and really the whole problems and pain that it's caused.

But for us, our mission was to keep the airline alive, because we believe that it was critical to provide support for the doctors that needed to get to places. It's a lifeline for our economy. And so, the mission was really clear. And it, but it did force a tremendous amount of innovation, really fast, whether it's ever-changing requirements to travel both domestically and in other countries and how we empower our employees to know that in real time. We had to build a lot of tools and connections to that.

We've had to become very smart on the big innovations, partnering with Abbott and other providers on how to get testing done, whether your international travel or employee testing. We had to set up clinics in our airport to do both vaccination and testing.

As you know, we recently just today announced that we are going to have all of our employees vaccinated over the next few months. And you know, that involved us setting up a system where people could upload their vaccine cards and then use that information to give it to the various systems that people schedule their work. So, we know who is and who isn't and where they are and et cetera.

And so, there's been a lot of innovation in that space, but it's been a very proud moment for me of the team and the way they've risen to the occasion. And the way they thought differently to really keep the whole industry alive.

Brian Ardinger: You know, a lot of times we think about, you know, all the negative effects of COVID and, and that, but I've seen not only with United, but other companies, like rising to the occasion and understanding that innovation is now not just something that we think about in the future, but something we have to do on a regular basis. Are there any particular surprises or positive effects that have come out because of the crisis?

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. In the beginning of the pandemic, you know, we had to go through like everyone else, some tough cuts, reprioritize. And, and we got through it all. And we said, we've still got an airline to run. And so, we got together and said, you know what we need, we coined a phrase, and we call it, we need to get scrappy.

So, we actually created a little manifesto around it. And at the heart of it was, it said, you know, we got to start thinking like a small business. We got to start thinking about how to move forward. It's going to be about, everyone's got to do more, do different roles, take chances. You know, maybe you don't do testing. When are you going to do testing or maybe you don't know how to do this kind of coding, but you're going to do this kind of coding, because we just don't have a lot of people in time that we were used to.

And I think that really caught on and the idea that we can find scrappy answers to tough problems is something now that's really sort of taken over the whole company. And we talk a lot about how do we get scrappy, which is code for how do we find simple, fast solutions to tough problems, and then scale them from there.

And I think when I talk to my team, especially, they're like, we don't want to go back. We don't want to go back to the bureaucracy. We don't want to go back to the way it was before. We want to stay scrappy. And I think that's going to be a legacy coming out of this, that we're going to continue.

Brian Ardinger: Well, that's a great segue for the trends that you're seeing, both in the travel industry and within United. What, what are you most excited about in moving into the future and maybe what are you most worried about or scared about?

Jason Birnbaum: Well, first of all, I'm excited people are traveling again. Which is fantastic. I think there's a lot of work and thought happening right now about the travel experience. And I think we are going to be on the front end right now of a lot of innovation and travel in terms of how do we take the friction out of it. Is biometrics a big part of that?

And we're working with the TSA. But make that a much more seamless opportunity. There's a lot more personalization that can happen. Whether it's food on board or different kinds of services. So, I, I'm really excited that as we emerged from the pandemic that I think we're going to be able to really continue to make the experience better.

And I know some people love it and some people don't, but I think there's going to be a lot of new things that come out using technology to make it just a much better experience for folks. And connect your whole journey, beyond just the airline, but maybe to the hotel and to the rental car as well. And how do we think of it in a more seamless way?

So, I think that's what I'm excited about. I think I'm excited as we continue to just the new business models that we're thinking about in terms of, you know, are we more Uber. You know, use your mobile app more, we've got the best mobile app in the industry. How do we continue to make that experience better? So, there's a bunch of stuff I'm really excited about.

Nervous, I think again, you know, it's a tough industry. There is innovation happening there is disruption happening. So, I think we have to continue to get better. We have to continue to prove to our customers that we have the best product. And whether that's through a great operation and getting you there on time. Whether it's through the technology that we offer. Whether it's through the great employees and the customer service and their anticipation of your needs through the journey. Like we just got to win on all those fronts.

And so, the thing that I'm worried about is complacency as we come out of this. And as people come back that we cannot forget that we've got to continue to up our game because there's always folks out there that will come and try to compete with us.

Brian Ardinger: And it's so important that culture aspect, like you said, you know, rallying around the new, new, and the new next and that culture and that. Are there particular things you have looked at as far as being effective at implementing that culture of innovation?

Jason Birnbaum: The culture of innovation, I think it's for us, it's about having our innovators or our technology team or people that are driving change as close as possible to the frontline and to the employee and to the customer. If you get bright, creative, motivated people, with people that actually are serving our customers or our customers, they will naturally find a million great ideas.

And then our job is to help support them in the creation and the development of those things. And so for me, the culture comes from actually having our folks right there with them shoulder to shoulder, out in the operations, out on the planes.

And I think my message to anybody is the fewer people between the user and the customer and the person who's building it, the better off you are. Because you lose some, every step, you lose something in that translation. And you don't end up with the kind of innovation that you want to get to

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Brian Ardinger: Jason, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing what you're seeing in the trenches. Again, I appreciate the time. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about what the United Airlines is doing in this space, where should they go?

Jason Birnbaum: I mean, certainly you can hit me up on Twitter @Jason_ UAL or my LinkedIn profile is available. I've got links to some articles on some of the things that we've done in more detail. So happy to take any comments there and questions, and any feedback you might have on what's happening out there as your audience is out and starts traveling again.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Jason, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, look forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck. And where are you going to travel next?

Jason Birnbaum: We just got back. We were just in Mexico. We were just in California, and now I'm setting my sights on trying to figure out how to get to Europe when that opens up. And so, I love to travel, and I've got a long list of places I need to get to.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I hope to see you on the road, and I appreciate your time again. Thank you very much.

Jason Birnbaum: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

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Originally published September, 2021.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Elliott Parker, CEO of High Alpha Innovation. Elliott and I discuss why innovation is getting harder and what to do about it, as well as new models for tackling transformative and disruptive innovation.

Interview Transcript with Elliott Parker, CEO of High Alpha Innovation

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of inside outside innovation. I'm your host, Brian Arbinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With us this week is Elliott Parker. He is the co-founder of High Alpha and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, which is an Indianapolis based corporate venture studio, which partners with organizations to create and launch new ventures. Welcome Elliott to the show.

Elliott Parker: Hey Brian, happy to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here because you and I have crossed paths a couple of different times with the stuff that you've been doing in startup and corporate innovation work outside the core tech hubs. And the stuff that High Alpha has been doing. Over the last decade we've seen a lot of changes and innovation, and a lot of innovation has actually come to the work of innovation. Can you give us a brief history of an evolution of High Alpha and this venture studio model?

Elliott Parker: Yes. So High Alpha is a venture studio based in Indianapolis. What that means is we're a combination of a build function with a source of capital. Think about it as a venture capital fund that builds companies. I'll make that small correction to the intro. I'm not a co-founder of High Alpha. I actually joined about three years ago. High Alpha has been around for five years. It was started by some friends of mine five years ago. They'd been working together in a company called Exact Target, that our managing partner at High Alpha, Scott Dorsey, founded about 20 years ago.

They exited Exact Target in 2014 and decided they enjoyed starting companies. And so wanted to go build a studio. Investors said you ought to raise a fund to sit alongside the studio. And this idea of a venture studio came together. That combination of build plus a source of funding. So, our team at High Alpha has gotten better and better at launching new companies over the last five years.

This year 2020 has been kind of a breakout year in many ways for us, despite all the challenges. In the end we'll get, the count 10 or 12 companies launched in 2020, but we will soon launch company number 29 out of the studio. And we've invested out of the fund in another 30 plus companies. All B2B SaaS focused. And along the way, as we've gotten better at this systematic building of new ventures, we've had a lot of scale enterprises, big companies come to us, and say, can you help us do what you're doing in your venture studio?

I mean, there's been a lot of interest just recently in the venture studio model with big companies, either starting their own form of a venture studio or looking to partner with an external studio. And initially that was not part of our approach. We were focused on building startups inside of High Alpha, but it makes a lot of sense to team up with scaled enterprises to do this.

Because although it may take us longer together to build a new startup than it might if we were doing this on our own. You know, we can launch a new startup every four weeks, but Hey, if we can build a startup with a bigco as a co-investor with us and potentially as a first customer or distribution partner for that startup, that startups got to a much better chance of getting to scale and getting to scale quickly.

So, we're very, very excited about teaming up with big companies to do this. So that's the LSD, the impetus behind High Alpha Innovation, which we created earlier this year to focus specifically on applying this venture studio model with partners like university corporation.

Brian Ardinger: So, we've seen this happen where corporations are looking at the startup realm and saying, Hey, how can we move as fast and how can we launch things that we're seeing out in the market that these disruptors and that, why do you think it's so difficult for corporations to get that innovation mojo and to the launch new starts in the way that the startup marketplace actually is doing it?

Elliott Parker: For a number of reasons. I think Clay Christiansen hit the nail on the head with the Innovator's Dilemma at 23 years ago now. And I spent many years working at Clay's consulting firm InnoSight where we tried to help companies overcome this challenge. And one of the things I learned is that to pursue innovation requires a certain set of processes and governance, the right incentives, the access to the right kind of talent.

And when you're building a scaled enterprise, you're not optimizing that scaled enterprise for learning and innovation. You're optimizing that scaled enterprise for execution. So you develop a certain set of governance, talent, process, and incentives that help you execute to do so at scale. And to take that operating model and say, now we're going to try and deploy this model to go learn. It doesn't work.

On the other hand, what we're seeing out in the market is that startups are designed to learn, to innovate, to move very, very quickly and to disrupt. And so what we try to do in the venture studio models, we've created an out of the box off the shelf collection of the right governance process, incentives, and talent that we can deploy to drive systematic innovation and to do so quickly. So, in scaled enterprises. It's very hard to take what they're so good at and to redirect it for something that they're not optimized for.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk through maybe an example of how a company would come to you and say, Hey, we want to innovate. We have some ideas that are on the shelf, but really don't know how to get that done. Why would they come to High Alpha? And how would you walk them through that process of launching or building something?

Elliott Parker: Yeah, most of the companies he's come to us because they are dissatisfied. To some degree with the quality and quantity of their innovation output. Things are moving too slowly or it's not disruptive or transformative enough. It's no wonder, right? Innovation is getting harder inside of big companies for a number of reasons.

And there are certain types of innovation that are both necessary for big companies to pursue. And at the same time, impossible or near impossible to pursue internally, it's a real challenge. And so most of the time, the companies that come to us are saying, Hey, We need to move faster. We need to get some points on the board, some meaningful points on the board.

And over the course of three or four months, we can launch a new venture backable startup and put some meaningful points on the board that way. So, it's the way to do something pretty rapidly at a cost that in many cases is lower than what it costs to do internally or certainly many times lower even than it would cost to go build a proof of concept with an existing startup. It's sometimes easier just to go start a new company.

Brian Ardinger: So, in that particular like functionality, how does it actually work? A corporation comes to you and say, Hey, we need some innovation. They come to you, you work with your team to iterate and build and execute on some of these new models and MVPs, so to speak. And then at that end of it, do they get that company or is it a company that starts as a startup that they work with? Walk us through that.

Elliott Parker: Good question. So, we deploy the same model that we use in our core venture studio. And in our venture studio, we found it very important to rely on what we call foreseen functions to make us develop the confidence that we need to make informed launch decisions and to get things built.

That's how we launch a new company at a regular cadence so that when big companies come to us, we can start at many different points in the process. We might start at the beginning of say, big company comes to us and says, Hey, there's this kind of strategic area we need to go learn more about, or we need to build some optionality within.

And we will start with a blank whiteboard and use our process to generate a few hundred business ideas in the first few weeks, and then take those ideas through an evaluation process that culminates in a sprint week where we take the top ideas and try to compress the first six months of a startup into a week. And at the end of that week, make a good, informed go, no go launch decision.

In other cases, companies are coming to us with something they've already, maybe already prototyped, or they've developed internally. It's just not moving fast enough. They feel like it's got opportunity outside the business and we can take those things and put them through the later stages of our process around through a sprint design, a best-case business model hypothesis, go launch that business, and then support it post-launch to make sure it's got the best chance of succeeding that it possibly can get.

Brian Ardinger: So, this makes a lot of sense for innovations that are H3 or on the farther out horizon, that it's harder for an existing company to execute on. What's your take on innovation that's maybe closer to the core? Should companies be looking again to outsource that and, or build a competency within their own walls to do the H1, H2 type of innovation?

Elliott Parker: Yeah. No. In most cases, companies should be doing that internally and they're well equipped to do it. There are a lot of things about our process that can be applied to that. But in most cases that tactic of setting up an innovation team, walling off that innovation team from the core to a degree, and letting them go pursue opportunities is the right thing to do. To go pursue kind of core adjacent H1, H2 types of innovation.

What we say when we're going through a process with a big company to do this, you know, 80% of the ideas that we'll generate along the way are things that they should be doing internally on their own. Or maybe in partnership with a startup that's already doing it out in the market. It's only 20% that fit this model of let's go build an external startup to solve this problem.

And that applies when there is a high degree of ambiguity about how to proceed, meaning learning is more important than execution in the beginning. And then secondly, it's likely that the end solution is going to conflict or challenge the core business in some way. Meaning it might be competitive, but it might not even be that.

It might just be that the new business is going to reprioritize stakeholders differently, for example, or apply a subscription model rather than a per unit pricing model, things like that, where if that's the case, oftentimes a startup is actually better equipped to win in that environment than the established company is. So, let's go build a startup together that can compete and win, but also leverage the strength of the bigco to do it.

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Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's less likely that the large corporations’ antibodies will have a chance to kill the new thing before it has a chance to get growing and moving forward.

Elliott Parker: Yeah. And in particular that's part of what we come in with skin in the game, right? The idea of setting up an external company with shared equity and bringing in other investors and things like this is for some companies, this is a new idea and many wonder, well, why would we give up equity? Or why would we share in that?

And a couple of reasons which one you just hit on by having professional company builders in a venture studio, having a small stake in that business with you that thing's more likely to succeed. It's less likely to be pulled back into the core prematurely. It's more likely to succeed because as a venture studio, this is what we do all day is build companies and support them. We're going to do everything we can to make sure that company succeeds. It's a way to safeguard it. It's also a way to ensure that that thing's going to just move faster than it would otherwise we are less reliant on the incentives, talent, governance, processes of the core.

Brian Ardinger: So, the other thing we talk a lot about with corporate innovators, the pushback is, well, why don't we just go out and invest in a venture fund? Or why don't we go out and just buy companies that build that innovation void? What are your thoughts on pluses and minuses to those particular models?

Elliott Parker: That can be a great approach, too. I think about all these things as complimentary tools in the toolkit. It depends on what a company needs to achieve. The way we think about it is you've got to ask yourself two questions, how much innovation do we need and how soon do we need it?

If you need a lot of innovation, meaning you've got to take some drastic steps to reinvent your core business model, to transform the company and you need to do it yesterday. Well, you're probably spending more of your time focused on acquisitions as a way to drive innovation.

On the other hand, if you've got more time, you don't need that innovation immediately. You've got some time to learn and to build some optionality going out and making investments, striking partnerships, building new can be great things to do. I think about CVC. As a powerful tool, primarily for learning about what's cutting edge in a certain space.

So a lot of times companies start a corporate venture fund with the goal that, Hey, we're going to go make investments. These investments are then going to blow back into our core operations in some way, transform our company. That rarely turns out to be true, but what can be very effective about the CVC approach is we can go out and learn about what startups are doing in that space. The CVC team should be closely plugged into the strategy team to be able to say here things that we're seeing on the horizon that will impact our business. We need to be thinking about.

With external building option through a venture studio, that the goal is a little bit different. It is learning, but it's also, I think, more about building optionality. So what I mean by that is if you're operating in an environment of uncertain futures where we don't know what's going to happen, the best way to maximize returns and minimize risk is to go run as many experiments as you can at the lowest possible cost per experiment. Building startups.

In fact, this is how we do that in business. That's how we run cheap experiments, you know, cheap in quotation marks. It's relatively cheap to go build a startup rather than centralize that innovation and have it fail inside your core business.

So oftentimes companies will look at a landscape or a set of opportunities out in the market. There isn't anyone doing exactly what we would like to see exist in the market. There is no startup to go invest in that's doing it quite right. So, what we say is, well, let's go build it. Let's go build it from scratch. Let's custom design it to fit the need and let's assume that other people have that same problem. And there's a big opportunity there that we can go explore it.

Brian Ardinger: So, can you give us any, either case studies or examples of companies that are doing it well, or things that you've seen that have worked in this new model?

Elliott Parker: A lot of interest just recently companies, either building their own venture studios or are looking to partner with others. I think we're at the front end in fact of a wave of this. When High Alpha was launched five years ago, I don't think anybody was using the term venture studio.

In some ways this wasn't entirely a new model. Ideal lab has been doing a version of this for 20 years and so on, but it was a new term. And now at last count there were over 600 venture studios or startup studios around the world. There's been an explosion.

And I think we'll see the same thing in big companies. You know, 15 years ago, a lot of companies were starting to play with the idea of the corporate venture capital thumb. Now nearly every large company has one. I we're at the front end of a similar wave with venture studios.

Some companies are starting to deploy it 15 years from now. Most will either have a venture studio or be partnering with an outside venture studio to do it. We've teamed up with a number of companies over the last year to either help them build a venture studio capability inside their company and or in the process, go build some startups.

And so there are some examples of companies doing that well. Recently, just in the last few months we launched a company for example, with Silicon Valley Bank, called Bolster. That's a good example of how this model works, where we were looking for opportunities to innovate in the ecosystem in which Silicon Valley Bank operates. Identified a need for early-stage venture backed startups, where they need access to fractional talent, both at the senior leadership level or at the board level, and decided to build in essence, came up with an idea for a marketplace that would combine people willing to provide that level of support and the startups that need it.

Brought in a leadership team to run that business. They refined the business model, made it much, much better. And then brought in other investors. Union square ventures and Costanoa ventures to co-invest alongside High Alpha and Silicon Valley Bank in launching that business. And they've been up and running now for several months and are doing a fantastic job.

Brian Ardinger: Are you finding more or different types of industries that are better suited for this, or are you seeing it across the board? Everything from consumer-packaged goods to energy or what are you seeing from that perspective?

Elliott Parker: I think it applies across the board. We certainly are seeing more interest from industries that are feeling the crunch right now of disruption, loss of interest in financial services, insurance, healthcare at the moment as one would expect. But no, I think the approach applies in any industry and certainly where companies are looking at, you know, every company right now, everybody's got a digital transformation strategy right now.

Software is really eating the world as Marc Andreessen said years ago. And every company, no matter what business they're in needs to get more proficient and better at deploying software to do the things that they do. This is a way to put some points on the board, and to drive some of that digital transformation and innovation fairly quickly.

Brian Ardinger: And the last core topic I want to talk about is, and we kind of briefly talked about this in general, but how do you see COVID as a game changer? Has it helped or hindered companies to get the fact that disruption is coming? And what are your thoughts around the trends that Covid is going to bring and how that's going to impact the industries?

Elliott Parker: I think COVID has been amazing at revealing weaknesses and accelerating some of the trends that were already in place. And so, if you think about over the last several decades, collectively what we've done inside our scaled enterprises, we've focused on making those companies ever more efficient. People running around with Six Sigma black belts and all these things, which is good to a point. But I think has been overdone.

And Clay Christianson before he passed away, was working on this idea of the capitalist dilemma. This idea that this focus on return on invested capital is the primary metric by which we measure the success of big companies has led us to make some really bad decisions along the way. I think he was onto something big.

We focus so much on making big companies really hyper efficient in their operations. Think about the way that we run supply chains. Very little redundancy or resilience and supply chains. And then COVID comes along and reveals the fragility that this efficiency causes.

And I think there's now a look, a lot of companies are looking at how do we become more resilient rather than efficient. We need to accept a certain level of capital inefficiency to make sure the company sticks around for the long-term. And this is the role that innovation plays.

Over the last few decades so much innovation has been focused on driving capital efficiency. This is absolutely the wrong objective, that results in a heavy emphasis on core innovation. I think a better focus for innovation is resilience. And if we can direct some of our innovation efforts to that goal, recognize that it's going to be a little bit capital inefficient by design, we'll have better outcomes and companies that can endure not only endure challenges like COVID, but come out of them stronger than they were before.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Elliott, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and telling us about what's going on and some of the trends that you're seeing. If people want to find out more about yourself or about High Alpha, what's the best way to do that?

Elliott Parker: So, we're at a HighAlphaInno.com. That's highalphaINNO. People can find me on Twitter. I'm occasionally putting out some tweets @ERParker. It's probably the easiest way to get ahold of me.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Elliott, thanks again for being on the show and looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Elliott Parker: Appreciate it. Thanks Brian.

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Originally published in January, 2021.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with April Rinne, author of Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. April and I talk about what it takes to thrive in a world of constant change and uncertainty and explore some of the skills and tactics you can use to better prepare yourself and your organization for a world of flux.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with April Rinne, Author of Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is April Rinne. She is the author of a new book coming out called Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. Welcome April.

April Rinne: Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm super excited to have you on the show. When I got a preview copy of the book, I started going through it and it's like, ah, this resonates with everything that I've been talking about, and our audience has been talking about. This whole idea that the world is changing. I think we fundamentally or theoretically understood that 18 months ago, but now every individual has felt that we are in flux.

So, this is an amazing book. You start off the book with a gut-wrenching story that gives you immediate insights into what's required to live in a world of flux. And I don't know if you can share that story and maybe its impact on your life and your career and how you got to this place.

April Rinne: Yeah. Sure. So, it's interesting. Just picking up on what you just said, which is I was actually working on this book for a long time. Long before the pandemic or lockdown. I like to say that the book itself was about three years in the actual writing, but it was more than three decades or close to three decades in the making. And that relates to my earlier story.

But it is kind of interesting where over the last 12 to 18 months, people are like, oh, world in flux, you know, welcome to my life. But I'm sort of looking at this saying, Hm, there was a lot of flux before and there's going to be a lot more moving forward.

But my entry into a world in flux or what I, what I sometimes call like my baptism. But my baptism into flux happened more than 25 years ago. I was in college, and I was a junior and I was studying overseas, and I'd had this kind of life expanding mind expanding year.

And just as it was wrapping up, I received a phone call and basically at age 20, both my parents were killed in a car accident. And that was that moment where whatever you think your future is going to be, whatever you think the world has in store for you. However you think the world works, like it just all changed.

You know, I would not have imagined back then that I would write a book about this sense of like, what do you do when you just can't control constant change. But that's when the seed was really planted.

Brian Ardinger: Whether it's the loss of a parent or a major job change or a pandemic. A lot of folks are in that space right now. Like they're trying to understand what I thought the world was going to be is different. So, I think the book helps outline some of the things you can think about or some different ways to approach it. So, tell me a little bit about the book and why a person should pick it up.

April Rinne: Yeah, absolutely. And you really nailed it. That sense of like, that was my version, but everyone has today I believe their own version. And what's key is the future is not more certainty. It's not more stability. The future is more uncertainty, more change, more flop, and are we really ready for it? And so the crux of the book is exactly that.

That's sense of, you know, on the whole humans, we tend to love change that we opt into. You know, exactly. But we tend to really, really struggle with change we don't. The unexpected change. The change that waylays you. The change that is unwelcome. And yet that's the world we live in today. There's more, not less of that.

And so, the fundamental premise of Flux the book is that in a world in constant change, we need to radically reshape our relationship to change from the inside out. I can add. In order to have a healthy and productive outlook. So, we're good at a slice of change, but we're really, really bad at a big chunk of it.

This is where I get excited because also individually, this plays out. Organizationally, this plays out. And societally this plays out. So that's the basic punchline of the book, but the eight superpowers are the kind of how to.

Brian Ardinger: Talk us through, like, how did you come up with those eight and maybe an overview of those.

April Rinne: Sure. This is one of my favorite framing devices, which is, you know, Flux is both a noun and a verb. As a noun it means constant change. I think we all kinda get that. It's also a verb and as a verb, it means to learn to become fluid.

So, the way I like to put it as the world is in flux, and we need to learn how to flux. To become fluid in our relating to all kinds of change. And so, I'll be really candid. The Eight Flux Superpowers evolved through a lot of hard work and thinking and post-its and reframing and structuring, you know, all of that.

And I will admit now, you know, the book's been written for some time. It's obviously in the publication process. I haven't yet found the ninth one. So, I feel pretty good about that right now.

But in short, the eight flux super powers, the first one is run slower. The second is see what's invisible. The third is get lost. The fourth is start with trust. The fifth is know you're enough. The sixth is create your portfolio career. The seventh is be all the more human and the eighth, one of the more provocative, although they're all provocative I think in some way. The eighth is let go of the future.

Each of those kind of relates to different themes, you know, run slower is a lot about anxiety and burnout and so forth. And start with trust is obviously about trust. And letting go of the future is not about giving up or failing. It's actually about our relationship to control. So there's a lot more packed in each of those, but that's a quick summary.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The first one you start off with in the book is run slower. And I think a lot of people, when you talk about innovation, and you see what's out there in the press and that everybody talks about acceleration and speed of change and that. And the obvious antidote people think of is well, I've got to run faster. I've got to go, go faster and that. So, it's kind of a contradictory approach to that. So, talk about what you mean by run slower and let's unpack that a little bit.

April Rinne: Landing on this particular superpower did result from a range of sources. But one of which was my many, many years as an advisor to companies, many of them were startups. But also, governments and think tanks and nonprofits. Organizations of all stripes, shades, colors, flavors, whatever, and their quest to innovate. And recognizing that change breeds innovation, but innovation itself, that simply means something new.

It's not inherently good or bad. And I'm looking at this going, how do we innovate well. How do we innovate responsibly? How do we innovate in ways where we don't end up having blind spots and regretting some portion of what we did later on, et cetera. And I think we see a lot of that today, right? So back to the superpower.

Run slower. The way I define it is in a world of ever faster pace of change, societally. The way we thrive is to slow our own pace. So again, you nailed it where I like to say the pace of change has never been as fast as it is today. And yet it is likely to never again, be this slow. Right. Now just let that sink in for a moment.

Right. It's sort of exciting and it's kind of terrifying as well. And I kept looking around as a futurist, as an adviser, as a human being and saying, okay, society tells us that when the pace of change increases, we need to run faster. We need to keep up. And if we know that tomorrow, there's going to be more change than today and next week there's going to be more change than this week.

And next year, next decade. Draw that out as far as you wish. If you know today that every single day for the rest of your life, your mandate from society is to run faster. That does not look like a future in which I want to live.

And organizationally run ever faster. Wait a minute. You're gonna miss the very best decisions you could make. You're going to miss the very best opportunities. At an extreme, I say, you know, when we run ever faster, we run the risk of running right past life.

This is not about doing nothing. This is not about being lazy. This is about slowing your own pace so that it's sustainable. So that in fact, you can be in touch if you will, with yourself, as opposed to just chasing after the next thing that you're supposed to do or the torrent of the info flow.

But also, it helps us make wiser decisions. You want to slow down enough so that you can see, recognize, identify, and focus on the things that really matter. So there are lots of different angles there, but I find this is a lot with people, both struggling with anxiety and burn out. But also, when it comes to innovation, how do we make the best decisions? How do we make sure that we've covered our scope of possibility and so forth?

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's, it's very much like that professional athlete. When they get into that flow, they talk about this idea of everything slows down. And they can understand the environment that they're in. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about.

I've also seen the reverse where people go slow because everything's moving so fast, they fail take any action. Or they're scared of being able to keep up, so they don't make decisions and things like that. So, it's, it's that balance almost of like you said, running. But running at a pace that finished the marathon.

April Rinne: Very much so. Exactly. I did not say sit still. I did not say do nothing. I said, run, but run slower. Run at a pace that you can sustain over time. Run at a pace that allows you to take in and take stock of everything that's going on. That really matters. And it's funny that you bring up athletes. There's a section in the book there, too.

Everything from, you know, what's the right time to make a judgment or a decision. To also one of my favorite quotes. And it relates to athletes, but also children. And I think adults too. Certainly, for me. This notion that there is a kind of growth that comes only with rest. Just think about that. We assume that growth has to happen through motion and action.

Think about how kids grow. Think about how athletes strengthen their muscles. It doesn't happen only when they're in motion. It happens when they're at rest.

Brian Ardinger: Another area that you tackle is this idea of getting out of your own way and expanding your vision. And you're talking about expanding your peripheral vision, specifically. Being able to look at industries and ideas in that in different ways and, and expanding your business. So talk a little bit about that particular superpower

April Rinne: Yeah. So that's the second one. See what's invisible, which says that, you know, when life feels uncertain or blurry, we need to shift our focus from what's visible to what's invisible. And actually, there are all kinds of overlaps with innovation here.

The classic cases that, in which again, what does society tell us? You need to focus on your goal straight ahead. And I'm not saying that having goals isn't important and that you shouldn't know how to focus. I'm saying that actually, where is typically most of the action. It's right in front of you or so we think. Where's the actual and really new ideas.

The really game changing opportunities. They tend to be on the periphery. They tend to be outside the mainstream. They may end up going mainstream some years later. And then you feel like, oh, I was a really early, you know, joiner to that particular company or idea or whatever. And so expanding our peripheral vision to see more and to see what is again by society standards, quote unquote, invisible.

Now just one quick example here. I've spent much of the past decade in the space called the sharing economy. You know, access over ownership and this, that, and the other. It's a classic case in which entrepreneurs and innovators in the sharing economy saw what was invisible to traditional companies. So, case in point, you know, a car sits parked on average 23 hours a day, 95% of the time. We've come to believe that's kind of normal.

How in the world that got normalized to have a 95 or 96% inefficient asset is beyond me? But you look at this and you go, this doesn't make sense. Yet society tells us everyone needs a car, not just one car. You need many cars. This is how we're going to build the car. Yeah. And so, you have, car sharing entrepreneurs who look at this and say, no, we actually see value in that parked car.

We actually see value in that parking space. We're going to flip the lens and actually put these assets into shared use, thereby helping people save money. Helping reduce CO2 emissions. Freeing up space. I mean, the list goes on and on. But that's a really interesting case. Society tells us to focus on what's visible, which is the cost of a car. GDP. Things with dollars and cents, but there was idling capacity, or what we could think of is invisible value in streets and cities around the world.

When you learn how to see that there's a whole new kind of ecosystem, not just for transportation, but far beyond, that can be developed. So that's an example on, again, the innovation kind of organizational end of things. But it definitely applies in terms of individuals and our own blind spots. And where we think we should be looking versus where the action, the action that really matters where it happens to be.

Brian Ardinger: And it doesn't even have to be within your industry. I think some of the low hanging fruit for a lot of corporations would be just to look at other industries and see what they're doing when it comes to customer relationships or whatever.

And it may not be in your wheelhouse, or your industry may not be doing it, but it may be something that's very easy to adapt or adopt into your industry. And all you have to do is just quite frankly, look at a different set of competitors out there and see what happens.

April Rinne: I love that you bring this up, Brian, because I joked with you in advance. Like ironically, what people often call me is a kind of insider outsider in terms of my advisory work. And I have lost count. I'll share this with you. It's so fun because I have lost count of the number of times I've been contacted by an organization and they've said, we want you to do what you did for that company, for our company. But they're in a domain, I'm like, I think you have the wrong person.

I began by saying that, because it was like an energy company that first asked me this. And I was like, I'm not an energy expert. They were like, we know. But, you know, just enough about us to actually be able to bring in insights from financial services, from the sharing economy. You know, and the point was not that I had their solution, but then I could bring a perspective and a set of examples and a set of ideas and a set of principles, et cetera, et cetera.

That were wildly different than what they were used to hearing. That ended up kind of churning their engines, if you will, around creativity, curiosity, and innovation. So you're absolutely right. And one of the things not just to see what's invisible, but all of the eight superpowers in the entire book. What I love is that I'm not asking you to have any kind of technology or money or whatever that you don't already possess. It's a matter of knowing where to look.

So, see what's invisible. All that you need to learn how to see what's invisible. It's right there in front of you. It requires you actually though, to be able to take the step, to reach out and say, I need to learn more about what I don't know. I need to go somewhere that again, society tells me that's outside my domain. That's outside my sector. It's actually really, really relevant for what you're doing.

Brian Ardinger: Well, that power of exploration. I think people underestimate it. And a lot of times it's not even exploring for a specific solution. It's just literally the act of exploring leads you to collisions of ideas and thoughts that lead you to that epiphany of whatever the thing is you're working on.

April Rinne: And just a quick side note there, which is it's a little bit meta, but I like to bring it up because I think the moment in time, we're all living in right now. Whether it's reopening, whether it's, you know, what parts of normal are going to continue to exist. You know, is there a such a thing as normal?

What, what do you want to leave behind in the last year? And what of the ways in which you changed; do you want to take forward. In this world of like we're in not just massive flux, but the sense of we don't have the solution. We're figuring them out. And we're in the early stages of what I believe will be a massive phase of exploration, iteration, experimentation, improvement, but like, we're not even close to those solutions right now.

And I think especially like hybrid work. I focused on the future of work for years. Anyone who tells me they figured out hybrid work. I'm like, no, you haven't. And the more you believe you have, the more, I'm less inclined to actually listen to what you're saying.

But if we can all kind of wrap our arms around the fact that we don't know, and we won't know, and to start that process exactly as you've said of, of exploring and experimenting and iterating, we're going to be just fine. But it's the people who want to control and know right now, what it's going to look like. Those are the ones that I worry about where we're going to find ourselves in some trouble.

Brian Ardinger: And that's probably a good segue to the last superpower I kind of want to talk about. It's this idea of creating your portfolio. I think maybe you and I are similar from that perspective that, you know, every couple of years, it's a new hat we throw on. I talk about it from the standpoint of everybody's going to have a slash in their name. So, I'm a, you know, entrepreneurial slash podcast slash director of innovation slash whatever. And this idea that everyone in society is going to have this portfolio of experiences that they bring to the table. Talk a little bit about why that superpower is important and, and what I that means to you.

April Rinne: Yeah. So this does relate directly to the future of work. It's a bit unique in that regard and that a lot of the superpowers are more applicable personally, professionally, societally. Portfolio career is very much about you and your career.

And fundamentally what we're looking at is the career of the future looks much less like a career path, a kind of linear trajectory, and much more like a portfolio that you take responsibility for. And you curate. It gets super interesting. So, the whole like study work, retire, learn linear path that we, again, society told us this is how your professional life is likely to play out.

Not to say that that didn't work for some time, but what we're finding is it's broken at every node today. And a lot of people want something more, once something different. I think the great resignation that's going on right now is directly related to this. And so, the notion of a portfolio, it's not just acknowledging that the structure of the workforce is changing.

It is now possible to work in more ways than ever before. The role of technology, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also looking at, you know, our professional identity. How do you actually want to show up and bring your best to the world? And so the shift from the career path, which you can think of as a ladder to climb, you know, it's, it's that linear, like pursue, pursue, pursue.

So, what's happening is more and more people are not wanting to climb that ladder. More and more people are finding that ladder is teetering, if not broken. And it doesn't work for a whole lot of people. A portfolio, which again, just in the spirit of creativity, you'll hear them refer to it as a jungle gym, rather than a ladder.

You'll hear them refer to it as a bento box. If you know the Japanese delicacy. But we're looking, I've also heard of actually a flower that has different pedals and different ways of blossoming. But what we're looking at is basically a shift in how you view your professional development. Your professional identity. And your career overall.

And that it's not a path, but it is exactly, as you say, it is a curation of all of the things you care about. All of the things you can do. And if you will, your best work. So, from a portfolio perspective, there are lots of ways you can look at it. The two that I prefer, because I find most people gravitate towards one or the other. One is, you know, investors have a portfolio. It's a portfolio of their investments obviously, but why do they have a portfolio?

They have it to diversify, to diversify and to mitigate risk. Right? Then you've got an artist portfolio. Well, what's in his or her portfolio, their best work. So whichever of those, you like, it's more a matter of everything that you've ever done or want to do or skills you have paid or unpaid that can contribute to society. All of that's in your portfolio. And then it's up to you to mix and match and curate it into something that's unique, which is where we end up with hyphens.

Brian Ardinger: The other thing about the portfolio career concept is that as the world is accelerating and you know, new tools are becoming easier for the average Joe or Jane to pick up and that. The fact that, you know, what you learned in college is no longer relevant after four years because of the, you know, the world's changed. It's both easier and harder to jump into that next portfolio or learn and take advantage of that, whatever that is.

So if you look at it from an opportunistic perspective and it's like, as an opportunity, this pace of change is actually a really good thing. Because you're never really that far behind whatever the next thing is.

Because you can jump in and become a part of it and learn faster, because those tools are available to you as well. So because of that pace of change, not only you have to be good at it, but it also gives you an opportunity to be able to flex and change in ways you've never done it in the past.

April Rinne: Absolutely. And this is, it's actually a perfect entry or a segue into the portfolio career being much more aligned with and fit for a future of work in flux. And what's interesting, there's a quote, it's actually by Jerry Garcia of all people, but you know, the quote is don't be the best be the only. And the reason I like this is because in the future, being that single greatest expert on X, Y, Z, less and less likely, more and more difficult and less and less just not really aligned with reality.

It's going to be the combination of different skills in your portfolio that allow you to stand out. And the more things you have in your portfolio, the more you can mix and match. And to your point, the easier it becomes to add things, layer up or level up. Moving forward as new technologies come through, as new roles become design, become available, et cetera.

So it is that sense of this is how not just that you're ready and prepared for the future of work, but also the more robust your portfolio, the harder it is going to be to automate some portion of what you do. The easier it is to keep refreshing your portfolio over time, et cetera.

So, one thing I would add, because this comes up a lot where people are like, wait, are you just talking about kind of hustling and the gig economy and that sort of thing, when they hear the word portfolio and I'm always like, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely not.

Any full-time job you have is in your portfolio, any side hustle or gig you have is in your portfolio too. Any volunteer experience you have is in your portfolio. The thing I like to remind people is each and every one of us already has a portfolio today. The hook is most of us don't realize it and we're not necessarily being deliberate about curating it.

But that's where, like I say, you've already got again, you've got the pieces of your puzzle. It's a matter of putting them together in a different way. That's much more aligned with and ready for constant change.

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Brian Ardinger: We have plenty more superpowers to cover. I encourage people to pick up Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. If people want to find out more about you April or about the book, what's the best way to do that.

April Rinne: The best website for my book and all things flux is fluxmindset.com. And I also have my site, which is just more about me, aprilrinne.com, but head to Flux first and feel free to follow up with questions. I'm super easy to reach. My email is april@aprilriinne.com. I'm always happy to be in touch and thank you again for today.

Brian Ardinger: Well, April, thanks for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to having you as part of the community in the years to come, and I appreciate your time today.

April Rinne: Absolutely. Likewise, thank you, Brian.

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Originally published August, 2021

Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Robyn Bolton, Founder and Chief Navigator at Mile Zero. Robin and I talk about her experiences in the world of corporate innovation from her days at P&G to Innosight to today. And what are some of the stories and things that she's learned to help companies navigate the world of disruption.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Robyn Bolton, Chief Navigator at Mile Zero on Corporate Innovation and Disruption

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another guest. Today we have Robyn Bolton. She is the founder and chief navigator at Mile Zero. Welcome to the show, Robyn.

Robyn Bolton: [00:00:53] Thank you, Brian. Thrilled to be here.

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:55] Well, I'm excited to have you here for a number of different reasons. You've spent your career at the forefront of corporate innovation. So, you worked as an intrapreneur at P & G. I believe you were part of the team that launched the Swiffer and the, and the Swiffer Wet Jet. So, congrats on that. You were a partner at Innosight, Clayton Christensen's growth consulting firm, and now you're the founder of Mile Zero, which is an innovation consulting and coaching firm.

You have been around corporate innovation, both inside corporations, doing it, helping companies grow and innovate. And then outside as a consultant. Where have you seen the most progress from companies when it comes to the concept of innovation? What has happened over the last 10, 15 years that hopefully makes these companies interact and do innovation a little bit better.

Robyn Bolton: [00:01:40] There's actually that, as you can imagine, a tremendous amount of change that's happened over the past decades. So, when I started in innovation at P & G in the late nineties, innovation hadn't yet really become an industry. Entrepreneur was still synonymous with unemployed. I mean, it was just, it was before the first dot com bubble. Innovation was really just a company launching new products.

Now there's a whole industry around innovation. You have admittedly consultants like me. You have venture studios; you have incredible firms that do market research that do prototyping. You have corporate venture capital. There's this entire industry and ecosystem that has been built up to support companies who want to innovate.

The other thing is innovation has just become part of the corporate language. Right. I don't think you can tune into an analyst call. I don't think you can read an annual report without seeing, or hearing innovation over and over. So, it's just become part of the language and the lexicon of business. And what executives think about.

Brian Ardinger: [00:02:51] Do you think a lot of that is due to the part that the world itself is changing so much and disruption is happening at a faster pace? And then therefore companies have to adapt to this, or is there something?

Robyn Bolton: [00:03:04] I think it's very much that the world is changing at a faster pace. It is easier to start a company than it's ever been before. So, you're just seeing a lot more traction amongst startups. And you're seeing disruption as Clay Christiansen, coined the phrase. It’s happening more and more.

It used to be that it took decades and generations for disruption to happen. Now you just think about the last 10 years. And all of the industries that we've seen disrupted. So it's become less of, I would say this nice thing to do, and more of a business imperative.

Brian Ardinger: [00:03:39] One of the things that I'm seeing out there is even though it's becoming much more part of the lexicon and people are thinking about it and trying to do some things around it, it doesn't seem to be actually impacting corporations. There's still a lot of failure when it comes to innovation. Can you talk a little bit about why companies are still having struggles around innovation?

Robyn Bolton: [00:04:00] That's actually the question that has plagued me, and I think a lot of folks who work in innovation. Innovation has been around, been talked about being worked on for decades, but nothing's really changed when it comes to that success rate. And why is that?

It's a lot of things. Companies got big by doing the same thing over and over and doing it better and better. And innovation is the opposite of that. It's doing something you probably never done. And making mistakes and learning from them. So, it's just the complete opposite of what a company is.

I think there's also this very human element of companies are filled with human beings. And as human beings, we respond to incentives. And we respond to the things that benefit us. So just any rational human being in their role within a company is going to say, okay, what do I get paid to do? What do I get a bonus for?

Honestly, the tenure enrolls has so reduced it. I think it's now like two years. That why would I spend time and resources and political capital on something that if it works, it will come to fruition maybe in five years when I'm long gone. Versus spending all of those resources and political capital on something that will most likely yield results in six months, when I'll get the rewards for it. So, there's just all of these human elements that are a challenge.

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:35] I'm curious to hear your insights into what's changed over the last 18 months. COVID radically accelerated virtually everything, and probably you and I have been talking about disruption in that for a long time.

And now it seems when you go into a boardroom, the executives, get it more than a theory, but they actually understand like, oh yeah, my entire business may have to change overnight. How has that affected people's take on innovation. And what have you seen over the last, maybe 18 months?

Robyn Bolton: [00:06:03] I've really seen this just enlightenment and this opening up to the realities of innovation, because what makes innovation so hard is it requires change and change is uncomfortable and change is uncertain.

Well, COVID required to change literally overnight for a lot of companies. And suddenly leaders had an experience of change. And they experienced the learning process and they experienced all of these things that go along with innovation, and they realized they could do it. And that it wasn't as scary as they thought and that it was okay to make mistakes and then learn from them.

And so, all of these things that you experience when you're doing innovation that seem very scary and that you want to avoid, they suddenly did them and survived. And are thriving. In that way with every dark cloud has a silver lining. The silver lining of COVID is the companies now have a greater belief in their ability to innovate and to change and a greater openness to try new things.

Brian Ardinger: [00:07:14] Who's doing it well now. And have you seen a shift in how companies are embracing innovation and maybe the tactics that they're using?

Robyn Bolton: [00:07:23] There are a lot of companies who are doing it well. I think the common denominator there is that they are moving off of what I call the shiny objects. So that innovation theater, like let's do a hackathon. You know, let's have an accelerator.

Those things are all useful, but in isolation they don't tend to yield results. And companies are realizing that in order to achieve their innovation goals, they have to approach innovation, invest in it, the way they invest in really any other function or competitive advantage that they're building.

So, they have to take a much more thoughtful systematic approach. And that it requires change. So, one of the things I talked to a lot of my clients about is that innovation really is head, heart, guts. We absolutely in business, you have to understand things on a logical level. You know, you need data, you need reason and rationale, but we're human.

And so, we decide with our hearts and we justify with our heads. COVID brought this heart experience of, oh, now I know what it feels like. I understand how my motivations are affected all of these intangible things. And then it requires guts to act. Companies and leaders are now realizing they have to invest for the long-term and that they need to speak to the three parts of themselves as a leader in order to really get innovation to stick.

Brian Ardinger: [00:08:51] I think the other thing that I'm seeing at least is that they're seeing innovation, not as something that is done by a group, but it's more integrated part of the culture that has to be created because of the rapid changes. And my belief is that everybody's going to have to be flexing these particular muscles of resilience and adaptability.

And so how do you start teaching that in the context of what they're currently doing, but also allowing them to understand that those muscles are going to have to be used if the organization is going to go forward.

Robyn Bolton: [00:09:20] I think you're absolutely right. People tend to hear innovation and they think of new product. Right. And one of the first things I talk to my clients about is innovation is much more than that. And in a lot of ways, I think of innovation and especially the tools of innovation, really as a way to solve problems. So all of those skills that you use to create a new product, the skills of curiosity, empathy, questioning, rapid test, and learn.

You can apply all of those skills to any problem. So, these really aren't skills that just the innovators need. These are skills that really are needed throughout the organization, regardless of where someone sits that reframe of, oh, innovation is about a product to innovation is how we solve problems, has really also led to a deeper engagement and higher priority being put on them.

Brian Ardinger: [00:10:19] You have to allow any associate within the organization to be able to raise their hand and say, Hey, I've noticed a problem. Or, Hey, I think there's an opportunity here. What do I do about that? You know, do you have any recommendations or thoughts how the average employee within the company can begin to build that innovation muscle, especially when it may not be culturally appropriate yet within the entire organization?

Robyn Bolton: [00:10:40] Yeah. Sometimes it can be very scary to raise your hand and say, Hey, there's a problem over there. Especially if like a lot of us, you've heard, from your boss, you know, bring me solutions. Don't bring me problems. Well, you want to make sure you're bringing a solution to a problem, not a solution to just an annoyance or something.

There are several things employees can do to maybe lay the groundwork for a more welcoming reception to their idea. You know, one is to make sure that there actually is a problem to be solved. And it's a problem that a lot of folks have, if it's affecting the organization versus just something that's annoying them.

Second is to draw a clear link between solving the problem and something that's important to the company. Does the company have a strategic priority around the topic? Does the company have a KPI around the topic, make that direct link for why this should matter to the company?

And then third, approach it from your bosses’ point of view. I know a lot of folks go in and say, Hey, I have this great idea. And then they have no plan after that. Go in with a plan. Speak your boss's language. Speak to the KPIs and say, okay, here's what I want to do next. And so I have a plan in addition to the idea.

Brian Ardinger: [00:11:56] Yeah, I think that's so important. I think a lot of folks that we talk to have an idea and they want to throw it over the fence for someone else to execute on that idea. But oftentimes the person who has that idea has that unique insight has that domain expertise, is really the one that should probably at least early on take that idea to the next concept. Do some further research, do some testing. See if there's any evidence that they continue to put resources, dollars, time into whatever that next stage of the experiment might be.

And you mentioned KPI. So, I'd love to talk about the concept of metrics. How do you start measuring success and how do you know if you're making progress? Especially when you know that innovation 8 out of 10 shots are not going to go into the goal. And it takes 5 to 7 to 10 years for some of these things to actually bear fruit. So how do you start measuring success appropriately? And how do you know that you're making progress?

Robyn Bolton: [00:12:45] That's the $10 million question. The holy grail is what are the best metrics for innovation? The best metrics I think are the ones that help you measure progress to your goal. So, for example, I have one client that hasn't honestly in years, hasn't launched anything new. They just need to launch things, launch it.

So have metrics around the launch and they need to launch quickly. So how rapidly are they going through ideas? How rapidly are they moving through the innovation funnel? Now I have another client that has been launching a lot of stuff and nothing is sticking. Then don't measure how many launches you're doing because you know, that's a vanity metric.

So, it's really starting with why are we doing innovation? What are the ways to measure how we're progressing towards that goal, and use the first few months, year to set that baseline? A lot of people look to, oh, what's best practice. Oh, what's Apple doing? What's Google doing?

Well, you're not Apple. You're not Google. So don't benchmark yourself again. Benchmark against yourself or maybe your nearest competitors, and that's really kind of the comparison and the improvement that you want to see.

Brian Ardinger: [00:14:03] So the next topic I want to talk about is what trends are you seeing that excite you when it comes to innovation? What are some of the new things that are on the horizon that particularly are jazzing you up and jazzing your companies up.

Robyn Bolton: [00:14:15] It's a great question. I think there's, as always, a lot of excitement around technology and, you know, things like AI, VR, you know, more immersive experiences. And I think again, another silver lining of COVID is since none of us can travel or go anywhere, people have been experimenting with how do you bring experiences into the home?

And so, there's been a lot of leap forward in technology that would have maybe taken several years. So, I think there's a lot of excitement around technology and using that to enhance, augment, even fill in parts of the portfolio. There's also a lot of excitement around the talent that is suddenly out there.

I'm sure everyone's been reading about the great resignation and what that's doing is it's making amazing talent available to a lot of companies that would have had a much harder time attracting people. So, there's a lot of excitement there about bringing in different perspectives, bringing in talent that may not in the past, have been interested in coming to companies.

So, there's this excitement around the diversity of talent. And then finally is what makes me most excited, is this realization amongst executives and managers and employees of, Hey, we can change. We can do something different. We are resilient. We can be creative. We can be problem solvers. Just a complete mindset shift from kind of heads down, execute, to heads up. Think about the big picture, be creative, and solve problems.

Brian Ardinger: [00:15:58] Do you have any recommendations or thoughts around how to not fall back into that mindset of the way of the normal. You know, I know most people are still struggling with going back into the hybrid world. They're trying to hold onto the fact that, well, now we're going back to the office. Or we're now we're going back to what, the way it was before. Any recommendations or thoughts around how to not fall back into those old patterns?

Robyn Bolton: [00:16:18] The tyranny of now will always get ya. I think it's like sustaining any habit. I mean, essentially that's what people have built are these habits around resilience, creativity, problem solving, and it's hard to sustain habits. You've got to very consciously, deliberately, create time for the habit. It doesn't have to be a big thing.

I've seen clients I've worked with when it kind of like is a parting gift of literally they just make a card that they take into a meeting and be like, right, these are the types of questions I'm supposed to ask in this type of meeting. And kind of creating these little cheats to remind them of the skills and habits they've built to try to prevent them from falling back. So it's the things you do to keep a good habit going, you need the same kind of helps.

Brian Ardinger: [00:17:09] It's definitely going to be an interesting world that we come into. And I think it's actually more difficult to go back into this world than it was to go into the lockdown. Everybody was in the same boat at that time and had to relearn and learn things overnight.

Now this hybrid world is going to be a different type of shakeout. It's almost like a reverse culture shock to a certain extent. So, we'll, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. What kind of recommendations or resources would you recommend for folks that are interested in exploring innovation or strengthen their muscles around this particular topic?

Robyn Bolton: [00:17:38] I'm a big reader. So, I always kind of default to reading first. There are several great organizations that publish newsletters and quick articles. Innovation Leader is one of them innov8tors, which is spelled with an eight, primarily in Europe, is another one where they're just constantly producing great materials, great resources, especially for corporate innovators.

You know, certainly all the magazines. HBR often has great innovation articles. And very selfish plug. I'm always publishing on my blog, Mile Zero.io, and just keeping up on latest thoughts, practices in the innovation space.

Brian Ardinger: [00:18:24] Absolutely. I would definitely recommend your blog and, and the stuff that you've written for Forbes and other places as well. It's been very helpful for my journey as well. My last question is, do you have any interesting stories from your Swiffer days, or maybe an interesting client project that could summarize the ups and downs of creating something from scratch?

Robyn Bolton: [00:18:42] Oh yes. Oh my goodness. I have so many stories from, from the Swiffer days. I will say, one. I learned many valuable lessons from this, but myself and some of the guys from R and D. We were actually in Rome. And we were doing in-home visits with women. And this was as we were developing Swiffer Wet Jet, just to understand their cleaning habits.

And what we learned over the course of a week is a surprising amount of Italian women have home buffing machines for their floors and daily would buff the floor. Would get down on hands and knees and scrub kind of like Cinderella, and just a completely different practice than what we're used to here in the U S or in the UK.

Anyways, we went into one apartment and talking to the woman through a translator. We asked her, you know, okay, get prepared to wash your floor. We want to see how you do this. And she stepped away, came back in and she was completely naked. And we were not prepared for that.

First lesson I learned was this is why we carry notebooks is so that you can hide behind them. This is also why you do research in pairs because weird things will happen. And then when we asked her why she chose to clean that way, she explained that it was because her husband likes it when she cleans that up.

That was also what I learned that it's okay to cut an interview short and just gracefully bow out. And maybe not consider that as a data point in the research.

Brian Ardinger: [00:20:15] Perhaps an outlier.

Robyn Bolton: [00:20:16] Yes. Perhaps we found an outlier.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: [00:20:19] Thanks. Well, Robyn, I do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to tell us some of those insights and some amazing stories. I'd love to have you back to tell some more in the future, but in the meantime, if people want to find out more about yourself or about Mile Zero, what's the best way to do that?

Robyn Bolton: [00:20:32] Best way to do that is to go to Miles Zero's webpage. It's Mile Zero. So, zero spelled out Z E R O dot I O.

Brian Ardinger: [00:20:42] Excellent. Well Robyn, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation and looking forward to continuing the conversation as innovation continues to move forward.

Robyn Bolton: [00:20:49] Absolutely. Thank you, this was great.

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Originally published August, 2021

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with two innovators from Dole Packaged Foods, Dr. Lara Ramdin, Chief Innovation Officer and Barbara Guerpillon, Head of Ventures. We talk about Dole's new venture fund, its open innovation initiatives, and how it's tackling global issues from nutrition to sustainability. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Dole Packaged Foods' Dr. Lara Ramdin, Chief Innovation Officer and Barbara Guerpillon, Head of Ventures

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have some amazing guests. Today, we actually have two guests coming from all around the world. We have Dr. Lara Ramdin, the Chief Innovation Officer and Barbara Guerpillon, Head of Ventures at Dole Packaged Foods. So welcome to the show.

Lara Ramdin: Thanks.

Barbara Guerpillon: Glad to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, I am so excited to have you both on the show together. The two of you are at the forefront of Dole's transformation and focus on innovation. And so, we wanted to have you on the show to talk about some of the new initiatives that you unveiled in the recent months and why they're so important. How does Dole define innovation?

Lara Ramdin: Innovation is, it's a very broad term, right? And it can often be overused in our case, it's at all touch points. So, from the farm to the fruit, to the product, to the way the consumer uses it, to the way the consumer disposes it. So, it's actually end to end, innovation can occur them, any of those points.

And that's obviously why we're here because we're trying to broaden our horizons in all of those aspects. It's time that we thought about Innovation beyond just a formulation and a pack.

Barbara Guerpillon: It's also about innovation in ways of working and Lara and I is a very great example of how we are working on Innovation. It's just different approaches as well to solving problems.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about those different types of approaches. One of the things I wanted to talk about is you've unveiled this new Dole Promise. These are six promises that you're making to the world that by 2025 you're going to make some big changes and transformation. So, Lara do you want to talk a little bit about the Dole Promise and what it is all about?

Lara Ramdin: What's really interesting about Dole and both Barbara and I are new to the company, right? So that's also new for Dole in terms of Innovation, having a Head of Ventures and the Head of Innovation, is that they sort of set their stool out and said, if we're really, really going to make a difference, where we're going to make a difference is by actually closing this nutrition gap, which we see happening all over the world and happening, not just in developing countries, but in developed countries.

And so, it's our mission to make nutrition accessible and affordable. And also, as part of this wider innovation agenda, try and get nutrition to people in different ways. Right? So that's the first thing. That's really the first big promise pillar.

And then underneath that, we're really striving. For access to sustainable nutrition for 1 billion people. And then also we're looking at our current portfolio and saying, how can we make those better? And how can we take out processed sugar? And how can we take out the things that we know you don't need? Right. And how can we give you the things that we already make in this period school? So that's one big nutrition pillar,

Brian Ardinger: Barbara, what are your thoughts?

Barbara Guerpillon: I'm specifically looking at reducing our carbon footprint. As Head of Venture, my role is to bring the outside in. Identify technology, startups, and entrepreneur we can work with. And if you look at the massive agenda on reducing carbon footprint, we know, we cannot do it all alone and we need to partner and we have innovators with new technology, and therefore reducing our carbon footprint, we'll start from, it will have to be a closed loop.

It will start from the farms, to our package product, to the way we are shipping the product to the way we are packing them. So, we also have a goal on a zero-footprint based plastic by 2025 in our world packaging, but it's not only on the packaging and so everywhere where there is today for based plastics. It also includes within our farm. So, there is a big interconnectivity between all our Dole Promises, which will be mutually beneficial. We are really looking forward to exploring those partnerships and those new developments with entrepreneurs.

Lara Ramdin: There's a big recognition Brian that we want systemic change. And if we want systemic change, we can't do it on our own. Right. So actually, we're in this position, and I think Barbara alluded to earlier, because we want to innovate in the way we work. And actually, Dole's saying, hey guys, we can't do this on our own. Come help us. That's already really innovative for us. Right. And I think we are embracing open innovation in its truest form in that way.

Brian Ardinger: And that leads to my next question. So, you were both new to Dole. I was going to ask, how are these initiatives different from the way Dole approached Innovation in the past? Obviously, you said it's much more open than before. Why do you think this is a different image for Dole and why are you going to go on this path?

Barbara Guerpillon: I think I'm going to start because my answer is going to be way shorter than Lara's. One, the Head of Venture and the Venturing Team is a new team, and it hasn't been done before. And I really, really focus on working with startups and young companies. So, the answer is quite easy because this did not exist before. It's a new initiative. It has been launched about a year ago. So that's a simple answer.

Lara Ramdin: And then building on that. I would say that Dole has been in the past quite traditional about how it focused on Innovation. Right? So, it innovated on what it knew how to do already. And actually, we're expanding our portfolio beyond the canned Pineapple. And so, we're saying, we want to go beyond that. We know fruit, we are the experts in food, but we want to get fruit and nutrition in fruit and vegetables and plants to people in different ways. How can we do that?

If we don't know how to do it, let's go and find somebody that can, that's the other part of this sort of innovation continuum that I'm doing, is that person over there can do supplements, sell it. Cause we've just launched supplements. Let's go and work with them to launch fruit-based supplements, for example. So, I think that's why I'm saying it's really open innovation in its truest form.

Brian Ardinger: That leads to my question, Barbara, about Dole Ventures and I believe you have a new Sunshine For All Investment Fund. $2 million annual fund. You mentioned it's a new initiative to go in this open innovation and actively pursue startups for that. Can you talk more about the fund? What are you looking for and how are you partnering and looking for investments in the startup space?

Barbara Guerpillon: We launched about a month ago. And these found is really our commitments to the rest of the startup community to work with startups and work on Innovation. So, I would say it's the proof that we are extremely committed to change the way we are organizing our business. And we're really committed to work. Dole Promise and acknowledging that we need them to help us. First of all, it is not a program like you would have in accelerators. We are really looking at innovative technology.

So, any startups, any social enterprise as well, any NGOs, anyone think they can help us? In our quest, in our journey, can apply through the website, which is a simple form, explaining a little bit more about your background and your technology. We will review and filter those. And then we'll, we'll help them to connect with the business because from my experience, the biggest problem that we need to solve, when are talking about corporate innovation and corporates, working with startups is defining what success look like for both parties.

It's helping them to get themselves organized, defining what the pilots look like. Both needs help. Both from a startup point of view, who needs to understand how a big guy is working, how can they develop that better solution for us. And for us working on how can we define our problem statement in a way that we can work in an interpretive mode.

So, the fund itself, it's really a door, an entry door to Dole and wants to connect with us. And the, the role of the team is going to then connect back with the business, working very closely with Lara, but also with the supply chain guy, working with the people in our farms. When we are looking at bio fertilizer for instance. When we are looking at traceability, we are really looking at any technology that helps us to deliver our Dole Promise. On the website itself, there is some examples and elements of what we are looking for, but we are by nature, extremely curious and open to talk to those entrepreneurs.

Brian Ardinger: Now, are you looking at making equity investments in these particular startups or combination of different opportunities, depending on what's going on?

Barbara Guerpillon: That's a very good point and no. So, we're not looking at taking any equity investment. I think when you're talking about experimentation and developing pilots, it's a lot easier if we keep it light and where the objective is really to solve the problems.

So, the fund is going to be spent in two pilots. So, it's money that we're going to allocate to try new technology, to try new ways of working new business models and not specifically into equity. To be honest, it's a lot easier to pull the plug when we need to pull it out, when something doesn't work. It's also easier to move forward a lot faster when there is no equity, legal, and all involved. So, it's really, this $2 million is really for us to accelerate that transformation and working with those startups.

Lara Ramdin: And also, really take action. Right? Cause that's part of our, how do we drive the systemic change is to really, instead of talking about it, to do it, to try it right. Our boss always talks about not trying is failing. I think that was really his intention, by setting up this fund, right. To fund really meaningful pilot activity, which hopefully will be successful and lead to bigger initiatives across the enterprise. But we know that obviously the failure rate is probably going to be quite high, but that's okay because we tried. And there's no way we're going to affect change if we don't.

Brian Ardinger: I know you're trying a lot of stuff already. I've heard a little bit about some of the Innovation efforts that are showing some impact, things like initiatives, looking at food deserts in cities like Baltimore, and that. I don't know if you want to expand a little bit more on those kinds of initiatives that are already working.

Lara Ramdin: So, the Sunshine For All Cities Program actually started in Jackson last year. And we are piloting this. We're doing this in order to take action. We're picking these cities and going to these cities and saying, you guys have got a food desert, which is true in Jackson.

There's only like 20 supermarkets in Jackson. I think, so it's one for every 10,000 people. And so, there are children going up who don't naturally have access to fruits and vegetables, which is unfathomable to me because obviously I'm very lucky where I grew up. So, I always had access to food, vegetables, but people in Jackson don't.

And so, we worked with the mayor of Jackson and we actually tried to tackle it in a few ways. So, we had pop up fruit and vegetable stores. We worked really closely with the boys and girls club in Jackson. So, we went in and we taught children how to cook with fruit and vegetables. We actually had a debrief from the CEO.

It was amazing. It was really, really amazing to see them get so excited about using. Fruit and vegetables, which they'd never done before. So, it's actually a several pronged approach that very specific to how Jackson is run and what Jackson needs. We are going to do the same in Baltimore, but it's not going to be a copy and paste.

Right. So, it's going to be very specific. But Baltimore has needs, and I believe they have a food policy director in Baltimore actually for that state. We're going to be working very, very closely with them to design a program for them. And so there will be other cities that we work with. Right. So, there are, unfortunately, there are many food deserts in the United States.

I was recently talking to a lady from the Chicago Sun-Times, and she was very passionate about us coming to Chicago. And so, I said, well, the Chicago can always apply. So actually, online on our website, you can apply for your city to be next. So, if you're very passionate, there's somebody listening to this and wants to pilot an activity like this for their city then. Yeah. By all means apply.

Brian Ardinger: And do you see startups working with those types of programs or maybe talk through what are some of the core areas that you are looking to fund or, or solve? You mentioned a couple of them, but.

Lara Ramdin: So, when we talk about the fund, we're open to all kinds of partnerships, right? If you're a social enterprise that is trying to use food that would otherwise be wasted in a different way, that's exactly an area that fits several areas of our promise. Right? So, it's about getting access to nutrition, but also solving, because we have to tackle it at both ends, the zero-waste end right.

So, Dole is a member of the upcycled food association because we believe. We take the zero waste apart very, very seriously. And as part of our continuous innovation program. So, if you're a social enterprise or an enterprise that works in those areas in those cities, then we'd be very interested to hear from you.

If you're a startup technology owner at a social enterprise, that's working to try and get nutrition to food deserts in different ways, in different forms, that comes from fruit and vegetables, then we're also very interested in talking to you as well. So, I think we said the word open quite a few times, yeah, but we genuinely mean that we are very, very good.

We are very curious. I think curious is exactly the right word. I've not worked for a company that's quite so openly curious about learning from other people. It's a very unarrogant way to do innovation. So, we're really very humble about the fact, there's a lot of things that we don't know, and we, we know that other people can teach us in order for us to realize this mission. And that's really what this is all about.

Brian Ardinger: Barbara, I know you came from Unilever and the Unilever Foundry program looking and working with startups on that side. Are there particular technologies or trends that you're most excited about delving into?

Barbara Guerpillon: Yes, actually. There is a lot which is happening, talking about reducing our food waste and food loss. A lot happening on extending shelf life of fruits in a natural way. So there is a lot of startups from around the world.

I'm really surprised to see that many young entrepreneurs are working on tackling that challenges. So extremely involved in R and D space. There is also a lot of startups trying to reduce sugar in products. So that's where we work quite closely with Lara, but that's areas where we are seeing a lot of things happening.

We are also seeing a lot of startups and a big trend around carbon footprint. So, so around regenerative agriculture and agroforestry practices. So, we do have a lot to do on the education part. How can we educate our farmers that we're working with and develop those new practices in our condition?

And there is a lot of startups and social impact companies actually, who are very soon going to help us to get there and to change our practices. Two big areas that I see quite a lot recently is on reducing our carbon footprint, emissions and food waste.

Brian Ardinger: So, I know this is fairly new to the process. I'm curious to understand some of the challenges that you've had in these early days about getting some new initiatives up and running, and more importantly, what are the obstacles that you're preparing to tackle moving forward?

Barbara Guerpillon: That's a very good question and it's still early days. So, I think at the moment, what I'm really focusing on is to get the organization to work in a very iterative mode. The biggest challenge I would say, and I've been through it in my previous life. So the biggest challenge is to help the team we're working with to define a problem statement without jumping into a solution.

Very often, when you go to talk to someone and you want to solve a problem, the person very naturally said, and we are looking for these A, B and C solution. And my role is to get a stop to the problem statement. And then you start to push and push back a lot on why are we trying to solve that problem? And usually, it unveils the real problem behind, and this is where we can start to look and look for new technology to help us.

So, I think that's the process we are in there here. The second thing is accepting that we're not going to have the solution straight away. It is not a procurement linear procurement process. It has a lot of iteration in there, a lot of trial and error. And Lara mentioned that as well.

We know that there is a lot, that's going to be failing, but, and I don't want to sound a little bit, in any failures we will have a lot of learnings. But usually if we know how to accelerate, the next iteration, thanks to the learnings, this is what we need to put in place here. And that's what we need to really, focusing on. So, we'll see, I'll talk to you again in six month’s time, and I'll share more about that experience.

Lara Ramdin: Because at the other end of the Innovation continuum, I work with the P & L owners in the regions. Right. And so, if you're sitting in a P & L chair, what we're talking about is like, yay, all well and good, but actually I own the P & L. Right?

I'm at the very different end. And so, my job actually is to infuse the Innovation organization with the design thinking approach, which is really about how to create this really valid problem statement. Because I think one of the things that we suffer from is that we want to do everything, and we can't. Right.

And then if you're a P & L owner trying to unlock some of the challenges with that, right. So, looking at different business models. If it's something that you genuinely believe is going to give you longer term growth that accepting maybe in year one, it's not going to give you the margin that you desired, but it's going to build to that because we are delivering to our promise pillars, and so-and-so, and these are on very, very early days.

And we're right in the middle of some of those conversations on some of the more disruptive things that we're working on at the moment. So, it's very front of mind for me. And so, it can be tough, but meaningful conversations because you know that, you know, you're moving forward to that aspirational goal of the promise, both from zero waste, nutrition, et cetera, et cetera.

I am empathetic to the P & L owners because I know that they've got very strict financial targets to deliver. But at the other end, you know, embracing technology, and embracing open innovation. So somewhere in the middle, we've got to meet those two. I would say that's probably one of our biggest challenges. We're still figuring this out. Brian,

Brian Ardinger: That's true. Virtually every corporation, they're trying to balance that exploration, exploitation of their existing business models and making sure those, because those two naturally don't fit well together. And how do you balance that?

Lara Ramdin: Obviously we can't do business as usual considering some of the more disruptive things, right? So that's sort of an ongoing conversation that we have to have and indeed, this idea that we're iterative is not just for the Innovation group, right? This idea that, it has to work across all the functions that we work with. And that's an ongoing journey for us, for sure.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, because if not, it just becomes Innovation theater and you're doing for PR purposes.

Lara Ramdin: Right. You can't do Innovation on an Island, right. You cannot. And so looking at alternative ways to do Innovation, looking at Innovation in terms of the consumer facing part with other partners in a different way is a big part of my focus. Obviously. I'm sure this will all be familiar to your listeners.

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Brian Ardinger: Yeah, no, it's definitely familiar. It's familiar to our audience members as well as we're all trying to learn together to figure it out, to navigate this new world of work and everything else.

If people want to engage with Dole, whether it's a startup or other folks that are interested in the initiatives, what's the best way to connect with you and connect with the programs.

Barbara Guerpillon: To start with, www.sunshineforall.com. That would be the best place to start, and we will help them to connect with the rest of the organization.

Lara Ramdin: I'm also telling people to DM me on LinkedIn if they want to as well. I'm not sure whether that's a good idea or not, again, in the spirit of being open and curious, please feel free.

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you both for coming on and spending a little bit of time with Inside Outside Innovation. Talk about the stories and we love, we'd love to have you back to continue and figure out what's working and what's not working. Yes.

Lara Ramdin: Yes, we'll come back in 6 months and tell you what's working

Brian Ardinger: Thanks very much for being on the show. We'll talk to you again soon.

Lara Ramdin: Thank you. Thanks so much.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Melissa Vincent, Executive Director of Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship. This recording was part of our IO Live series and Melissa and I sit down and talk about the people, the resources, and the companies making the Midwest a great place for startups to grow and prosper. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation, is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Melissa Vincent, Executive Director of Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest with us today. This is part of our IO Live series, which is our virtual conversation series to talk innovation and entrepreneurship. Part of our Inside Outsideplatform, where we have our podcast and newsletter and ongoing events like this. So I'm super excited to host Melissa today. Melissa is a good friend. She's the Executive Director of Pipeline. So welcome to the show, Melissa.

Melissa Vincent: Brian, thank you so much. I love it when I get to chat with you.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited about this conversation. Before we get too far. I always like to thank our sponsors. Today our sponsor is the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. They are a private nonpartisan foundation based in the Kansas City, Missouri. They seek to build inclusive prosperity through entrepreneur focused economic development. They've been a huge help to a lot of things going on, including Pipeline. I believe they're a sponsor for. If people are interested in finding out more about Kauffman, go to kauffman.org or check them out @KauffmanFDN on Facebook and Twitter.

And so huge shout out to our sponsors for making things like this happen. And having conversations that make Midwest Entrepreneurs even better. I was gonna say, you're new to Pipeline, but you were new from the standpoint of you started working at Pipeline right before the pandemic. It seems like that's a short time ago, but it seems now we're what, almost two years into this thing. So it's exactly, exactly the pandemic years.

But I wanted to have you on, because I think Pipeline has been one of those proven things in the ecosystem that has helped entrepreneurs across the Midwest here. And I wanted to get you on to talk about, you know, what have you seen? What's different and, and more importantly, what's going to happen moving forward. So maybe let's start the conversation with, tell us a little bit about what Pipeline is. For those who may not know that and where we're at right now.

Melissa Vincent: I would love to. Yes. So I have been there for, as you mentioned, it'll be two years next month. So it's kind of crazy because it feels sometimes like six months and other times it feels like 10 years because of the pandemic. So you never know. So Pipeline is a fellowship for high- growth entrepreneurs in the Midwest. We are industry agnostic. So we do everything from Bio to Ag. You name it, everything in between. And do not take equity in the organizations that we work with.

And so we're different in that way as well. And we focus on serial entrepreneurs because they have the greatest economic impact on the region, when you focus on someone who's going to get right back up, if they have a failure. And if they succeed, they're going to get back up, start another company and invest in the community.

Brian Ardinger: Pipeline's been around for a number of years. It was actually started even prior to me starting Nmotion and that. I think you have over 140 or a 150 entrepreneurs that have gone through the program. Had had an economic benefit. 2,700 employees I think are, are based in Kansas and Missouri and Nebraska because of the founders that have been part of Pipeline.

Your founders have raised over $600 million in capital since joining Pipeline. And it's a flywheel approach. So, you know what started 10 or 15 years ago. Now we're seeing some of the fruits of that payoff. So tell us a little bit about how you got involved in Pipeline.

Melissa Vincent: Pipeline was started 14 years ago. It was started by Joni Cobb and a number of key people kind of in the Midwest. She was the CEO. And the idea was that there was such, as you mentioned, like 14 years ago, we were in such a different place.

There weren't all the entrepreneur support organizations that we have now. And so, you know, when she started the organization, it was around this idea that if you came and you brought resources from the coast to the Midwest. And you focus specifically on serial entrepreneurs to have a massive impact on the region because of what we talked about earlier, they're going to reinvest, they're going to get back up, start another company. And that was really true.

So over the last 14 years, our members are not just creating jobs. They're creating really high paying jobs. So average salary for an employee of one of our members is $52,000. So they're creating great jobs. They're creating a lot of them. And they're raising capital and they are staying here in the Midwest.

And so really over 14 years, that whole concept that we were seeing, if it could be proved or not, if you bring in these resources, what impact would that have if you focused on serial entrepreneurs is proven. So it's like, okay, successful, we've done that. That's really amazing. But then it becomes the question of 14 years later, how things changed. Like to your point, we've had, with the pandemic and we've had social injustice that's been ongoing that really came to a head last year.

So we have all these different things that happened over the past few years. And so I think for us as an organization, we've really looked at well, how do we respond to that? And I think there's a lot of other entrepreneurial support organizations that are doing the same. How do we step in. How do we be a part of that progress and change that really needs to happen?

That's where Pipeline is headed. But we couldn't have gotten there without the legacy that was started 14 years ago, by bringing in all these resources and creating some amazing fellowship programs.

Brian Ardinger: It's been a very important piece of the puzzle. When I started Nmotion, I think it was 10 years ago, ish. It was the first accelerator in Nebraska at the time that's a equity based accelerator. But we quickly wanted to tie ourselves with Pipeline and get our founders an opportunity to move through the Pipeline. And you find those early stage founders. You get them a little bit of capital. You surround them with mentors and investment capital.

We help build that. And then you also then connect them into a wider network. I think that was one of the most important things about like an Nmotion is, you know, we started in Lincoln, Nebraska. But we realized quickly that you can't build a startup ecosystem by yourself. In just the four walls of your own county or city.

And so how do we create opportunities for those founders to make network connections that can help them grow their business wherever they end up. And, you know, we've had some great founders that went through Pipeline. Brett Byman who started with Nobl. And now he's with another company, BasicBlock.

You mentioned that serial net nature of entrepreneurs. Vishal Singh with Quantified Ag. Liz Whitaker with Pawlytics and that. And now with Brooke Mullen who's with Sapahn and she came through the GBeta Program with Gener8tor that we're now working with. So those are just some of the things, but maybe let's talk about some of the success stories of some of the Pipeline Entrepreneurs that have had success based on having access to your program.

Melissa Vincent: Yeah. You know, one of the things that, you know, we're really looking for when we're investing is we're looking at high growth. So they're already at a decent place. And then we're really trying to help them get to that next phase of growth to hopefully, like we said, either exit or re invest in their community.

And so some of those are ones that everyone kind of in the Midwest, you know, your Toby Rush with EyeVerify. So everyone kind of always thinks of Pipeline. They're like, oh, that was, you know, Toby went through that. But the thing that I love is that we have so many other organizations. So a couple that people know of that may not have realized that their founders went through Pipeline is ShotTracker Davion Roth.

So that's a company that is still ongoing. Doing massive things. In the news. Part of Pipeline program back in the early days. Another one, let's go to Nebraska here. We have Blake Lawrence with Opendorse. Oh my goodness. Since the NIL law changes, like, I mean, he already was killing it. But now it's like, those are just like set him in a whole other trajectory because he can capitalize on college sports now and college athletes.

So there've been these really successful founders. And I think that there's a lot of different pieces that in the ecosystem, like what you're doing and what Pipeline's doing. It takes more than just one organization to be able to provide the support. You really need layers to that. So you need some groups that are a little bit earlier stage. And then you have Pipeline which fits in this very unique role of serial entrepreneurs who are high growth, who are looking to exit and give back.

It's a very unique spot that we fill. And so really trying to figure out how do we support each other. And I think that's kind of in the Midwest, what everyone's looking at right now. So it's like, we have organizations like yours that have been around for 10 years. Pipeline is fourteen. Like these established organizations that are now looking and saying, okay, we've done this. How do we work better together? Because if we work well together, we can do even more.

So I think that's kind of the shift that's starting to happen. And I don't know if it's the pandemic that was part of like, kind of being the catalyst to that. Realizing that we all needed each other. And we needed, our entrepreneurs need more support than one organization could give solo. But when you combine forces, we can do so much more.

Brian Ardinger: So let's talk about the program itself. So obviously there are specific things about the program. You go through things over the course of your year, and that. I think most people think of Pipeline and think of the value that's created from the network that's been established and the access to that network. But talk a little bit about the program itself.

Melissa Vincent: When you're a Fellow In the program. You go through four modules a year. And those are really intense three day workshops, basically. And they are focused on helping you really scale your company. So the first module that they go through is understanding who your target customer is. Which these are all going to sound very like early stage.

They're not. I mean, they're digging in super deep to analyze this information. So finding your target customer. The second one is all about your business model. And making sure that you have the right business model now that you know who your target customer should be. And the third is telling your story through your financials.

Which, in all honesty is probably the one that everyone fears the most. Because one understanding your financials is one thing. Telling your story through your financials. Nobody wants to do that. And then when they get through that module, they are just able to easily tell the story through their financials.

And then the fourth we just wrapped in St. Louis. Was about telling your story and what's your why? So taking all of the things that you learn throughout the year. Putting that into basically a pitch for an investor or a potential client. And being able to tell the entire story of your company in one single pitch.

Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things, because I've been a mentor in Pipeline for a long time, and I've seen the evolution of how these companies kinda go through that. And you mentioned things like just that customer discovery piece, for example, your business model. I think a lot of times we forget that that's not necessarily something that all entrepreneurs understand or know or use.

And oftentimes just having that forced function of let's re evaluate, let's make sure that we are in the right business. And we have the right metrics. The right things that are going on can do such a powerful thing to an entrepreneur because it kind of levels the system, especially when you're surrounded with other entrepreneurs and other business models and that. It gets them thinking and doing things differently.

Melissa Vincent: And we certainly saw that in the pandemic where I think as entrepreneurs we're hit across the board, just like everyone else, but realizing when you're the one who is out there as an entrepreneur, It comes to you. It's so, it is lonely at the top. It's especially lonely when you're a serial entrepreneur, because we do think a little bit differently.

It's that whole like, ah, knock me down. I'll get right back up and start something else. And if I succeed, I'm gonna put myself through this all over again. But I think that in the pandemic, what we really saw was the value of that network and that connection. And really being able to lean on other people who were struggling.

But because this isn't a program where you go through, and yes, you've gone through that program, but that's it, you become a member. And you're part of this pipeline family. They were really able to lean in and support each other in a very unique way. And obviously Pipeline provided resources, and we did a lot of stuff around mental health and wellness.

However, that support of that network was so powerful. And you could really see it during the pandemic. Cause there was a safe space to be able to talk about things that you were struggling with, that had they not had that network maybe wouldn't have come up or they wouldn't have felt comfortable talking about.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think everybody was in that boat. Reevaluating what they're doing for who they were doing it for, et cetera, et cetera. We've got a number of people in the audience. If anybody has a question from the audience, feel free to type it in the chat, or there's a great feature in this Run the World called Grab the Mic.

So you can also click the little microphone button and come on stage with us and ask your question directly. Happy to do that. So, yes, we're excited to make this a little bit more interactive. So we talked a little bit about ecosystems. So talk about the different ecosystems that you support. You know, you're in Kansas, you're in Missouri, you're in Nebraska. And obviously the cities are involved. Talk a little bit about the differences in the ecosystems and where you draw your entrepreneurs from.

Melissa Vincent: You nailed it. Thank you for you have exactly right. So we are Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. And I think everyone always asks the question, like, are you guys planning to expand further? Yes, we may at some point. However, right now there is so much like attention. Resources that we know we need to provide just on that three state region, that it's super important that we stay there.

But those are the areas that we look at. We are actually, we just finished. We've just closed our apps for recruiting. Had in all honesty, the best turnout we've had in years. I mean, it's interesting because at some point you don't know, during the pandemic are people really starting companies. You know, for some, it might be a really difficult time to start a company, but that's such a great, you know, response from that. And we're super excited about that.

We see a lot of pockets. So we have Wichita pockets. We have Lincoln Omaha pockets. We have St. Louis pockets. And then obviously Kansas city on both sides. And so we see a lot of people coming from there. I think as far as how the different regions, and the only I can really compare it to, because I feel like I've become entrenched over the last two years here in our three state region.

But when I look at like Oklahoma or some areas that aren't part of that really strong network of ESOs or Entrepreneur Support Organizations. You know, Oklahoma is further behind than let's say Kansas or Nebraska, and certainly St. Louis. I think part of that is because they have not brought in outside organizations to come in and help them establish some of the entrepreneurial groups that you need.

You need more than just one group within a region. And again, when you've been doing it, as long as you know, we have here and in Nebraska and certainly in Missouri, I think that that's where you're able to, you've been doing it for a while. You realize where you play well, and then you find other people to compliment.

And I think when you look at other regions who aren't there yet, they're just trying to figure out who do we even want to bring in? They're not to a place yet where they could even say, oh, here's the part that we do really well. Let's find other organizations to supplement that.

So I think that the Midwest, when we're talking about Nebraska and Missouri and Kansas is unique and really amazing, and its ability to work together regionally to create really strong entrepreneur.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing fundamental differences or different expertise in the different ecosystems? Like how does St. Louis compared to a Lincoln or?

Melissa Vincent: So St. Louis has a lot of bio. Obviously there's Bio STL. So we see a lot of bio coming out of St. Louis. And then Nebraska, we see a lot more animal health resources. And obviously healthcare resources as well. And then Kansas City, this conglomeration of bio and, and also Nebraska would be sports tech. I would put that in there too, even the shot trackers here in Kansas.

So you have this interesting mixture and I think along the whole corridor, you have a lot of animal health cause we're in that kind of quarter for animal health. And then we have some amazing entrepreneurs who are rural because that's an area that we really have tried to focus on. And so we have rural entrepreneurs who are doing really unique things, you know, in ag and everything else.

Brian Ardinger: So talk a little bit about the mentors themselves. What type of mentors did you bring in? And how do they work.

Melissa Vincent: We love to bring in a mixture of regional mentors, like yourself, and then national mentors. And we feel like that mix is super important. Because one regionally, you want people who actually understand the ecosystem, understand the issues of raising capital that are still here. And, you know, that we need to address and change if we want to really be able to grow the ecosystem.

And then we want people from the coast. So we know that a lot of times what we're seeing is that on the coast, we have PE and VC that are looking to invest here in the Midwest. And so we're able to kind of capitalize on that. And because Pipeline takes our entrepreneurs through such a strong vetting process to even get into Pipeline, it's not the easiest thing to get into, but there is a pretty long process to get in.

And then you have a year's long fellowship. And then they know they're going to get that extra support. We get a lot of interest from the coast about what our entrepreneurs are doing, because you're adding those layers of continued support and resource, which should hopefully help their success rates continue to go up. So that's kind of where we are.

Brian Ardinger: And the type of people that you bring in, like a Chris Shipley has been on the podcast before. And spoken at our events before. People like that who have been in the industry for a long time and can navigate east, west and in between is really helpful.

Melissa Vincent: And even international. I will tell you, I love Chris Shipley. She is so able to help you take and tell your company's pitch. And we just saw this because she leads our fourth module. And you can tell your entire company story in your five minutes. You're in. And she'll be like, so what I think you're saying is, and she'll like completely boil down your company to like a minute.

And it's like, oh yeah, that. And it's like, oh my gosh, please tell me I wrote that down. One of my other favorites that I think, it just reminds you of how unique Pipeline is in the mentors that we bring in. So Laura Kilcrease, she leads our module three on financials. If you look her up, she's literally credited with starting the tech scene in Austin.

And she's just this ridiculous, amazing leader and ecosystem builder. And now she's in Alberta running the entire Alberta, the province of Alberta, she's running their entire new innovation arm. And so she's just, it doesn't even seem real when you talk to her. I mean, she's just, she can give you stories of companies that you know, she's been on the board for, that had sold for, you know, ridiculous amounts. And she's been through so many different things.

So it's that level of just resources and expertise. And just people who really care about entrepreneurs, who understand the entrepreneurial lifestyle. What's it's about. How hard it is. And really care about giving back and supporting our entrepreneurs.

Brian Ardinger: I want to shift to COVID. And again, you started right before a lot of this stuff happened. Talk a little bit about how COVID and the remote nature has changed Pipeline and, and change your entrepreneurs.

Melissa Vincent: You know, so I would say there were both good and, you know, difficult pieces. So Pipeline for anyone who doesn't know is very, very much an in-person organization. The modules are in person. They're three days. The professional development was always in person. There are all of these pieces that it's like a hundred percent an in-person organization.

And then you have a new leader that starts, and then you have a pandemic that doesn't allow anyone to be in person. And so it was really interesting because the downside was. Our Fellows had one module, the very first one, and then everything else was virtual.

And for me just research thought was okay, how does that impact, you know, who becomes a member who doesn't, or their engagement with each other. And we started with 13 Fellows, we've finished with thirteen fellows, despite the pandemic.

We were very intentional as soon as the pandemic hit to go virtual with resources. So rather than having, you know, a handful of professional development. We went weekly. Everything from, okay, how do I communicate? What is this pandemic? How do I communicate to my customers, my team? I mean like things that now it feels like, oh, that was 10 years ago, but it was just last year.

And so we were trying to really figure out and then PPP loans and all of that. So just started doing virtual resources. So in that way, I think it was positive because it allowed us to really beef up, any type of professional development. I mean, it was just weekly. We're coming at you and we're helping you feel connected.

And then after that, I would say the downside was not being able to have those in-person connections, but we just finished our last module for this year, which we had the first two, which virtual. The last two modules were in-person. And again, we've finished with thirteen, started with 13, finished with 13.

So I think really for us, it allowed us to do a whole lot more because we could do it virtually. The transition for an organization that is so heavy on live in-person events is probably some of the members who have been around for a while. And we're like, whoa. When are we going to get in the person? I heard that a lot.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. But Hey Bob, I saw you Grab the Mic and I didn't have a chance to click the button. So if you want to grab the mic. There you go. Welcome Bob.

Bob: Yeah, there's some other people from the Midwest I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, I'm at Case Western Reserve University. I run something called Launch Net. We used to be a Blackstone Launchpad, which is around the country and now we're at Launch Net, There's five of us, in different universities in the area. Besides that I'm an Entrepreneur in Residence at the economic development called Jumpstart. And also doing some business incubator.

Question I had, St. Louis. Is I, I was working with a guy from Kent State. And Melissa, I don't know if you know this guy or not in St. Louis, Brian Stoyfield. Does that ring a bell? Okay. I was just curious. He's a troublemaker, which in a good sort of way. He was trying to put rockets into suborbital space for experiments. And because there's so much aerospace in St. Louis, he ended up moving down there and hung out a lot with, begins with a C the big area where everybody collaborates, connects.

No people in the middle, we just have to work harder. But I think it's turned a lot. Got quite a few friends out in SF and they're leaving. Some of them, just the cost of structure. And it used to be that a VC said if I can't have lunch with you, without flying somewhere, I don't want to invest. That has changed dramatically.

Austin's picked up, as you know, and Miami has picked up. We picked up a little bit here. Actually rental costs for homes have escalated tremendously. And inventory has dropped. Because people were working from here, but a number of people are staying. Which is good to see.

So, but yeah, I just wanted to, you know, say hello. I'm also involved with Techstars a little bit. I just had one in Techstars, Chicago. And then Techstars, Minneapolis. And so we're gaining that. And then I used to work with GSV Global Silicon Valley. GSV.com. If you want to take a look. They just did a $220 million spec and then something called GSVbootcamp.com.

We do it now twice a year. And it could be helpful for some of the people in your cohort. It's not just ed tech, it's a broader spectrum. And they kind of did it to help during COVID. And now it kind of stuck. That they said, hey, this is good. You know, while we concentrate on ed tech for our SPAC, GSV invests in other entities, plus this is a good way that people can't, you know, do something in person physical can do this.

I've also done a number of, three times now, startupschool.org, which is run by YC. Which has been really helpful. But yeah, the in-person the, the two that went to Techstars. One in Chicago, that was right in the midst of COVID. So there was no in person. The other one went to Minneapolis or Farm to Fork and he was in person. And they've got a delivery robot and it's really, really, really cool. And EcoLab. The company has helped a lot.

Melissa Vincent: I've been taking notes as you've been talking

Bob: CarbonOrdinance.com. It's a grad again, getting into aerospace. So a guy who worked on the Mars rover, and some other folks, one who dropped out. That basically you can deliver food in these little carts. And you can observe or be kind of like not the driver, but kind of the driver in virtual reality.

So those people who don't own a car. Who maybe don't have the ability to drive a car can be drivers of this. And we already have 300 people signed up. Yeah, to drive these vehicles in virtual reality. And we're getting some restaurant pickup again. Ecolab has been a great partner in Minneapolis. It's not the best place to have a little cart delivery because when the snow flies.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, next time. Spring and Summer time.

Bob: Exactly. So, but they're, they're working hard. And the other one that was in Chicago was called undone.com. Yeah. During COVID I did a hell of a lot of stuff online. I'll give you one more. If your MPD is one of the it's called pitch-force.com. They went from being in person only in San Francisco and they were charging $75 to pitch.

And I don't like to pay to pitch, but they would then turn around and buy pizza, beer and pop. They went to online. Free. And I've attended almost every week for over a year. And they've got 10 companies and five VCs. These VCs generally were San Francisco based. And now they're all over the place, including Austin, including New York.

And there, now that it's virtual, they now have other entities pitching from Argentina, from Australia, from Israel. And it's a good way to learn how to pitch and see how things are going for people and also things, how they're going poorly for people. So it's a good way of see a real entrepreneur. It's your real business.

And so friends of mine and I, we would literally watch it and text each other, our votes. And after a while, you get pretty aligned with what the VCs would do. And the downside is you get good. And all of a sudden you see these very, you both understand, you see these very smart people going, okay, you're in love with your technology, but what's it going to do for the customer? How much are you asking for? And then you're going, this is going to burn down. And sure enough, they get a two.

Other ones you go, holy crap, did they hit it. I work with a lot of students and you know, they're just learning how to do this. And I sent them there. And they see, you know, the real people putting it all on the line to do it. Max who runs it, he runs a staffing agency and he also helps startups who don't have the finances to maybe pay someone right now, get somebody to work for equity only.

And that's how he makes money that you have to pay him like five grand and then a certain percentage after let's say six months, once you put them on a salary and you know, maybe they're going for that Series A or something like that, but they can't get there because they don't have that chief marketing officer. Well, he knows off people who are bad exits and they can do that.

Melissa Vincent: That's awesome. I love hearing from other regions on, well, not regions, but just other states that are kind of right next to us. What's going on there and how it's similar or different. And one of the things you brought up about the VC groups out of San Francisco being like the pandemic really did shift.

And I think, you know, when you're talking about who you would put capital, that has been, I think one of the best biggest shifts. The ability for us to bring capital in from the coasts. Because to your point, exactly. That was not something. If you could not do lunch or coffee, there was not capital happening here and you'd have to move.

And so it's really allowed us to have a lot of people moved back to the Midwest, their roots. And then allow people who would have had to leave previously, get to stay here in the Midwest. Which is just an enormous benefit, that was a by-product of the pandemic.

Bob: Absolutely. One of the entities who didn't make it into the top five does a Reg A. He pitched at going public and he didn't make it to the top five and he did a great job. And I reached out to him and his name is Darren Marble. And he has a show that he he's working with Entrepreneur magazine. It's called Goingpublic.com. And so my friend is the board director for Gen Global. Jeff Hoffman.

We just went through Global Entrepreneurship Week. And I introduced Jeff to Darren. And now Jeff is one of the advisors and one of the producers on Going Public. But that wouldn't have happened if again, to go to Pitch Force, I would have had to been on San Francisco that week. And I'm going to like do that maybe twice a year.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Bob, thanks for coming on stage. Anybody else have any questions? Feel free to put them into the chat. And we have a couple more minutes to keep going. You've changed parts of that program. You're actually creating a new program focused on the diversity inclusion side of things. So maybe talk a little bit about that part of Pipeline and some of the new things that are happening.

Melissa Vincent: Yeah, so super excited to be able to, as I mentioned, this is a great kind of success story of what Pipeline was traditionally for the first 14 years. And without that, you know, legacy of success, you can't really add or expand. But because of that legacy of success, and because we were able to successfully say, you bring in resources from the coast to the Midwest, and you focus on these entrepreneurs who are really going to scale.

And one of the things that we realized in going through the recruitment process during the pandemic was that, in order to get into Pipeline traditionally, you have to working on your company full time. And so during the application process, what we saw were a lot of really great ideas for high growth companies that the person just wasn't able to yet work on their company. Full-time.

And when you looked more closely, we realized that there were a lot of those people were from underserved communities. And for us, that is rural, female, and minority entrepreneurs. And so the only thing that's holding them back is they haven't had an even playing field to get to a place where they are actually ready to be able to get into Pipeline.

And so we wanted to do something to address that. And so we created a new program. It's called Pipeline Pathfinder. That is kind of like a starter program to be able to get into the Pipeline traditional fellowship. But our hope is that when you go through the program and it starts next year, we just finished recruiting for it.

That it will be something that you're either able to run your company full time at the end of it. Or you get to a place where you're ready for Pipeline traditional and a really scale to the next level. So that is our hope. Next year, will be our first year to pilot it. And then after that, we hope to expand and continue to grow.

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Brian Ardinger: It's exciting to see changes that are happening across the ecosystem. You know, we mentioned one of the benefits of being an entrepreneur in the Midwest is this comradery. And this ability to get access to people that you wouldn't normally have access to necessarily in the big tech hub. Where again, if you find the right person typically are one or two degrees separated from getting to the people that you need.

And appreciate everything that you've done to move it forward, and then also take it in new directions. So if people want to find out more about yourself or about Pipeline, what's the best way to do that.

Melissa Vincent: So go to pipelineentrepreneurs.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Or you can always email me at melissa@pipelineentrepreneurs.com. Could we have any longer of an email? Probably not, but.

Brian Ardinger: Melissa, thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Thanks for doing this live and thanks for all the audience folks that came and participated. We look forward to having future events and that.

If you want to find out more about Inside Outside, go to InsideOutside.IO. Subscribe to our newsletter and watch the podcast every week. So appreciate you coming on Melissa. Look forward to having further conversations and thanks very much.

Melissa Vincent: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks everybody.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Ben Bensaou, Professor at INSEAD and author of the new book Built to Innovate. We talk about some interesting case studies and essential practices that companies can use to make innovation accessible to everyone in the organization. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript of Dr. Ben Bensaou, Professor at INSEAD and Author of Built to Innovate

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Dr. Ben Bensaou. He is the professor and former Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD and author of the new book, Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into your Company's DNA. Welcome to the show, Ben.

Ben Bensaou: Good morning, Brian. And thank you for having me.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. And I understand you're in Japan right now, so we're different sides of the world. You've got a new book out called Built to Innovate. But I wanted to step back and talk about how did you get into the field of innovation research.

Ben Bensaou: Well, actually, as a matter of fact, I got into the field of innovation starting where I am right now. I did my PhD looking at Japanese firms. And I had lived in Japan before, but my PhD at MIT Sloan was on the way that Japanese firms were actually developing production systems. And a production system was the quality management movement.

So, I was in Japan at the time. And then when I went back and joined INSEAD, I continued my interest in Japanese firms, but this time I want to know what they were doing in the field of innovation. And this is how I got involved with companies in Japan and outside of Japan. Mostly its established firms who are trying to become more innovative.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we think about is corporations, it's hard for them to innovate. Maybe now it's a little bit more thought of is, you know with all the disruption from everything from COVID to new technologies and that. Companies are a little bit more aware of the fact that they need to be innovating and that the world is changing around them. Can you talk a little bit about how your research and your experience in the field of innovation has changed and evolved over the years?

Ben Bensaou: Yes. I would say that one thing that I've noticed over the years, I've been doing my teaching innovation and also helping firms is that I noticed that number one, a lot of people, a lot of organizations equate innovation with launching a new blockbuster product or coming up with a life changing new business model.

Many also think that you need to have a genius leader or to be a startup by a matter of fact, to be innovative, to be able to innovate. But I found out that it's not true. I found in my research established even centuries old companies are able to innovate. How did they do this? Well, they don't only focus on industry changing effects, but also for small important changes, very often in unexpected places.

And for this, what they do is that they rely on continuous and systematic innovation. Innovation of all kinds. And innovation driven by everyone in the organization. And that's what Built to Innovate is about. It's really about how do you embed continuous innovation inside an organization using a systematic approach.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important because a lot of corporations that I've talked to want innovation to happen somewhere else. Or like they have their teams and they're executing on their business model and they're optimizing that, but they want innovation to happen somewhere else. So, they create an innovation lab or something and they throw the idea over to someone else to execute.

But what I've seen, and I think what it's apparent in your book, and the examples you give is that again, to survive in this changing world, we all have to become innovators. And it doesn't mean, like you said, you have to come up with the next electric car, but you have to find problems and take those early ideas and then innovate them and execute on them so that they become value creation, parts of the business.

Ben Bensaou: Absolutely. Absolutely. I find so many people expecting that the innovation is going to come from the leaders. Or, you know, like you say, they create a skunkworks, or they create specialist units that are supposed to do all the innovations for the company.

And I think many organizations, and I found this very innovative companies in my research, are able to enlist and leverage the capability of everyone in the organization. For this, what they do is that that they create what I call an innovating engine. Which is a protected, fully legitimized and organized space within the company where everyone can innovate. Not just the specialist.

You can innovate in everything you do. I mean, you can innovate of course, in your products and services, but you can innovate in your processes as well, or your internal functions. You can innovate in HR and legal. And you can make innovating a regular habit. Not a sporadic kind of burst of creativity when there's a crisis. And that's what I think I've seen some of these innovative companies do is to create this innovating engine. And leveraging everybody's inate capabilities.

Brian Ardinger: So, what do you think are some of the common myths or mistakes that companies make when it comes to executing or putting these innovation initiatives into place.

Ben Bensaou: I think it's always the same thing is that many of these organizations, like you were talking earlier about startups, don't have the problem of size. When they start, they're all innovating in a sense innovating mode. Everybody is in contact with customers. But as soon as you grow, you start to be dominated by an execution logic.

And the execution, what I call the execution takes over. And the execution engine takes over. And the execution changing is very much about control. It's no surprise that many organizations, established organizations, develop hierarchies and vertical silos focused on supplier side view challenges.

And innovating in a sense is less about control. Is more about delegating and is more about collaboration. Is more about teamwork. Horizontal structures that are focused on the customer. Like you said earlier, I think this is a very important word. You said innovation is about problem finding. What kind of new problems do we need to find to solve for the customers. And execution is very much about problem solving. It's a very convergent mindset.

And I think this is where a lot of companies fail. Is that they don't realize that when you move into innovating and what I'm saying is that when you create an innovating engine, you allow for every employee to be able to spend time doing some innovating activity in the space of the invading engine. And at that time, they need to switch their mind. They need to switch from a supply side view to a customer side view.

Brian Ardinger: That's really interesting because too many folks forego or forget about that exploration side of the business. That a lot of companies don't measure or reward for that type of activity as well. What are your thoughts when it comes to why is it so hard for employees to be innovating?

Ben Bensaou: As a matter of fact, I would almost say that it's not very difficult for frontline people to be innovating. We can come back later to the importance of middle management, but I think it's said the dominance, I would almost say the tyranny of the execution mindset stops people from genuinely discovering what the customer really needs.

So, for me, when people are switching from an execution mode to an innovating mode, they have to embrace a customer perspective. And there, there are three challenges that I like to think about. One is to listen to what I call the voice of the customer. What are the likes, the pain points, the wishes of the customer? And when you are in innovating mode, you have to switch away from the traditional tell mode or even worse, sometimes people are in complete sell mode and try to be in a listening mode very much with empathy for the customer.

The second challenge I think, is about listening to what I call the silence of the customer. The silence of the customer is the things they don't tell you. They don't tell you. And they don't tell you about it either because they don't know or because they know, but they don't think it's your problem to solve.

So maybe it could be interesting for the audience. I give you an example about how Phillips, I mean the Dutch appliance and consumer electronics company, develop the first kettle with limescale mouth filter. So, there was a colleague who was a consultant in a consulting firm, and he was part of the team was helping Phillips re-energize their market share for kettles in the UK market. The team leader at some point asked some of the team members to spend a few days and actually live in families in the UK. Observing how customers use their kettles.

And after a few days, the members noticed that people were facing a problem they never told them about. I mean, when they were trying to pour the boiling water into the cup of tea. I guess, because the water had a lot of calcium, there was this little coat of limescale floating on top of the tea.

And it's very interesting because the customer knew about the problem. It was obvious because they were trying to scoop the limescale with their spoon. But they never told the kettle manufacturer. As a matter of fact, they complain about it, but they complained to the water authorities, not to cattle manufacturer.

Brian Ardinger: Interesting.

Ben Bensaou: So, this is very interesting because it took only a few months for engineers at Phillips to develop this little filter, which you can find in any kettle these days, that blocks or stops the limescale. So, each time you pour the water, it stops the limescale from getting in your tea. This is what I call the silence of the customer. The customer wouldn't tell you about it. So, you need to find this problem in spite of the customer. Not thanks to the customer in spite of the customer.

And then the third challenge is what I call the non-customers. It's very important to learn to listen to non-customers. So here I could give an example, one, for instance, kind of observed Fiskars’s for instance, when they, the Finnish company that makes tableware and garden tools. So, for their cutting tools, for instance, they spend time with surgeons in operating rooms, you know.

Or they look at first tree workers who cut trees in large scale. They're not like cutting small trees in the garden, but on a large scale and very often. And much more dramatic example is this company called EcoCem. It's in the cement business. They developed a new technology, a substitute for cement based on a technology called GGBS, which has much lower carbon footprint.

And it is made out of a byproduct of the steel industry. So, it is very, very good for the environment. It has the same properties of traditional cement. Now, the only problem is that the dominant incumbents, were not looking at it very positively. So, when EcoCem tried to sell it to the customer, the customers we're hearing all this criticism from the dominant players, and they were not very keen on playing with it.

It just happens at the cement industry is a very regulated industry. So, what EcoCem did instead of focusing on the customers, they focused their attention on their regulators. And they spent a lot of time engaging the regulators, bringing experts on the new technology to regulators. They managed to have the regulators actually accept and propose the new technology. And then the customers walked in. So, this is again, a very good example where the innovation didn't come by creating value to the customers, the construction companies. But to the regulators who are the people who can influence what the customer do.

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Sponsor Voice: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation based in Kansas City, Missouri, that seeks to build inclusive prosperity through a prepared workforce and entrepreneur-focused economic development. The Foundation uses its $3 billion in assets to change conditions, address root causes, and break down systemic barriers so that all people – regardless of race, gender, or geography – have the opportunity to achieve economic stability, mobility, and prosperity. For more information, visit www.kauffman.org and connect with us at www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a good segue because I think a lot of folks think about innovation as this solo, mad scientist comes up with an idea and executes on it. But you talk a lot about in the book, this importance of collaboration. It is important engaging that idea with others and that. So can talk a little bit more about that process of collaboration.

Ben Bensaou: I think this is very important, I would say that innovation is a team sport. And cross-functional teams are very important. And I always am surprised when I observed teams, to realize that it's not always the ones we think who are going to have that critical insights.

So, it's very important to bring people with different mindsets. And then it's very important to close the gap. Close the distance between the would be innovators and the customers. Or there would be innovators in the company and the salespeople. For instance, I think these are two spaces and this is part of what I call the innovating engine.

So maybe I can give an example of the first situation. This is about Kordsa. This is a Turkish company. They manufacturer fabric that is used to reinforce tires. On a regular basis, they send cross disciplinary team to their customer's plants. And these teams, they literally camp at the plants of the customers.

They stay for a few days, and I've seen actually in the early days, they used to have a tent in the plant. And they just roam around, talk to people, observe what is happening in the plant. And these are cross-functional teams. You might have somebody from engineering, somebody from R and D, somebody from marketing, from legal, somebody from procurement.

And at one plant, the team saw that the workers and the customer were having trouble to safely handle roles of reinforcing fabric that were loaded onto a truck. Now, again, this is an example of a silence of the customer. The customers knew the problem, they were facing the problem, but they didn't know the supplier could solve it.

So, what happened is that this team at Kordsa, they just went back home and remedy the problems by developing a small kind of methodology, some process. They trained the customers into this new process, and they were able to help them reduce the resources from 30 minutes for three people to 12 minutes for one worker.

And this was literally because they were able to go as a team and they close the gap between the team and the customer. So, it's very important to not only have multidisciplinary team, but also to bring the inside the firm first to bring the innovators together with the salespeople and then to bring the innovators together with the customer.

Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about, and we talked briefly about it, but so everybody in the organization should be an innovator and should have the capabilities and aptitude to make things happen like that. But oftentimes middle managers and higher end managers either block that or change that. What are the roles of mid managers and upper management when it comes to innovation?

Ben Bensaou: Let me talk to this as an example, and then I'll explain the roles. This is about Bayer, the global pharmacology and life science company based in Germany. So, this is a company that has a long history of scientific achievements through R and D and brilliant scientists. Yet in 2014, they decided to create from scratch to create an innovating engine, to leverage the capabilities of the hundred thousand employees in the company.

So how did they do this? First, they made the whole board responsible for innovation. Then they selected 80 senior managers across all country groups and global functions. And these ambassadors, they made them as ambassadors. They were supporting these 80 senior managers became ambassadors, supporting the board. They were innovation ambassadors. And as ambassadors they spend most of their time with middle managers.

Explaining, training, advocating, sponsoring innovation. And then they did something very important for these middle managers. They created a formidable support structure. Between 2016 and 2020, they trained and certified a thousand innovation coaches, which they activated locally across the whole company.

And then for frontline people, they created WeSolve. This is a digital platform where any employee in Bayer can post information about a problem they're struggling with. And invite input and ideas from anyone in the company. So just to give you a sense. I visited the site once at any given time, they have 200 challenges posted on a platform. And then up to now, 40,000 employees at Bayer have participated in this platform.

But to tell you the truth, Brian, what really impressed me the most in the statistic they showed me is that out of the best ideas that are proposed for all these challenges that are posted, two third of the best ideas effectively come from a department or unit different from where the person who posted the challenge works.

This is to give you an example of what is a formal structure for an innovating engine. You can see that the senior leaders are the ones who have to give permission. They have the ones who have to give to permission to everybody to be able to innovate.

They are the ones who create the governance structure, the coaches, and the local coordinators. Then the middle managers have a very important role. I was really surprised in my research to find out that middle managers are actually the key to innovation in corporate settings. Without middle managers, innovation gets lost.

I've found it in any organization, senior leaders, they get it. They're facing a tough environment. They understand that without innovation, they can't survive. Frontline people, I mean the facing customers and non-customers on a daily basis. They understand that they have to innovate to solve the pain point and respond to the wishes and desires.

But the middle managers are the ones who are caught in between because they don't have that direct pressure for innovation. And on top of it, they are the ones who are incentivized on execution. They're responsible for execution and they don't know if they don't get trained. They don't know how to help their people innovate.

So, they need also this support structure to help them any time an individual or a team wants to innovate. They need to have these coaches. So, I would say you need to have senior leaders. You need to have the ones who create what I call the reframing. Allow for the organization to challenge the status quo challenge. Challenge the basic assumptions.

The middle managers are the ones who participate in what I call the integration process. The process by which you connect the ideas and the people and the resources. And the process by which you winnow, channel, select, maybe prototype some of the best ideas before they get moved to the execution engine.

So, this is a very important role for the middle managers. And they are the ones who support the frontline. And the frontline are the ones who have a huge contribution to make to what I call the creation process. The process by which the organization generates new ideas. New ideas are the raw material of innovation.

And I explain how they do this by listening to the voice of the customer, the silence of the customer, and try to learn from non-customers. So, as I say, in this innovating engine, everybody has an important role to play. Senior leaders, middle managers and frontline innovators.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: And I encourage anybody who's listening to this podcast, who's in an innovation to pick up a copy of Built to Innovate. It's got a ton of great case studies, as you said. And it really helps set the framework for how you can start creating more of a culture of innovation within your company. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Ben Bensaou: LinkedIn. I have a profile on LinkedIn. I have also my website on the INSEAD and then for the book, they can go to their local Amazon to find the book and to order it. Or they can go to the website for the book, which is BTIthebook.com. BTI for Built to Innovate thebook.com.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Dr. Bensaou, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to continuing it as the world changes in the future.

Ben Bensaou: Thank you, Brian. It's a lot of fun.

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Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into Your Company’s DNA

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Karin Hurt, Co-author of the new book, Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates. Karin and I talk about the difficulties and opportunities with creating a culture that values innovation and curiosity, and how companies can develop productive micro innovators. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Karin Hurt, Co-Author of Courageous Cultures

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Karin Hurt. She's co-author of the new book, Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates. Welcome to the show, Karen.

Karin Hurt: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Karen, I am excited to have you on the show. I just got a chance to read through a preview copy of the book and excited to dig into that. Tell me a little bit about how you got interested in this particular topic.

Karin Hurt: Yeah. So, I run a company called Let's Grow Leaders. And we work with human centered leaders all over the world with practical tools and techniques. So we were noticing a consistent pattern. As we were going into organizations, we'd be working at the very senior levels of organizations. And we would hear things like why don't more people speak up. Why don't people share ideas? Why do I stumble upon a best practice? Why are people sharing them with one another?

And then we would go into do leadership training at the supervisor level. And we would hear things like nobody really wants my ideas. Last time I spoke up, I got in trouble. You know, why bother nothing ever happens anyway.

We thought, are you all working for the same company? So, you know, most leaders really do want ideas and employees have great ideas to share. So why was there this disconnect?

So, we partnered with the university of North Colorado on an extensive research study to answer that question. When people were holding back ideas, what kinds of ideas were they holding back and what was preventing them from speaking up and sharing ideas to improve the customer experience, the employee experience, or productivity in a process. That's a little bit about why we got so excited about this research.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into it. What makes a culture courageous?

Karin Hurt: You know, our favorite definition of culture comes from Seth Godin, the marketing guru, who just says culture is simply people like us do things like this. And so, when you're talking about a courageous culture, people like us speak up. They share ideas. The default is to contribute. People are coming to work every day saying, huh, how can I make this better. And managers are proactively going out and asking for those ideas and responding well when people share them.

Brian Ardinger: So clearly that is not the case in a lot of organizations, at least the ones that I've worked with and have been around. It's not always courageous. What do you think makes it so difficult for people to speak their truth or overcome that particular fear?

Karin Hurt: Yeah. So, Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard who wrote the Fearless Organization, you know, she's really a pioneer of psychological safety. And she talks about people are more likely to hold onto a negative experience than a positive experience. And that really played out in our research as well.

We would ask people; we did a whole qualitative set of interviews in addition to the quantitative study. And we would say, okay, if you're holding back an idea, you know why? And they would say, well, because you know, something bad happened in the past. Was okay, how long ago was that?

And you wouldn't believe it. Sometimes people say, well about 10 years ago. And then we would say, well, was it at this company? Oh, no, no, no. I was away at some place completely different. But it was enough to teach them that speaking up is scary. So that's one piece of it. And then, you know, other things that came out in our research, 49% said, I'm not regularly asked for my ideas. Something as simple as that.

And when we got underneath that binding, the managers are saying, well, I told them I have an open door. And the problem with an open door is it's passive. And for some people, especially if they've had a bad experience in the past, it still takes some level of courage to walk through that open door.

And another thing that people said, which the most surprising finding quite frankly for me was 56% said, they're not sharing ideas because of fear they will not get the credit. And, you know, as fascinating. As I've been sharing that statistic people like aha. Yeah, well that happened to me too. And so, I think that really resonates with folks. And then another statistic that I thought was really interesting was 50% said nothing will ever happen. So why bother?

And sometimes that nothing will ever happen. Isn't actually true. Something has happened, but the loop isn't closed. Right? So, people think their idea went into this black hole, you know, and because we're not circling back. So, whether it's an employee survey, it's a suggestion box. It's in a one-on-one meeting. Are we closing the loop and what we call responding with regard to the ideas that are coming forward?

Brian Ardinger: That's a fascinating insight, because I see that a lot when we talk with corporations and what are their innovation efforts. And a lot of them say, well, we're doing these hackathons. Or challenges and asking for employee feedback.

And that's great to do that, but what they fail to do is put the process in place and what to do with those ideas after they come through the funnel. And like you said, be able to either close the loop or have a process that moves those particular ideas forward. So, you don't have this environment where people throw things in and, and again, like you say, the black hole of nothingness. And they get discouraged to do it again.

In the book, you talk a lot about this loop between clarity and curiosity, kind of back and forth. Can you talk a little bit about that and why that's so important?

Karin Hurt: Yes. So, when you're building a courageous culture, it really does start with clarity. And that's clarity around two things. One clarity that you really do want people's ideas. And we found this to be really, really critical as we were testing the different tools and techniques. Clarity about where you need a great idea.

So, you know, not just going out and saying, hey, do you have any ideas to improve the business? Or what do you think we could do to improve productivity? That feels intimidating. Yeah. That's like, well, gosh, where do I start? I have so many ideas.

So instead, if you say, can you tell me one idea that you have to and then fill in where your strategic initiative is. You know, to improve our diversity, equity, inclusion efforts. One idea to take this new product to market. One idea to go into this new customer space. One idea to improve the customer experience. When you can ask for that, and that constraint actually owns up the creative process. And then it's showing up with curiosity. And proactively going out and asking people for their ideas.

And we have a variety of tools to do that. You know, one is simply asking courageous questions. And a courageous question is simply a specific and vulnerable question. So, one of my favorite comes from a client of ours. I've known Don Jaeger for 10 years, and he has been consistently asking this question and he's moved from a couple of companies, and he continues to do this. And it worked so well for him.

He's the COO of his contact center company. What is one policy we have that just sucks. Now he's asking his frontline agents. The people answering the phones, who are talking to the customers all day long. He knows if they have a policy that is annoying the customers, those folks, the ones that are hearing it. And it's vulnerable because he's the COO.

I mean, he either has made the policy or is endorsing the policy, that's pissing off the customers. And so, he finds that when he asked that specific vulnerable question, Then he's got a conversation going, and then he says, oh, thank you. What else? And now it's created a safe space for people to share what else is on their minds? He's said this he's gotten a lot of really good insights around that.

Another example of curiosity is teaching people how to vet their ideas so that they bring you better ideas. And one model that we use, and we teach in our training programs is our idea model, which is okay, when you're thinking through an idea.

Tell me why is this idea interesting, meaning strategically aligned with where we're headed as an organization or the project we're working on? D is it doable? Tell me why you think we could actually pull this thing off. E is an engaging meaning who else might we need to include in this? This is where you teach your team to think about stakeholders and then A, what are a couple of key actions recommended next steps to get started?

So, you know, if you were an employee and you were sitting here listening to this and saying, yeah, I have ideas, but I'm still a little nervous. If you went to your manager and said, gosh, you know, I really care about this team. I want us to be successful. I have an idea. Here's why it's interesting. Here's why it's doable. Here's who else? I think we need to include. And here are a couple of next steps. They still might not implement your idea, but you are going to show up as a critical thinker, team player, who wants to make an impact.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that I've talked about in our practice is this idea of changing the mindset. Most ideas are quite frankly crap when they first start. You haven't figured everything out. It's new and unknown and that.

So, if you come in with more of a side project mindset. It's like, this is my side project, or this is my experiment that I want to run, it changes the framework. And a lot of times it gets rid of that fear of it having to be perfect to launch. Or having to be perfect to have that conversation with your boss and that. What's your take on that?

Karin Hurt: I can, I agree with you more. I love that so much. You know, I'm always like, so just do a pilot. And, you know, I was at Verizon for 20 years and I led some really large teams there. And in one of those roles, I had a particularly change resistant boss. Like he just was super corporate. He didn't want to try anything different, you know, he's like, if it didn't come from headquarters, we're not doing it.

And that's not me. And I'm not happy leading in a role like that. And I had a big job. So, I was constantly saying, let's just try it in this one market. And let me prove it in. Let's just try it with a couple of our employees. Let's take a couple of our high performers and let them kick the tires on this thing.

Yeah. And that made it very, he's like, okay, but don't tell anybody you're doing it. Yeah. But then he was very happy to take it to headquarters when we proved it in. And so, I think that is a way to deal with that. And I'll say that even when we're selling in training programs to folks, I'm like you don't need to say you're going to train all of your leaders, just give me one team. And let me show you the impact and how this will play out in your culture. And that's really much easier for people to say, oh yeah, well, we could try that.

Brian Ardinger: So, in your book, you talk about how you're trying to create micro innovators. These small, powerful people that can take action and do things. Is this something that you see courageous cultures being built from the ground up or top down or a combination of both.

Karin Hurt: Mostly you need to go from the top down. For our first book, Winning Well was really more practical for the frontline managers to do this. To really truly create a courageous culture, you need to do all the things, right.

You need to be having very clear that you do want a culture of innovation. You need to be communicating that consistently five by five. You've got to have strategic priorities that people know where things are headed. Some of that can come from the top, right? With that said either you're a manager listening to this, or you're an individual contributor and saying, I would like to be a micro innovator.

You don't need to go out and declare, well, we need to build a courageous culture around here. Everybody should read Karin's book. No, just figure out where is one area of the business that could improve? And come up with a little idea. It doesn't have to be game-changing. It's just a little idea that would make things better.

How would you have less stress in your day, if one process was improved. How can you collaborate better and reduce the friction that you've got with this other department that's driving you crazy? You know, that's the micro-Innovation. And when you have a culture where more and more people are coming up with these little incremental ideas, they completely add up to build a more courageous culture.

Brian Ardinger: How do you start measuring your progress and success? How do you know if you are on your way to building that courageous culture? What things do you look at and what things can you measure?

Karin Hurt: Yeah, so I would say one of the things that you really will see is you getting more ideas when you are in meetings, what is happening? Is it you're coming in with the agenda and everybody's listening to you and taking notes and doing what you say? Or are people saying, you know what, I'm not sure that's going to work. Or what about this? Could we try it this way? Or have an idea.

And I think the quality of your ideas, because at first you might get a lot of ideas, then you're like, oh my goodness, why did we even open this can of worms? But over time as you teach people, what a good idea looks like, how to vet their ideas, how to articulate their ideas, how to, to your point pilot and test their ideas, you will see that happening.

And then, you know, I think the other thing is the irony about a courageous culture is it takes less daily courage to show up because this is the way we do things around here. So, it doesn't feel courageous to raise my hand because everybody is raising their hand.

So, I think that is one of the things. Now, where does it play out in business outcomes? Well, you're going to see ideas that improve productivity. That improve the customer experience. So, you see those metrics improve.

And from an employee engagement perspective, it will definitely improve retention because people will feel seen. And, you know, we have this one client we've been working with for two years now. And we have trained pretty much everybody. Every leader from the senior team to the VPs, to the Director in the revenue generating and the revenue enabling side of the business it's become cultural.

And one of the interesting things that they've told us is, you know, before we started working with you and really introducing this courageous cultures concept, the number one reason people were leaving was leadership. That's what they said in their exit interviews. Now it's not one of the top reasons people are leaving anymore. The cost savings of better retention is tremendous.

Brian Ardinger: We are living in this new world hybrid world, or COVID, everything has literally changed the way every business is working. What are some of the trends or things that you're seeing and how can courageous culture play out as we evolve the workspace in general.

Karin Hurt: Yeah. So, a couple things that I'm seeing play out as I'm sure you are too, is one, is there is a deeper need for human connection. People are really craving it. There's been a lot of mental health issues. There are people who've been through a lot. We're all tired. And so, leaders need to be more attuned to that than ever.

And part of what we've seen as I've been watching good leadership and bad leadership throughout this time, is good leadership is really correlated to are people willing to show up and be authentic and a little bit more transparent than they have in the past. And I've watched people, managers who've showed up, you know, with their teams and said, I know this isn't easy. It's not easy for me too.

Here's why, you know, why I know this is hard for you. Here's a little bit of a, what's been happening to me. But here's what I do believe. Now clarity. I believe in you; I believe in this team. And I know that we'll figure it out. Then curiosity. So, what ideas do you have as we've transitioned to working from home? What do you need? What's one idea that you have that could make you more productive while you're working from home?

And so, it's that. It's that human, being, being human. And I think if there's any silver lining out of this whole mess that we've been in, it's that people are paying more attention to leadership. And to developing their leaders and understanding that you can't do it without the deeper human connection.

Brian Ardinger: Well and that's so difficult in a remote type of environment. Are there things that you're seeing that have made it easier for some companies to latch onto that? Or create that more intimate relationship even though a lot of them are remote.

Karin Hurt: So, the number one thing I would say is getting really great at one-on-one meetings. And not just phoning in the one-on-one meetings, where you show up, you have the same agenda every time, you know, and you just check it off. It's saying what does this person, this human being need most at this time.

And so, you know, we talk about there's five different things that you could include in your one-on-ones. Are you having a connection one-on-one where you're just really checking in on a human level? Are you having a clarity one-on-one where you're really reinforcing strategic priorities? So, people understand what's most important right now in the sea of things coming at them.

Are you curios? A one-on-one where you're going to ask them for their ideas. And so, thinking about each person on your team. And then how do you mix up the way you're doing the one-on-ones so they feel fresh. That they are serving the team. And I think if every manager could get really good at one-on-ones you're halfway there. Yeah.

Brian Ardinger: Well, we have a lot of startup founders who listen to this podcast as well. Do you have any advice for companies that are forming new cultures and how to get it right early and avoid some of the pitfalls that bigger companies have fallen into?

Karin Hurt: Absolutely. And that's actually one of our favorites. We work with a lot of clients that are venture based, fast growing startups. And that seems to be a sweet spot because as you're growing fast, you get to that point and you're like, oh, we probably ought to be more intentional about our culture and the values and the behaviors.

And so, the things that I would say there is start by really defining what does success look like. And, you know, one way we actually do that with folks is we give people two pieces of paper and say draw the picture of what we're trying to be. Draw the picture of what we look like right now. And, you know, sometimes you'll see, especially with startups, the house is on fire.

Usually there's a house on fire somewhere in the room. Right. And we would like not to be that. We would like to be smooth and organized. Or you'll see, gosh, we're in a lot of silos when we were really small, we just got in a room, and we figured it all out. And now as we're growing, we've got unnecessary bureaucracy that is creeping in and we never wanted to be that way.

You can start there. And then you'd say, okay, what are the values? And not just, you can do this well, or you can do this in a way that's just not going to work very well. What are the values and don't just paint them on your walls or put it on your internet and call it a day? Then get really tactical about what are the behaviors both internally about how you're going to function and externally how you're interfacing with your clients or customers. And how does that play out?

And then you could even say, get, come up with some scenarios of, and we do this a lot with folks. What are these two values are in clash? Like if compassion for your employees, is in tension with a, you know, responsiveness value. How do you play that out in real life scenarios?

And so, and just getting people to talk about that and then looking at every element from how are you hiring, how are you onboarding? How are you rewarding and recognizing? And are you building those values and those behaviors consistently.

And the final thing I would add there because this happens most of the time, if there is a turkey who is not behaving according to your values, just because they were there with you from the very beginning, if they are destroying your culture and you keep looking the other way, everybody is watching that.

And you can say we value integrity, but if they're not operating with integrity, that is a problem. And some of our clients have had to make some really hard decisions of people that they cared about who were there at the beginning, but who could not behave consistently according to the values. And they have not regretted having to make that choice.

Brian Ardinger: It's about being courageous, right? Yup. Doing the hard things sometimes. Excellent. Well, Karin, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit about this. I, again, encourage people to grab the book. It's called Courageous Cultures. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Karin Hurt: So, our website is letsgrowleaders.com and on LinkedIn. Love to connect with people on LinkedIn. Answer any of your questions. It's Karin with an I. Karin Hurt on LinkedIn

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Karen, thanks again for coming on to the program and looking forward to continuing the conversation as the years continue on.

Karin Hurt: Excellent. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure.

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Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Todd Embley, Senior Startup Advocate for Agora. Todd and I talk about the new technologies and trends from no-code tools to embedded audio and video platforms, that affect how we see, hear, and interact with each other. We also explore how companies are tapping into startups and startup ecosystems to enable founders to build and impact the world more effectively. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation as the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO. Each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Todd Embley, Senior Startup Advocate for Agora

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Todd Embley. He is a Senior Startup Advocate for Agora and a formerly with China Accelerator. So welcome to the show, Todd,

Todd Embley: Thank you, Brian. It's good to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because we've met a while back early in my startup days when I was running NMotion. You were in China. And we met at some global accelerator network conference. I think it was in San Diego, perhaps. So, you spent a lot of time in Asia, as I did. And recently moved back to the states, working for a interesting company called Agora. We had a chance to run into each other again in Lincoln.

Todd Embley: Yeah. Thanks very much. I actually did come back from China and moved to the U.S. but now I'm back in Canada. I am Canadian and I'm living in Western Canada.

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to start the conversation with the most recent company that you're with is a company called Agora. It's an interesting company for a couple different reasons. And it's a real-time engagement platform that a lot of popular companies are using to build on top of like Run the World, which is something that we've used for our IO Conferences and that.

And some of our IO Live events. I think you guys provide like the SDKs and the building blocks to enable these types of startups to build off of. So, I I'd love to get your take, not on just Agora, but you've got an interesting role there as a Startup Advocate. So, what is a Startup Advocate?

Todd Embley: It's a great role, for those of us who aren't necessarily adept at selling. And we fall under marketing. And the role is really, if I were to compartmentalize everything that we're about and our ethos and thesis. Is go out into startup land and be as helpful as possible. Try to integrate. You know, we sponsor. I run workshops. I meet with lots and lots of entrepreneurs all the time, and we're just out there trying to be as helpful as possible.

And the great thing that the company and the founders and senior leadership have all gotten behind is just be out and be as helpful as possible. And wear the t-shirt while you're doing it. That's almost the be all and end of it. And for those that are really interested in what Agora is and what Agora does, then we can get into that. But essentially, we're not trying to put it in front of everybody and not trying to blast everybody with, with Agora specifically.

The team is comprised of people who have been entrepreneurs, been in startups, been in VC, run accelerators. And who have just a lot of empathy for startups and that's kind of where it begins and ends.

Brian Ardinger: We see a couple of different companies use this approach of startup advocate type of program to help build their business. Walk me through like, what are the benefits and the reasons why a corporation would want to put together some type of program around this.

Todd Embley: You know, I think AWS and what they've been doing for as long as they've been doing it are kind of the benchmark. And they were, I would say the pioneers, at least the most famous pioneers of running programs like this. Our senior leadership had an opportunity in China to talk to the heads of AWS Activate in China.

And they divulged some interesting statistics, which I think were the precipice of Agora wanting to build their own startup team as well. And that was that after 15 years of them having a program, they will now attribute up to 65% of AWS revenues today to the activities, you know, over the last 15 years, of their startup program.

And what we're trying to do is invest in our future huge customers. Knowing that the world's next billionaire companies, trillion-dollar companies. The unicorns of the future are still just startups today. And if we want to align ourselves correctly with what it takes to build a startup and how hard it is, let's maybe try to get out of their way at the early stages while they're trying to cross the early chasms of, you know, and the difficulties of what it takes.

So, from a revenue perspective or from a cost perspective, let's give our stuff for free. You know, until you, their revenue. You can't get blood from a stone. So, while they're still searching for product market fit and revenue, let's let them use our software for free until such time as they are then finding product market fit and then able to start generating revenue. And only at that time, should we then start to talk to them about actually paying for the service?

Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. And obviously it seems to be working. I think I read on your website, you've got over 50 billion minutes of engagement on the platform. Probably going up as we speak. I don't know if you can speak to any specific use cases or specifically what you do when it comes to helping these companies get up and off the ground.

Todd Embley: Sure. As you alluded to, there are some famous companies that have been using us, especially in the real-time audio space. There are a few NDAs in place. So, you could mention who those companies are. And by all means it's pretty widely known. I necessarily can't speak directly to who some of those more famous ones are.

But the nuts and bolts of the program essentially boils down to free minutes. So, my Director, Tony Blank. He and another friend of ours, Paul Ford, used to do this at SendGrid. And that's where they were a big supporter of the Global Accelerator Network where you and I met in the beginning and then the Twilio acquisition of SendGrid. So, he was there. And they were doing a great job as well.

And leading on some of the data from their experience there, or Tony's experience there, and then understanding our business and the data that we had over the years that Agora has been thriving. We positioned the amount of minutes at 1 million, we figured 1 million minutes of Agora should be enough for most companies to achieve product market fit and revenue.

If you haven't achieved product market fit and revenue, after using a million minutes of Agora, you may have some underlying other issues that are getting in the way of that. But we really feel that upwards of 80%, even 90% of companies who do achieve and use up the million free minutes, should be at a position of having raised money and are revenue positive.

At which time we feel comfortable to say, okay, though, now we do have to, for our business purposes, need to, to work on something and we'll hand them over to sales in a gentle way and work on getting them some discounts and start forecasting future usage and things like that. But those are the nuts and bolts.

In our world of real-time video, real-time audio, just the real-time engagement aspect of it. There are certain verticals that are really taking off. I think health is obviously a big one where you have doctors and patients or therapists and their clients. We're seeing a lot in fitness, so for coaches training. Doing big group classes. Education is probably our biggest. I think that's a pretty obvious use case of doing real time lessons with teachers and things.

But we're also seeing a lot of activity in the area of gaming where people want talk to each other. They want to be on video with each other while playing games together. Live performances and experiences around online virtual concerts or comedy shows or things like that as well. There's a lot of added context that you can get from engaging in real time, over video. That you couldn't get at an actual conference.

You know, there are solutions coming around blending those where you might be at the concert, but you'll also have on your phone different camera angles that are available to a viewer. And you can get other contextual information that is happening plus chats with other people at the concert or something like that.

And then, you know, a lot of multi-verse. A lot of VR stuff. I mean, I had a conversation with a startup out of New Zealand who was working in the overcoming therapy space, where if you had a phobia of dogs, you know, a psychologist would work with their client, and they would go to a kennel and slowly start to integrate and learn how to overcome.

But now we can do that in a VR environment, but overlay a lot of very interesting artificial intelligence, facial recognition. Stuff like that to really be able to measure the things that are almost imperceptible to the human eye, to understand like the dilation of their pupils when faced with a small dog versus a big dog or different breeds or something, just giving a lot more contextual information to help a psychologist really work with their client to overcome a phobia.

So, it's fascinating to work with the startups because they are thinking of use cases that we even within Agora can't think of.

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Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's an interesting thing because the platform itself is really robust. You can do video calls and voice calls and interactive live streaming and real-time messaging and white boarding. And like you said, the toolkits are there. And I think this fits into one of those trends that we've been talking about, where it's never been easier for a startup founder to find the tools they need. They don't necessarily have to build everything from scratch nowadays.

They can find partners and no code, low code tools and things like that to get up and going and testing the marketplace a lot easier than ever before. And get to those use case scenarios that a platform tool provider may not have thought of originally. I'm curious to get your take on some of this accessibility to tools that founders didn't have maybe, you know, 10 years ago when we started in this business.

Todd Embley: Yeah, it's amazing. I think back to, I used to be with SOSV was the fund, and we were doing kind of an internal conference for all of our portfolio, all of our mentor network. Everybody that had ever been involved with us, including investors in Agora or LPs. And we had a guy named Dave McClure come and speak.

And somebody had asked him is your eight-year-old daughter learning how to code. And he said, let me rephrase that. I think what you're asking me is do I think that it is important for very young people to learn how to code and essentially that's what you're looking for.

And he said, you know, coding is like learning any other language, you know, in the development of the brain and how that enables young people to really grow. But it is in his opinion, he said it is just kind of a commodity. He said coding is probably going to become a commodity. And we've seen that in the low-code no-code explosion.

And then he thought, you know, design would probably not be that far behind. I mean, there probably will be a day in the future where our phones will know everything they need to know about us, where you won't have to necessarily code or design the UI UX CX, of how an app works and feels. Because it can just deploy to our phone and our phone can tell the app how to develop itself as it lands on our home screen, in the way that we prefer it to be from colors to where the settings are or where our profile lives.

And we can navigate that so intuitively. It has been absolutely amazing. And I think, you know, as we go, we've launched our app builder where pretty much anybody, even without any coding experience can go on and within 20 minutes create a video conferencing tool that they can use for their family reunion. You know, that is super easy. So yeah, it's been amazing.

Brian Ardinger: It is kind of crazy to think what are the uses. I'd imagine obviously COVID has changed the dynamic landscape for you guys, especially. And so maybe let's talk a little bit about that. Some of the trends you're seeing with the move to more remote and more virtual environments.

Todd Embley: Anybody who just watches the stock price of Zoom over the last couple of years would understand exactly where this industry has gone, but then factors like the quote unquote Zoom fatigue. And now we're seeing people that want to have more control over the layout and the design and the backgrounds and the information and the chats and emojis and music and all these other things that you can build into it.

Because you know, now for instance, all our conferences went virtual, right? So we are now having to figure out how did you run a web summit or you know, like an East Meets West, that Blue Start-ups does in Hawaii or something. How do we now do this online and create a really great experience where everybody can still try to achieve those same outcomes for why they attended in the first place. It's been a pretty amazing growth that has really kind of pushed the boundaries.

The work from home, I think has been the biggest thing where everybody's now at home. So, there's working with colleagues. There is collection of data. There is monitoring output and outcomes. And, you know, as a department or as a salesperson or marketing has changed. How do we do now market to people who aren't leaving their homes anymore that has now all changed.

It's been such a game changer just in the future of work. I wouldn't say it necessarily changed course, but COVID has absolutely accelerated what we were already starting to think it would be. You know, it's done some damage to the world of coworking spaces, right. Or in-person accelerators or incubators. It's changed how we, even as a startup team go out and find partners and find startups to introduce them to Agora. So, it's had a tremendous impact.

Brian Ardinger: You spent a lot of time ecosystem building for lack of a better term. You know, you go to different communities and see what the landscape is in the startup world. And then again, try to help founders navigate that. So, what are you seeing when you travel around to different startup communities and that. What's maybe different than it was five or six years ago?

Todd Embley: There's a lot of factors. Entrepreneurship and startup land, as we know it, just even in the last 20 years, let's say since the .com boom and bust. And then, you know, Paul Graham kind of the Godfather of the accelerator starts Y Combinator in 2005. And so, the way investors started investing, and then there was, you know, a lot of information and then Crunchbase and others started coming around. And then, then we had 10 years of data from Crunchbase, somewhere around 2013. That we're now measuring how well people were investing, how well-performing that whole venture financial class was doing.

And we've seen things where investors are now looking more at timing of solutions versus not just team and problem, but they had so many investments that were either too early, too late. And they started to recognize that. A lot of funds are starting to look internally and seeing, trying to reinvest inside the value that they've created to capture more of the food on the table versus being so outwardly focused.

For our jobs, even in doing ecosystem development, how to startups find us versus how do we find them? If there's no meetups. If we're not able to do in-person startup weekends, then how are we able to find them, to attract them, to support them and to help them. How are investors doing their due diligence? You know, things like DocSend. Right.

Having that digital data room with a lot of analytics built into it. So that founders can now not only see who's entering and who's looking at their due diligence documents at, but where in the deck are they spending time? On what slides, what is important? Where are they stopping? Where are they looking at? There's a lot of data and information that they can measure from that as well.

I'm not exactly sure if that answers the question, but it is so drastically different. And now we're going back into, you know, web summit is in-person. I'm going to be going to that next week after we record this. That is going to be a different experience as well. And then there's the hybrids that are kind of doing both. It's changed a lot.

Brian Ardinger: It is definitely interesting. You know, it's always been hard to find startup founders. A lot of times they're heads down doing their thing. You know, over the last five or six years pre COVID, you started to have a different environment where things like coworking spaces and events like Startup Weekend and that, started to bring some of those folks out and started to get some energy.

And then COVID kind of slap that in the face to a certain extent. But now what I'm seeing at least is more collaboration across different communities. So even though I'm based in Lincoln, Nebraska, the network and our reach to different communities for the startups in our backyard, has increased and been beneficial from the standpoint of they're no longer having to be in the middle of flyover country.

They can access folks that wouldn't necessarily in the past look outside of their own Sandhill Road area. So, I guess there's pros and cons to this new environment, but I was curious to get your take on that as well.

Todd Embley: Constraints, breed Innovation. And COVID has drastically brought a whole new set of constraints just by not being able to meet in person as much. So, I think it's the development and the investment in developing a different skill set. You know, you take one sense away, the other senses improve. And so, we've had to become better at being able to build relationships.

And we have video. And we have voice. But suddenly we're tuning in to the video and tuning into the voice. We may not have the same social cues and we may not have the same physical cues to be picking up on things. We used to train entrepreneurs on how to pitch in person. You were on a stage facing an audience. You were standing in front of an investor at a meetup. Here's how you do it. Here's how you talk. Here's how you hold yourself. Be careful of your hands. Don't shift your feet around.

You know, there is all these, you know, all this kind of training, which has had to change. Which has had to develop. And now we're reaching out, we're developing partnerships and I think I've seen a lot of ecosystems lean in on having silos or verticals that they're starting to own to be seen as a place.

And accelerators are now going virtual, where they're pulling from anywhere. Right. We have a focus. We're vertically focused. And so even if you're in Brazil or you're in Russia or wherever, this is the accelerator that you want to join because the world has just been absolutely flattened. And now this is the best place. This is the best accelerator, and you don't have to fly in and live here. Right? So now you've seen costs of living. People are moving out of the main centers. It's just, it's been a tremendous change.

Brian Ardinger: You've spent your life helping founders. And I'd love to get your input on for our founders that are listening to this show. Some of the biggest obstacles or barriers or things that you've seen or can help them overcome. Are there particular tips or tricks that founders should be paying attention to nowadays?

Todd Embley: I still think it all starts with the problem. And I still find myself having to talk about deep diving into the problem discussion. And there has been a penchant for the snapshot. And of the landscape as it is today. But I think what we're starting to understand. And what I'm seeing from a lot of questions that come from investors, is it's not as much about what. It's about why. And when you're pitching or talking about what you're doing, you have to start layering in the why.

This is our go to market strategy. Great. Doesn't really matter, but why did you choose that? They're being measured on the way they think. The way they process. The way they built. What data did you take in. Which did you keep? And which did you throw away and why? And then what decision and strategy did you make off of that data?

And why did you decide to strategize that? Why are you deciding to build this next? Why is this the next iteration of what you're doing, this problem that you're trying to solve? Anybody can Google and get a lot of data on a problem that exists today. But do you have a deep understanding of how we got here? You know, we have this Canadian kind of saying of the Wayne Gretzky, don't go where the puck is, go, where the puck is going to be.

And as investors, we're always trying to find the entrepreneurs who are good at figuring out where the puck is going to be. But the only way that they can figure that out, isn't understanding just where the puck is, but how the puck got to where it is. Because only then do we understand the speed and the trajectory and are able to extrapolate off of that to know where it's going with some reasonable degree of accuracy. But we'll never get it right.

But that I think is always be factoring in your why. Nobody is going to be blown away by your what because you're still early stage. Unless you have a hundred thousand downloads or a million MRR, you know, it's just not that impressive. Because the only thing that matters is what people use and pay for.

So, knowing that. Now, we're just trying to measure size you up as a founder. So lean in on all your why of everything that you're talking about so that they can understand how you develop, how you price, how you see the world. Be unique, be different.

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Brian Ardinger: Solid advice. Well, Todd, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights and your experiences from the many years of being in the trenches there. I want to encourage people to check out Agora and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the startup program at Agora, what's the best way to do that?

Todd Embley: Yeah. I mean, if they want to connect with me, LinkedIn is great. Just Todd Embley. I will generally show up. That's a great way to do it. And I'd love to connect. And I love to meet with everybody. And then agora.io/startups is where the entrance to the startup program lives. But Agora.io is where most of the information about Agora lives. And we're happy to talk to anybody, especially partners. Anybody doing events. Anything out there. We'd love to be a part of it. We'd love to sponsor. And try to add value.

Brian Ardinger: Well Todd, thanks again for coming on the show. It's great to see you again and look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Todd Embley: Thanks, Brian. It’s been great.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with entrepreneur and product developer Radhika Dutt, Author of the new book, Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. On this episode, we talk about the product diseases holding back good product development, as well as ways to develop and execute a more radical vision to build products that have impact in a changing world. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Radhika Dutt, Author of Radical Product Thinking

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Radhika Dutt. She is the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. Welcome to the show.

Radhika Dutt: Thanks so much for having me on Brian.

Brian Ardinger: I am excited to have you on the show. I always love to have entrepreneurs and product folks on here to talk about what it takes to build in today's world. You've been in product development for a long time, and you help companies figure this out. What's the state of product development today? What's working and what's not?

Radhika Dutt: I think the most important thing in terms of where we have landed today, right. Is we've learned that the way we build products is by iteration. The mantras have been, you know, fail fast, learn fast. We keep hearing that you really just have to keep iterating and pivoting until you hit this nirvana of product market fit. And here in lies the problem.

Because Innovation it's like having a fast car, a fast car is great. It's good to have a fast car. But the problem is, if a fast car is just not that useful, unless you know where you're going. And the ability to iterate fast has often given us this illusion that you don't need to start with a vision, just set off on your journey, and you'll kind of discover a vision. And that is the piece that's really not working.

So, if we think about the fact that Lean Startup, Agile, all of these methodologies have really become ubiquitous over the last decade, right? And yet fundamentally the number of startups who succeed or fail hasn't really changed. Right?

So, we've really gotten this approach of innovating fast, but what we're really missing is a methodology that helps us set the direction and be able to navigate to it using this fast car. Meaning that our iterations have to be driven by a vision and strategy. And that's the piece that's been not working so far.

Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, how folks in product and that, or they're building stuff, kind of run in to these product diseases that hold back good product development. Can you talk a little bit about what stops people from developing and maybe getting into this iteration rut?

Radhika Dutt: These product diseases are things that we need to be able to speak openly about. Because regardless of the size of company or the industry that we're in, I keep seeing these same product diseases over and over. So, a few that I've run into or caught myself, right? One that I will admit to contributing to myself is obsessive sales disorder.

This is where your salesperson comes to you and says, you know, if you just add this one custom feature, we can win this mega client. And it sounds mostly harmless as a product person. I was like, yes, let's do this. Right. And pretty soon, by the end of the year, you're sitting with a stack of contracts and your entire roadmap is driven by what you have to make good on. And that's one example.

A really common one is Pivotitus. Pivotitus is where you know this idea that we have that you just pivot until you find product market fit, it leads us to just keep trying different ideas to see what works. And your team just feel demoralized, confused, even your customers, they don't know what you're about anymore. And that's Pivotitus.

Brian Ardinger: I love those. And I think a lot of us in product can relate to that. And even more to that, I think it's not just product folks that are running into these particular issues. A lot has changed in the world of product development with things like no code and low code. And pretty much everyone these days has run into this ability to create something. You know, and it's democratized the product development process in general.

And so, whether you are in product today and you've seen these things, the majority of folks are going to be running into these diseases, whether they know it or not. What can you talk about to the new product person, the person who maybe is new to this world and trying to understand what does it take to build something of value in this world?

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, maybe first, I want to talk about what I mean by product. Because, you know, traditionally we've thought about product is a software or a hardware. A thing, basically, right. A digital or a physical thing. And that view has really become outdated is what I've realized. To me product is your mechanism to create change in the world.

It's your vehicle for whatever that change is. And so, you know, whether you're a non-profit, you're working in a government agency, in a high-tech startup, or even freelance. You're creating change in the world. And as a result, you are building a product. And I think that's the first fundamental realization.

Given that this is our new definition of product for every person who's entering this field, the question is then, you know, how can you create change very systematically? So, you're most likely running into these diseases and I list seven of them in the book. A few other examples are Hyper Metracina. Which is where we're all about analyzing data and optimizing for metrics, except that sometimes those wrong metrics.

And things like Strategic Swelling. Which is where your, either your organization or your product just tries to do more and more and more, but it's just a very bloated product and you kind of lose your way.

So, all of these diseases, like it's not just in your product itself, it's in your organization that you might be seeing it. And so, we need to think about product differently as a mechanism to create change. And then think about, are we experiencing these diseases in our organization?

And then finally, if you're seeing it, then it's time for a new approach where you create change systematically and build the successful product systematically, which is what Radical Product Thinking is about as a methodology. Instead of taking this approach of let's just try what works, which is kind of evolved from the venture capital business model over the last decade.

Brian Ardinger: And what I like about the book is you say all the stuff that we're doing when it comes to Agile or Lean or that, they're good tactical stuff to continue to do. But you almost have to have a layer above. That thinks about the vision and thinks about how does the vision fit into, you called it the Sustainability Matrix. Maybe can you talk a little bit more?

Radhika Dutt: You know, one of the things that I've found is, we all know that we need a vision, and it's just that the way we've thought about a vision and what we've learned about, what's a good vision has been so flawed until now. For the longest time, we've heard that a good vision is a BEHAG or a big, hairy, audacious goal. For the longest time, you know, vision statements such as to be the leader in blah, blah, blah, or to be number one or number two in every market.

We're touted as just visionary statements. That this is what you want in a vision. You know, stating your big aspirational goal. And the Radical Product Thinking way, what I realized is your vision should not be about you or your aspirations at all. And so, your vision has to be about the change you want to bring about.

That's really the starting point of a Radical Product Thinking approach. And so, what I mean by good vision is thinking about questions like whose world are you trying to change? What is their problem? Why does that world even need changing? Because maybe it doesn't. And then you can talk about what the world would look like when you're done. And how you'll bring about this world.

And so this is the Radical Product Thinking Approach, where instead of the short slogan you're writing, well, there's this fill in the blank statement that I use for writing such a vision statement. That really makes it easy to do this and answer those profound questions. And once you have a vision, then you can use this vision versus survival.

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Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I'd like to talk a little bit about this Radical Vision Worksheet that you have in the book. It's really almost a Mad-Libs way to fill out and fill in the blanks to get you thinking about what your vision really is and who does it serve and how does it work?

And I've heard you talk about this before. Like it almost creates, what you said is that the source code of your vision. And then that's not what you necessarily have to portray to the world as far as the marketing around it. But it gives you that guiding force when you're in a product meeting, working with your teams. To look back at that source code and say, hey, are we on track.

Radhika Dutt: Exactly. And you know, this idea that your vision statement has to be what you tell the world, is really the marketing vision statement, which, you know, you can figure out the marketing aspect afterwards. But first for your own team, what you really need is the blueprint. If I think about this as a house construction analogy. If your team is actually building that house, would they need is the blueprints of the house.

It's not the 3D renderings that look pretty that you start with. Right. And a good vision statement, gives them a clear blueprint of what exactly are we trying to solve? Why are we trying to solve it? And then how are we going to bring about that before?

Brian Ardinger: In the book, you also talk a lot about this trap that we fall into of iteratively building products and that. And so specifically like big companies and that, fall into this trap of they've been building a car the same way forever, and they don't necessarily think about, are there different ways to do that? Can you give me some examples? I read in your book about Tesla and Volt, for example. And the two approaches that they had to developing an electric car. Can you talk about some of that?

Radhika Dutt: One of the fundamental differences between a Vision Driven Product versus an Iteration Led Product is in an iteration led approach, your iterations are driving where you're going. Where as when you're Vision Driven, right, it's your vision that drives those iterations.

So, the example of Tesla versus Volt. Specifically, the Model 3 versus the Chevy Volt. You know, there was this really well-known auto expert, Sandy Munro, and so he took five of these cars and he was looking at these cars under the hood to really evaluate, you know, which car is better. And he had a profound reaction to the Model 3. It was like, wow, this car is revolutionary. It's not inching up.

And whereas on the Chevy Volt, he said, well, this is a good little car, and you know, it's value for your money kind of thing. But the Tesla Model 3, like he was just raving about it. But if you look under the hood, like you really get to the why. The Tesla, it has a 40% more efficient engine, and it had this hall effect that Sandy Munro says, you know, I've only ever heard about it. I never seen an engine being built using this approach.

And he couldn't even figure out how they manufactured some of the elements that made this engine. Whereas he looked at the Chevy Volt, he was like, you know, I'm very familiar with all of these pieces. This looks pretty much like a gas car except in an electric format.

And then if you look at why Tesla built this transformative product versus Volt was just an evolutionary thing. It all comes down to their vision. The Chevy Volt was built with this vision of beating Tesla Model 3 to market with a car that had a range of over 200 miles. On the other hand, the Model 3 was built with a more transformative vision, a radical vision, which was about the change that they wanted to bring about. Which was to make it no compromise and give an affordable car to a driver who wanted to go green.

And so, the two visions lead to very different products and being vision driven means taking the transformative vision and systematically just infusing it in every aspect of your product. And that's why the end product is so different.

And so, in the Radical Product Thinking, right, the idea is not just that you start with a vision, but it's a step-by-step approach. So that, that vision is very systematically translated into every aspect of your product, into your everyday activities. So, your everyday activities become connected to a vision.

Brian Ardinger: I'd love to get your input on some of the new trends that you're seeing when it comes to product development. Again, a lot of the stuff that used to be new as far as Lean and Agile has, there's a lot been written about. 10 years ago, it was tough to get tactical in that particular space because it was so new.

You know, now we've seen a lot of folks that have executed on that particular format. What are some of the new trends that you're seeing and how do you see the world of product development playing out?

Radhika Dutt: You know, we're still getting better at doing more testing, more AB testing, optimizing, right. And fundamentally the trends that I keep seeing, they aren't that different. It's more that our tactics have improved in terms of how we're doing this. If I think about product management, maybe 10 years ago, we didn't have all these tools to be this data driven. Now, there are just so many tools to be able to know how well your product is working.

Is your user going through the right journeys? What all are they clicking on? What are they doing on your products? Like we've become more data-driven and have more insight into what our users are doing. We capture every piece of data and work on analyzing it. So those are more of the trends that I keep seeing. Right.

But what I haven't seen is a fundamentally big shift in how are we thinking about the data? What exactly are we trying to learn from these insights? So that's one thing. The second trend, this one I'm excited about. I'm starting to see the first kernels of product people realizing that, you know, we're building products that affect society, and we have to take responsibility for what we're building.

There's a chapter in my book, where I talk about Digital Pollution. And the chapter after that is the Hippocratic Oath of Product. It's fascinating to me that these two chapters are so polarizing. There are people who love the fact that I included that in the book. Because this gives you the superpower for building successful products and it has to come with the responsibility of building products that don't create collateral damage to society.

But there's also, an equally large faction of people who say, you know, that had no place in your book. You should just talk about how to build successful products. You shouldn't be talking about, you know, digital production and this Hippocratic oath of product.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it is interesting because you do see a lot more discussion around what it is that we build and the effects of that. And I think 10 years ago, a lot of the product building was I need to build an app because that's the new technology out there. And we've gotten to a place where a lot of that low hanging fruit of product development has been picked.

And so now it's really about, we're having to tackle harder problems. And whether it's climate change or social media injustice or, or whatever, they're hard problems out there. And I think it takes more radical thinking around what type of products we produce to try to solve this particular problem.

So, I found it interesting that you included that in the book as well. Primarily to get people thinking about, it's not just about solving a particular customer pain point. It's like the larger vision that you need to be including as you develop products out there.

Radhika Dutt: Exactly. And my goal was to provide a framework so that we can think about, you know, how are we affecting society with our products. And ways to identify digital pollution that we might be contributing to as only if we have that awareness that we can actually do something about it. But I want to go back to something you just said in terms of trends.

What you talked about, you know, it's basically that we seem to be commoditizing the skillset. When you said we've picked all that low hanging fruit, all that I was saying about, you know, we've gotten better at doing data analytics and AB testing, et cetera. I think that is really like to articulate that trend, it's that those skill sets are becoming commoditized. And what's really going to set people apart is doing that next level, which is what you are just saying.

Brian Ardinger: If there are people listening, they're maybe working in an existing company, iterating through their products and that, but they want to be more radical. They want to be more transformational with what they do. Are there tips or tricks that they can start introducing into their team or into the product development that can help start moving that needle?

Radhika Dutt: I'll share two types. One is, you know, if you are working in a larger organization, it's always hard to bring change. When you bring a radical new idea, it's like you're introducing a foreign body into this organization and you'll see organizational immunity that tries to attack this foreign body.

And so, the first start that you need is to be able to talk about why are you even introducing this new body, so there's more acceptance. So, start with a discussion around product diseases. Very often, like the way I've even approached this, and sort of this slightly sneaky way is, you know, you do a book club where people start to think about these product diseases and kind of like, oh, that's what we're suffering from. So that gives you this first entry point to start talking about, you know, maybe we need a new, radical way of thinking about this. That's one step.

The second is with your world, where you have control, you can start to develop a radical vision and start to use that with your team. You had talked about vision versus sustainability. Maybe, you know, in the book, I call it Vision versus Survival to make it really much clearer in terms of what we're trading off. So having a vision is good, but using your vision in everyday work, that's where the real power comes in.

And so the way you use your vision is if we think about our own intuition, what we're really doing is we're balancing the long time against the short term. Which means that we're thinking about vision versus survival in the short term, where vision is the longer-term picture. And so things that are both good for the vision and survival they're of course ideal.

But if we always focus on just the ideal, then we're just still being short-term focused. And so sometimes you have to invest in the vision where it's good for the vision, but not good in the short term. For instance, if you're refactoring code for three months or working on technical debt, you're investing in the vision. And the other quadrant, right, is Vision Debt. Basically, if you're finding this Obsessive Sales Disorder disease, it's because you have too much vision debt. It's where you're doing things that are good for survival in the short term, but it's not good for the vision.

And so the way you can infuse your vision in everyday actions is you start to talk about your decisions on this two by two matrix of Vision versus Survival. If you find yourself taking on a lot of vision debt, then you know that, okay, maybe something needs to change here. And talk about your decisions so that everyone is aligned on what are the right trade-offs for your particular company. There aren't any right answers, but those discussions are what really are most important.

The tips that I have for our listeners is you start with product diseases and a discussion of why you need a new approach. Then work on a vision and then use that vision and making decisions as you trade off long-term against short term.

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Brian Ardinger: I love that. And I encourage anybody who's listening to grab the copy of the book, because it does walk you through the process. It gives you some great frameworks. Some exercises and a lot of great examples as well. So, if people want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way do that?

Radhika Dutt: So, the book is on Amazon. It's Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. The free tool kit is also available on the website. It's radicalproduct.com. And then finally, if people want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm easy to find there. And I always love to hear stories of how people are applying Radical Product Thinking in their innovation journey.

Brian Ardinger: Radhika, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk about the book and all the new things that you're seeing out there. I'm excited to see where the world is going when it comes to product development and appreciate your time today.

Radhika Dutt: Thanks so much for having me on this has been such a pleasure.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dave Parker, five-time founder, and author of the new book Trajectory: Startup. Dave and I talk about a range of topics for helping founders go from ideation to product market fit. And this conversation was part of our IO Live Series recorded during Startup Week Lincoln. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, Founder of InsideOutside.io. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Dave Parker, Five-time founder and Author of Trajectory Startup

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to thank our sponsors for this event. We are part of the Techstars Startup Week here in Lincoln. So, we wanted to give a shout out to them and Startup LNK for making this all possible.

Also Inside Outside is sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. As many of you may know about the Kauffman Foundation, they run 1 Million Cups and a variety of other things, but they're a private, non-partisan foundation based in Kansas City. They seek to build inclusive prosperity through entrepreneurship- led economic development.

So, we're super excited to have them as partners with us here. And you can find out more about them at kaufman.org or follow them on Twitter at Kaufman FDN on Facebook or Twitter. So, thank you again to the sponsors. Thank you, Dave, for coming on, we had set this up when your book was coming out and I said Hey, I've got the perfect time to do this during startup week. When we might have some startup founders who may be having some questions.

You and I met eight or nine years ago through Up Global. We were with Startup America. And you were based in Seattle. You also helped found Code Fellows and you're a five-time founder, so you've got a lot of experience in this particular space. Eight years ago, the startup ecosystem, and what it was like was a little bit different than is today. So, what has been the biggest trends or things that you've seen that it's changed over the course of the few years that we've known each other?

Dave Parker: Well, let me go a little further back. I started my first company in 98 in Seattle. And believe it or not bill gates and Jeff Bezos weren't really giving back to the startup community at that time. Oh, wait, they haven't yet. I mean, Bill gives back to like global change the world stuff. Right. But the idea there was, wow there's a bunch of us doing this startup thing, but there's not really anybody to give much advice.

So, we did a peer cohort. Which was my first thing. And after a while I was like, wow, we need to level up our city. All of us tend to think of the next city bigger than us as like, oh, we want to be more like, Seattle doesn't want to be like Vancouver, Canada. We want to be like San Francisco. Where Portland's like, well, we want to be more like Seattle.

Because I grew up in Portland and then moved here to go to college and never went back. First startup in 1988. Built a software distribution company called license online. The company went from zero to 32 million in sales in 4 years. Which was ridiculously fast. And we went from 3 employees to 150 and in four years. And then we sold the company in 2002.

So then in 98 to 2002, if you remember back there, there was a tech bubble in there and there was 9/ 11 in there. So, it was an interesting time. Wasn't a great time to sell a company now, too. But got it sold anyway. And that was my first startup. First of five. Three of them sold. Two of them failed. One in a rather epic crater fashion. Which is funny. Because it was after the first one, that actually worked.

So, you know, people were like, I wouldn't do this again. And they're like working on the next one? I'm like obviously got a serial glutton for punishment. So, 16 exits total. So as a founder board member advisor. So, my day job is helping companies and founders sell their companies. Which allows me to my 20% time to work on community building and giving back.

Which kind of got me to Startup Weekend and Up Global. Up Global was the merger of Startup America and Startup Weekend. And we did about 1,265 events worldwide, my last full year there, before we sold to Techstars. Including launching Startup Week globally. And we launched it in 26 cities globally, the second year. I ran it in Seattle.

Andrew Hyde started it in Boulder. And we ran it in six cities, the first year. And 26 cities the second year. So, startup communities stuff is awesome. And I love it. It's, as you know, though, it doesn't pay, so you have to have a day job. You have to have a side hustle, so you can keep your community building job, right. Or vice versa.

Brian Ardinger: Exactly. Yeah. I think we're nine years here at the Startup Week in Lincoln. We got grandfathered in when Techstars made it a global deal. But we found it very helpful to have these conversations, even if it's just once a year to get people connected and reengaged with why it's important to have a startup and why a startup ecosystem is so important in your own backyard.

So, you've got a great book out called Trajectory Startup. I would encourage you to take a look at this. There's a lot of books about startups out there. What made you say, I want to take a different take in this and give back to the community by writing a book about startups

Dave Parker: Two big things about the book gap that I saw in the marketplace is one, I mean, you, you know, Brian, you've been around Startup Weekend. I'd see people coming out of Startup Weekend and they're like, woo. I met my co-founder, Charles. We're going to leave at eight and then go start our start up. And I'm like, yikes. Like, there are some things you can know before you leave your day job and your benefits and all those things, which allow you to really look at what do I want to know so I can de-risk this as the first semester, right.

So, I got to do the market research and competitive analysis and look how big the market is and like, and how do I do that? The book's really focused on, the original title was Six Month Startup. And then I started delivering it in different formats and I'm like that doesn't work for the brand. So, it became Trajectory Series.

But the program now is focused on a five-month program that takes you from ideation to revenue. And the idea there is, if you can't get to revenue in six months, it's probably not a great idea. There are exceptions to that rule. Like if you're a B2B or B2B enterprise and you need to build a really robust product, like that's an exception. Or biotech. Or you're doing B to C and you're competing with clubhouse and you're really about growth of users, right? You won't get to revenue in six months.

But in general, you should be able to validate or invalidate your idea in six months was the goal. The second thing that came out of it, I kind of backed into was somebody came to me during my time at Startup Weekend. And they're like, hey, can I have your financial model?

I'm like, well, yes, you can have it. But yours is a business consumer marketplace and mine's a business- to- business subscription. And those are fundamentally different. I mean, we use the same lingo. And as you know, in startup land, we have our own language, which is knowing how to work the system for sure.

But the key there was how many templates would there be. So, I reached out to Crunchbase at the time and the CEO of Crunchbase and said, hey, can you give me a list of every seed funded company in the last 18 months globally. Ends up being twenty-six hundred and fifty-four companies. So hired a team. My son who was in college at the time was my project manager.

And we basically looked at all twenty-six hundred and fifty-four websites and where they didn't have a pricing model or a revenue model, that was obvious, I reached out to them and said, Hey CEO, I'm doing this research project on revenue models. How do you monetize? So, we ended up breaking down 2,600 companies into the logical revenue models and there were 14. And that was it.

So, I would say the most unique part of the content of the book is really the breakdown of the 14 revenue models that are successful in tech. And how you monetize them. So, the basic unit economics of what are the key metrics and KPIs of each of the 14 revenue models. Consequently, I became super geeky about pricing and revenue.

When somebody now gets to give a pitch and they're like, hey, we're doing a blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, you're a marketplace that monetizes this way. And people are like, how did you know that? And I'm like, it's actually not a secret. There's 14 just like pick from the list. Right. So, I think for first time founders, the question then becomes what you're building I hope is unique, but how you monetize it is almost never unique.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Brian Ardinger: That's an important point, because I think a lot of times we think about the features or the problem we're solving, but we don't necessarily think about the business model itself and you don't have a business without a business model. So, that's so critical to think even at the earliest stages. It may pivot. It may change based on what you find in the marketplace, but at least going in with here's our initial assumption of how we might make money. And the model that we need to...

Dave Parker: And that, let me break down the business model in three parts for you, because I think one of the things that all of us look at and we're like, oh, it's in our business model. Kind of like this. It's a black box and it's a secret thing. And one of the things I discovered in the process was here are the components of the business model.

So, think about it as a Venn diagram. The top circle is really creating value and how you create value is your product, your service, and your team. And those are the costs associated with creating a product or a service.

So, if you're in a service business, if you and I were lawyers, God forbid. We would bill out on an hourly basis. We'd have a pay rate and a bill rate, and that differential would create gross margins. It's a service business. In a product business it's a little harder to predict because we build the software once and we have thousands of users. So, it's not like, oh, every time we build it, we have to create a new and separate version, right.

But the cost of building that product, whether it's the six engineers in six months or three years, depending on what it is, is a cost associated with creating value. The value created is the product or the service. There's a cost associated with creating a value.

Circle Number Two is the cost of delivering value. And that is your pricing. Because that's a variable, right. That I can adjust. It's my revenue model. How I monetize. It's my marketing and my sales. I fixed the cost to build. I have now fixed the cost to sell. And there's lots of variables in there. There's lots of marketing things you can test. There are a few sales models, not a lot. Marketing is the most creative, and obviously it can be the most expensive in some ways too.

And then what you have leftovers, the third bubble which is your top line revenue and your gross margin and hopefully net profit. Those are outcomes. You don't get to control those. You get to control your cost to build it, and you get to control your cost to sell it and the price. But when you think about it, that way, you're like, oh, there's only so many variables I get to be in control of. And since those are the ones that you control of, then I'm a strong advocate of like, know what the levers are you can pull.

I talk to a lot of founders and some of the research was interesting. It basically showed that most founding teams don't change their price at all in the first three years. Which is when you think about it kind of crazy. But us as founders, were like, oh, I know all the product detriments and you know, it was kind of like, I would liken it to, if you said, hey, show me a picture of your son, Brandon, I'd be like, oh, I can show you a three-year-old picture of Brandon.

He's a super cute kid. He's 28 today. Plays lead guitar in a metal band. Tatted up and you know, with sleeves and gages in his ears. It would be true, but I just want it to be accurate. Right. And I think that as founders, one of the challenges we have is how do I continue to reprice my product as a product feature set goes.

So, one of the things I always recommend to founders is having a pricing council, you do once a quarter. Not that you're going to change price every quarter, but you are, you should really think about it.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and you can also do tests around it as well. I remember a story, Eric Ries was talking about. He was working in a corporate environment, but they were saying like, this is the price. And he said, well, have you ever tested it? Do you know if you can go higher? And they said, no, no, because you know we know our customers and blah, blah. And he said, well, why don't we just run a test? And let's, you know, throw out a different price and see what happens. So, they ran the test. And it worked.

And they said, well, why don't we do it again? Let's bump up the price again. And they ran a test and it worked again. And they realized like all these years they were leaving all this money on the table, so to speak. Because they had never even tested it. They never test to see if they could extract more value out.

Dave Parker: There was a company in Seattle and I'm blanking on the name, that I was trying to see if they pull up real quick. So, they were doing a competitor for PowerPoint. It would look at contextually what the content was, and it would make the image suggestions for you.

When they launched the product, the product is all the same price, and they came back at one point, and they just doubled it. And they had zero churn. Right. Which makes you think like, oh my God, how long ago could we have done that? Like nobody left. Everybody's like, yeah, makes sense. Like it would have paid more for it all along.

Brian Ardinger: So, what are the most common questions that you get from founders at the earliest stages? What are most founders struggling with when they come to you?

Dave Parker: When we think about the go to market strategy is definitely a question. So, I'm a product person or I'm an engineer and I'm new to like go to market. There's still a little bit of that theory of like, well, if I get on Tech Crunch, I'll just go viral. And the answer is, no, it doesn't work that way. Right. I mean, it would be awesome if it did. And we see some examples of companies going viral and there's a misattribution Brian of like, well, I'm going to go to market like Clubhouse.

I'm like you're B2B and only B to C companies get a chance to go viral. Like B2B companies get good word of mouth maybe but going viral is math. Right. There's probably three big things in startups that are mysteries, but when you peel them back, they're actually not a mystery. It's just math. Going viral means it's called a K factor.

So, if you have a K Factor of greater than two, I'll give you this base formula. Every customer I buy, I generate two additional paid customers. So, if you think about WhatsApp right or clubhouse, the answer is I'm in a business model there that actually doesn't require a business model. So, I call it new media.

And what you're trying to do is grow your customer base so fast that at some point you'll monetize it through advertising. Not a surprise. Facebook, WhatsApp, et cetera. At some point you'll monetize it through advertising. So Clubhouse, you're starting to see some of those things, Tik TOK with pre roll. And people apply that revenue model or lack of revenue model to like a B2B business and B2B companies don't go viral.

There's been two examples of things that went close, right? So Slack super close to viral. Interestingly enough, Slack before their pivot was a gaming platform. The game sucked but the communication platform was great. So that's one example of a B2B company kind of going viral, but it's really just group invitations.

And the second one was LinkedIn for a very short period of time, about nine months, early, early on. And they built a tool that allows you to upload your entire contact database. And for that nine-month window, they went viral for every paid customer, they got more than two. So that's what viral means. The second one is traction or product market fit.

And one of the things you'll hear from investors all the time. And I work as a venture capitalist now for a fund out of Atlanta. People are like, well, when you get traction, come see us again. Which is really the VC patting you on the head and saying, you're really cute. Like, let me know how it goes. And most first-time founders are walk away from those and go like, oh, that was an awesome meeting.

And I'm like, actually, no, it wasn't, you're going to get ghosted. This is just like, they just swipe left or right. Or I don't know, I don't use dating apps. So whichever way they swipe, they swipe. Wrong way. Traction and product market fit is just math as well. Right. So, when people are like, oh, it's a mystery. Like we'll know it when we see it. I'm like a VC saying it's like porn, like that's crazy. Right.

But product market fit is really not a mystery, it's math. So, when I think about the method Product Market Fit, there are early indicators of Product Market fit and there's trailing indicators. And the trailing indicators are easy. Churn. Surveys of, hey, if you didn't get use our product, what would it be like and how much disappointed would you be? And lack of customer retention through either contracts going down in value versus contracts going up in value. Those are lagging indicators.

The early indicators are really things around like, is the traffic at the top of your site going up, right? Are the number of people downloading your app? Is that going up? Is the time to close going down? Is the conversion from demo to customer going up? And is my average contract value going up? When I put those five factors together. Right? So, closing ratios are improving. Traffic is improving. Demos are improving. Time to close is going down. And average contract value is going up.

It's like the miracle of compound interest. If you don't have any of those indicators moving the right way, maybe you have product market fit, but it's too early to tell. If you do have those indicators coming together, then the answer is right, good on you, man. This is, this is exciting. And as an investor, that's where I get excited about writing the check. Because I'm like...

Brian Ardinger: Because you know your money is going towards the fueling of that growth versus building something or guessing.

Dave Parker: It's the early shift between risk capital and growth capital. And typically, what I see in the early stages are people like, well, we're not spending any money, we're just doing organic growth. And that's okay. But the big question is, okay, how do you scale it with paid growth so that organic growth can go fast. Oh, I'm just doing it through my network today. So I think about it as 10, 100, 1000 customer rule, right?

The first 10 customers as the founder, you're going to go hand-to-hand combat. Go get them yourself. The first hundred, you probably can't do that. You're going to need to hire a salesperson or two. And you need to get good at making them, your value proposition clear. You need to get good at getting your pricing, right.

But that's when you start to scale and as the first investor for you as the founder, that's good news, right? Because it's starting to scale past what I would call the Binary Risk Stage. Right? It's a zero or one it's going to succeed. Right. And angels will invest in you because we like you, right? I'm like, oh, writes you a check for $10,000 and you know, maybe be a board advisor, right, as an angel.

When I'm ready to check for the fund, our average check is $650,000. I'm looking for like numbers and math. Right. And I can help the founders see it. But typically, what happens in venture is if a VC sees the math before you do, they're going to get a really good deal because they're going to put a check in and go like, Ooh, we saw the math before the founder did.

And I'm not good at that. So, when I talk with founders, I'm like, here's the math you should be looking for. And one of the funds I used to work for, it was like, why are you telling them that? And I'm like, because I think better trained founders is always a good thing. So, if you're geeky about math and numbers and unit economics, you'll love the book.

If you're new to that. And don't know, you're like Dave, you're speaking a foreign language and I recognize it is English. You'll learn the lingo with the book as well.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I do think that's vitally important. Especially as you go out and want to go that more venture capital type of route, because these are the things you have to be able to talk to and understand and know, like you said, the levers and that, that you have to pull to make that work.

The other question I want to talk about is early-stage solo founders. One of the biggest things they've got to figure out is how to build that team and the culture and things along those lines. What kind of advice or insights have you seen at the early stage of how do I build that team create it.

Dave Parker: I'm going to give you a little contrarian advice. It frustrates me at times when people pontificate around stuff that they don't actually know. So you'll hear VCs often say culture matters is the most important thing. What they mean by that is personality. When you have a two-person founding team or a three person founding team, you don't actually have culture.

Like there are few repeat entrepreneurs or people come from organizational development, or maybe you're in the services business. And you're like, we're going to build our company on a services culture, and that we really understand.

If you're building a product, your first milestone is product market fit. Because if you get the culture wrong, you can fix it. But if you don't get product market fit, your culture doesn't matter. You don't have a company. Right? Right. So, the first milestone is product market fit. So, in VC you say, oh, culture really matters. What they're really talking about in a three-person startup is do they like you from a personality standpoint or are you an ass?

Right? So, cause if the answer is, I don't think you'll listen to feedback, I'm probably not going to write a check. If I'm like the average investment for me as an angel is probably eight years to exit. So, if I don't like you, I'm probably not going to write a check. Right. So, there's, the things I'm looking for there from a personality profile type tends to be, then there's totally from views, right?

There's the Introvert view, right? Bill gates did okay. Jeff Bezos, I don't think it was really an extrovert. But people will over-index on charisma or salesmanship when the answer is maybe, right. So ultimately, I kind of look at it first and say, is this the right founder? Is it Founder Market Fit? Are they the right people to solve this problem or not?

So, I remember with Mitsui when I was there at one point. I was with a big fund out of Silicon Valley for three years. We got invited to invest in this deal, that was like spin the bottle where 70% of the attendees were girls and 30% were boys. And it was like late teenagers, early twenties. I'm like, we can't invest in this. This is just creepy.

We're a bunch of old guys by comparison. It's just weird. Like, wait, this is the wrong investor fit for us. So, I'm looking at the founders and going, are they the right founders for this market and for this product first off.

Brian Ardinger: And I think that's an important point for the founders to understand is like not every angel or not every fund is the right fit for you. And it's not necessarily, they don't like you or don't think it's great or whatever, sometimes it's an industry that they don't invest it.

Dave Parker: For sure, like the fund that I'm supporting out of Atlanta, is called the Fearless Fund. So Fearless Fund is two African American women were the founders of the fund. They launched the fund with a $5 million exploratory fund. For all the wrong reasons. It blew up, right George Floyd, et cetera. And they're going to close on $30 million. We invest exclusively in black and brown women.

And when they recruited me on it, I was like, oh, hell yeah, this is like, so on-mission right. Because 3.1% of all venture capital over the last 20 years is went to white dudes named Dave. Now I just want to pinpoint Jims are worse than the Daves. They got 3.4%. 2.8% went to all women. 0.8% went to people of color. Like if I could spend the next chapter of my life helping to level that playing field, I'm in. Like, it's kind of a no brainer. But if you came to us and said, hey, I'm a black and brown woman, but I'm based in London.

We would be like, sorry, I can't do it. It doesn't matter how good your ideas because we have what's called an LP Agreement. An LPA. The LPA says we invest in these things, US-based companies, black and brown women founders. And if you're not in that mix, it doesn't matter how good your idea is.

And people tend to take it personally. They're like, I can't believe you told me. No, my idea is brilliant. And I'm like, you're not in our thesis. Right. And if you're not in our thesis, we can't invest in it. So, know that that's pretty common for a lot of venture capital funds. Some VCs are opportunistic by definition and the answer is they can invest in a very broad category and angels can invest in the stuff that they love. Right. I like you as a founder. And I think it's a cool idea. I give it a shot.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. At Nelnet where I do some investing, obviously on our venture capital side, we are a lot more opportunistic or we'll take different bets based on community or other things, rather than things that are always in our sweet spots, so to speak. So corporate venture is a lot different as well. So, it pays to understand who has the money. Why do they want to invest for sure? What are they looking for?

Dave Parker: One of the chapters, I break down what the investor profiles are and why they invest. So, if you think about this as an enterprise sales process, if you, as a founder are out raising money, the question is, is like what stage appropriate capital. Right? So as a corporate VC, you're probably not investing in early risk stage capital. But you're investing in markets you want to keep an eye on usually. Because you're like, oh, that's a super interesting development. Let's put some money over there and see how that works and we'll follow on with it.

Brian Ardinger: So, Andrew has a question in the chat. He says, I work with very early-stage VC funding, pre prototype presales. I've noticed this new trend where companies are being trained in their pitch to propose who they might be acquired by in the coming years. Do you feel this as a legitimate trend and if not, how we advise founders to prepare for acquisition?

Dave Parker: So, I've done 16 exits. So, I definitely have an opinion on this one. I would say the first thing you need to focus on is like focus on building a great product and a great company. Right? And then your acquisition thing becomes a lot easier to discuss. Like I will say my general default is I like products and companies that have logical upmarket buyers.

Right. So there's like, oh, it makes sense that they've and people like, oh, Google's going to buy me. I'm like, actually you can, there's a Wikipedia page. Every acquisition that Google has ever made. And in most cases I will tell you, they're not going to buy you. Now, I know aspirational, you want them to buy you and that's super cool.

But there's a big difference between oh, Microsoft will buy us or it's like, actually, no. Right. So, we're selling a company right now. They're doing about $10 million runway and run rate and revenue. And at one point I was talking with the CEO and he's like, Salesforce will buy us. I'm like, no Salesforce, isn't going to buy you. You have to be way over 10 million in revenue to have Salesforce actually be interested.

So, they bought Slack for, you know, something incredible in the billions of dollars. But they have to do an acquisition that moves the needle in the billions, not in the oh, it's 10 or 20 million. Right. It doesn't mean you're a bad company, it just means you have limited buyer set. So, from a founder perspective, I think if they're asking you the question there may or may not be the right investor because we don't typically look to flip deals.

I know I'm going to be in the deal 7 to 10 years. But I do like where there's a logical upmarket buyer who has a track record of doing acquisitions. So, I would say it's a bit of a Catch 22. By contrast, I will tell you I've been on the board of the company for 17 almost 18 years. That we're the largest player in our space.

Which means the company today is a great, you know, kicks off great dividends. We do really well with it, but there's no easy exit for it because we're the biggest player in that kind of niche market. Which gets you back to the market sizing and why you want to go after a market, that's a much bigger market than a niche market for sure.

Brian Ardinger: Andrew says. Thanks. Great insight. Thank you for that. Question around what are some of the trends that you're seeing and what are you excited about when it comes to startups?

Dave Parker: I think one of the ones that I'm aspirationally looking for, and I can't get myself to get off the bench and go do myself, is I think there's going to be a shift in the social platforms, not just solely based on the fact that watching Facebook stab themselves has been awkward. But the idea of platforms that empower the creatives and creators is super interesting to me.

Like when I look at Sub Stack and things like that, it's like the revenue models are still flipped. Where it's too much of the money, goes to the platform and not enough money goes to the creator. So, I think there's probably a really interesting opportunity that says, hey, how do you flip that model, where the creators make most of the money and the platforms making less.

You know, obviously Facebook's the extreme version of that. But Tik TOK is a good example of, hey, somebody gets on to try to monetize something and finds that they made quite a bit. I think we'll see more platforms develop that empower the creatives. Creative class. I think that's super exciting.

Brian Ardinger: That's interesting too. The whole no-code low-code movement has really changed over the last five years where again five or six years ago, you, at some point had to have a development team or a, or a developer on your team to start building product. And nowadays I tell most founders, there's probably enough out there with low-code no-code tools that you can at least get your MVP some early insight without having to have that developer co-founder on board.

Dave Parker: Yeah, I think that's super exciting as well. It's one of the categories we're following. And I think low-code no-code is the equivalent of what AWS was to buying servers. So, I've raised $12 million and exited $85 million. In my first startup, we had to buy servers and racks and build them ourselves and put them in a, an Exodus Data Center.

And people were like Exodus, what was that? It was one of the biggest epic fails of all time. And when AWS came along and they didn't have to, I could just turn up a virtual server. I didn't have to order something from Dell. It fundamentally changed the cost of doing a startup. Low-code no-code I think will be the same. And my cost of actually doing it.

Now, I still have to learn how to do that. But from a founder perspective, I can learn how to do that in months and not years. And then not have to build the development team. So, using Bubble or Air Table, for sure. Monday, I would say is the expensive version of Bubble or Air Table by comparison, from a founder perspective.

Brian Ardinger: What I like about it is it allows for greater customer discovery and experimentation around your product earlier to get that feedback, to see if you're on the right stage and figure out what features you do need to build or scale or optimize.

Dave Parker: Yeah. Yeah, that one's great. I think in a revenue model side, one of the things we're seeing is in the marketplace components. As we're seeing marketplace shift from transaction fees only to subscription fees, plus transaction fees. I would tell you watching revenue models over the last seven years, ish, total, there's been a few changes in them. One, if you remember Groupon, there's thousands of competitors to it because at a fundamental level, I would say revenue models aren't, they're not defensive.

Revenue models, so think of they're very public domain. So even Google and pay-per-click copied that model from Yahoo. Lost the lawsuit against them. Yahoo had bought a company from Idea Lab who'd had actually patented the pay-per-click model. Yahoo ended up being a great holding company for Alibaba and Google stock, right at the end of the day.

Revenue models are defensible, but if you look at all the copycats of Groupon, you see, most of those went away. Groupon is still alive in a public company, but they traded 0.49 times trailing 12 revenue. So, if you take the market cap of the company divided by sales, I would say that it's 50 cents on the dollar. Right. So as far as what they trade at.

Now, compare that to a subscription business. Well, maybe the next step up would be you and I do a consulting business for a million dollars. That company is worth roughly a million dollars. It's worth one times revenues. So, because if you remember Groupon booked the top line sales of what they sold you for that certificate, but they really only made the margin on the, you know, the 10 or 15% on the margin of it.

So, if you and I had a consulting company for a million dollars, it'd be worth roughly a million dollars. If we did a million-dollar subscription company, it would be worth somewhere between 12 and $15 million. And one of the new models that really came out in the last five years was the idea of a metered service company.

So Twilio is a great example, AWS, if it was pulled out of Amazon is a pay as you go model. It is predominantly is B2B, but those companies traded really 35 times, right? So, if you think about, okay, if I'm going to do a startup, which revenue model should I use, I would tell you to think about again, if you're going to go back to Andrew's question about the exit multiple, I would be interested in less than who's going to buy it. More interested in the revenue model and the multiple of sales. So, I'd be like go for a metered service company for sure, or subscription at very least.

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to ask around the topic of founders. It's obviously a very lonely, difficult journey at the very early stage. Do you have any advice for early-stage founders to how to get better connected and deal with the mental challenges of building a company?

Dave Parker: Yeah. Great question. It was probably my most read blog post ever is I wrote about my personal battle with depression. And then I hit publish and I thought, what the hell? What did I do? What was I thinking? And I got more positive comments on it than I could have imagined. Brad Feld, who used to be on my board, as you know. Brad sent me a note with one word, and it just said brave.

I think that the challenge there from a founder perspective is, you know, you're always trying to be positive. You're trying to, I was trying to be upbeat. If it's motivate the team or motivate investors. And so consequently leads to a lot of isolation.

And I think that's one of the things that, like, one of the things we're doing here in Seattle is we run a cohort program for founders. We don't take any equity. There's no cash. They don't pay for it. And it's really about us up leveling the community of founders 25 to 30 founders twice a year, which is our math.

And we're really helping them navigate the ecosystem, here in Seattle in six months instead of 18 months, which improve their odds of success. But also connecting them with other founders. Because other people are asking the same questions you're asking. They're not competitive. They're going through the same challenges.

And by putting them in community, it serves one of those two purposes. One is we want to help them navigate the ecosystem, but we also want to help them connect with other founders like them at the same stage, which we think has two benefits. One is personal connection and not being in isolation for sure.

And second is really helping them think about reinvesting in the community over time. So, if you think about classically, it was the PayPal mafia and then reinvested in each other. So, Reed Hoffman and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, et cetera. And then it's now become the Uber mafia, right? All the people that were at Uber that are now launching other companies that are reinvesting in each other. We've never had that in Seattle. And most cities don't. It's one of the biggest gaps.

So that's our secondary benefit is we think if we have them in community and at five years, but when we launched this as a program, which through the Washington Technology Industry Association. And I went back to the CEO. I'm like, this is a ten-year plan. Right. I'm like you can't judge it at three years or four years. And we're coming into our fourth year right now. And I'd say it's worked out better than we thought. But as I told him, I'm like, you don't get actually judge on it for 10 years.

We've had some exits; we've had a bunch of fundraising. Our teams do it a lot faster than other teams. So, it's become a program. People are like, I want to get in. So, we just actually, Brian took it and put it into an document for a national scale-up grant for the Department of Commerce, with the State of Washington. So, we actually have those documents set up now. If somebody wanted to take it to Nebraska and say, Hey, we want to replicate all of this programming.

We've opened source all the programming, we've open sourced, the narrative doc and the fundraising docs. So, somebody could turn around and say like, okay, we're going to go launch this program here as a, as a copycat with, with pride. Like we want you to knock it off.

Brian Ardinger: Well, that's interesting. That may be an interesting model to explore now with COVID and the whole virtual remote angle of it. Or even in communities like Lincoln, where again, just by the pure numbers, we're not going to have thousands of founders. So how do you scale that?

Dave Parker: For sure. And we're basically taking a program we were running in Seattle now and run it in Kent, Washington and Yakima. And Vancouver, Washington, and Tacoma. And we're trying to provide it from an access perspective. Like we want to make sure that we provide people with access that didn't have access to that before.

But also, with a path to funding, because if you give people access to programming, but no, they can't ship an MVP at the end because they don't have any money. That's still a problem. So, we're trying to address that problem next. But the grant was a $750,000 grant over three years. Which means we'll kind of be able to take the show on the road and obviously virtual too. I think the nice thing about if there's a positive outcome of the whole COVID thing is place matters a lot less than it used to.

Like the good news is I don't have to get on a plane to come be on stage with you. I'd like to be. That'd be kind of fun, because we could go have a beer afterwards and have dinner. But that that'll happen too. But I think from an efficiency standpoint, I've been doing programs for the Middle East, like six or seven cities in the middle east over the last two years. And I fly out Thursday night to Abu Dhabi for four days. And I'm like, it's kind of a fast turn for Abu Dhabi. Could do it just virtually. And be fine.

More Information

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to thank you again for coming on. Here's Dave's book Trajectory Startup. Pick it up at any place you buy books. I'm going to put it in a call to action. He also is giving away some free stuff on his website. So let me share that right now. You can download his free resource guide on 14 successful Tech Revenue Models to check that.

And then I also, again, I want to thank all our sponsors for bringing this today. And I encourage folks to also sign up for Inside Outside.io. Our newsletter and our podcast, where we bring these types of things whenever we can. So that's the link to that. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for all the audience for being here. Thanks for the great questions and looking forward to doing this again, at some point. And maybe having you come and see us in real life. So, I appreciate your time. And thank you again, Dave. If people want to find out more about yourself or your book, what's the best way to do that?

Dave Parker: Yeah, they can find all the information is on my blog, DKparker.com. If you don't want to buy the book, you just have to figure out how to navigate all the blog posts in order. But that should be, you know, there's only 180 blog posts there. So DKparker.com, you can find the book and more information. The 14 revenue models.

You can also find me on social media. I'm at Dave Parker CA for Seattle, when you find, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm not on Facebook anymore. I just finally had to just say, no. I'm still on Instagram because I want to see what my kids are doing. But Daisy, my dog has more followers on Instagram than I do at this point. But so yeah, you can find me on social media, and you can find me on DK parker.com.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thank you again, Dave. We're looking forward to having future conversations. And go out and have fun everyone at Startup Week Lincoln, and we'll see you around the neighborhood. Thanks very much for coming out.

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Trajectory: Startup: Ideation to Product/Market Fit

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Selina Troesch Munster, Principal at Touchdown Ventures. Selena and I talk about the changing opportunities in corporate venture capital, both for corporates and startups, as well as the impact in the growing focus of diversity, equity, inclusion, and how it's impacting the industry. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Selina Troesch Munster, Principal at Touchdown Ventures

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Selina Troesch Munster. She is the Principal at Touchdown Ventures. Welcome back to the show Selina.

Selina Troesch Munster: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you back. You were out in Nebraska in 2019. You spoke at our Inside Outside Innovation Summit. And so, I'm super excited to reconnect after COVID to see what's going on in the world of corporate venture.

Selina Troesch Munster: Yeah, it's such a shame that COVID ended in person events because that was such a fun event. And I encourage anybody listening to definitely get out there the next time it happens in person. It was fantastic. And I have relationships from that week that are still very fruitful.

Brian Ardinger: That's awesome. Oh, I'll give a little bit of background to our audience members who may not have seen you there or heard more about you. But you started at Touchdown Ventures, I think in 2014 or so when it first got off the ground. Before that you were at Barclays in New York. You're currently an Adjunct Professor at USC teaching Venture Capital at the MBA school there. And then also just were named a Global Corporate Venturing Rising Star in 2020. So, congrats on that as well.

Selina Troesch Munster: Thank you. Yeah, that's so accurate.

Brian Ardinger: For those who aren't familiar with Touchdown Ventures, it's a corporate venture as a service almost type of company. So, let's talk a little bit about what is Touchdown Ventures and how does it fit into this corporate venture environment?

Selina Troesch Munster: Yes, absolutely. So, Touchdown works with corporations to help them manage their venture capital programs. And what that means in practice is most corporations either don't have the appetite or ability to hire experienced VCs to run a program internally.

So, what our co-founders decided to do was to create a service-based business where experienced VCs, work together with folks internally at the corporations to develop a strategy for, and then actually manage, these corporate venture programs. And the opportunity that David, Rich and Scott saw back in 2014, when they founded the business, was corporations have so much to provide to startups in you know, having a relationship with them. In addition to the capital that they deploy.

But often they don't have the skill set necessary to identify which of those startups are a good investment opportunity. And then to manage those investments through to an exit, whatever that may be. Which is what we know how to do. We, on the other hand, don't have the expertise in the internal politics and priorities within that organization.

And so, by marrying together, our financial analysis and, you know, opportunity evaluation skills, and then deal management skills, and their knowledge of what's impactful for their business, we have a really powerful way of making investments in startups. That as some of our corporate partners say, give them a bit of a leg up against their competitors based on that relationship.

We work together with I believe 18 different corporations, as of right now, managing their funds. Each one is developed specifically for that corporation's goals and objectives and risk tolerance. And, you know, we have a dedicated team to manage each one of those specifically.

And so, we run programs across a variety of different industries and have made, I think almost 70 investments at this point across all those programs. Pretty awesome growth from where we were in 2014.

Brian Ardinger: When you think about corporate venture, it's somewhat new to the field of venture capital. I mean started probably with Intel. I think they were one of the first corporate venture funds to come on the scene.

But you're seeing more and more companies look to startups and look to corporate venture capital as a way to either differentiate their Innovation efforts or have access to different things that they wouldn't have before. What do you think is driving corporates to taking a look at venture capital as a means to meet their goals?

Selina Troesch Munster: I think there are a couple of drivers. One is the increasing rate of company formation and, you know, to use an overused word disruption within traditional industries. And so having the foresight that venture capital gives you of, oh my gosh, I just saw 10 companies that raised funding in a particular space. That gives you an idea of where the market might be moving toward and what a corporation needs to be aware of in terms of what might be coming their way and trying to eat their lunch in the future.

And so, you know, even if we don't make that many investments over the course of a year, we still interacted with hundreds of startups and started to see what's happening out in the market. And that intelligence is a really important part of a corporate venture program, is you don't have to say yes to an opportunity to learn from it.

The other thing that I think is driving it is that there is a lot of capital out there funding a lot of different types of businesses that haven't traditionally been venture backed. And so, we see it in the food space. That is a relatively new sector for investment for venture capitalists.

You know, traditionally you're talking about software. That's pretty much it. And so, when you have VC money flowing into these sectors that are non-traditional VC sectors, you have a greater volume of threats to those businesses as well. And having that function where you get to have a much tighter relationship with some of these upstarts is really valuable to the corporate strategy team and really the business units.

And there are also certain types of partnerships that just don't happen without capital investment. And startups are recognizing that they can leverage the capital raise process to also get really tight, great relationships with corporate partners in that way.

Brian Ardinger: A lot of corporates out there, they do invest in the venture space, but they do it primarily just investing in other funds and that. So, are you seeing more and more companies wanting to take more of that hands-on approach? Not only just investing for ROI return, but investing in Touchdown Ventures and what you can bring to the table to give them that more hands-on insights and looks, in addition to just the ROI traditional financial model around it?

Selina Troesch Munster: Yeah, I think that that's a big driver of what's helped our business grow, but also what's driven corporate venture funding to new highs over the past couple of years. And I think we've had a record year in corporations putting money into startups in 2020 and probably 2021 as well. How things are trending.

And I think it is because of the desire for that direct relationship with the startup. It's something that we, as Touchdown enable because we're in the trenches with the teams at the corporations, talking through every opportunity that we see and figuring out which ones are good investment opportunities, as well as sort of strategic partnerships.

And I think having fund investments also has a place within a portfolio approach for corporations. But the ownership of the program is really important to a lot of these folks because they want to see firsthand, who are these companies? What are they doing and how do we most productively create sort of mutual benefit between ourselves and the startup ecosystem? And that can be a little bit harder when you're invested in a fund and you're not necessarily seeing all of the deal flow.

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Brian Ardinger: Are you spending more time working with the startups and sourcing startups, or are you spending a lot of time with the corporate folks trying to understand what their needs are? Is it 50/50? Walk me through the process of how you actually work with a corporate and a startup to make that match.

Selina Troesch Munster: It's definitely a blend and with a team of three, for instance, on the fund that I'm working on, we split those responsibilities. And some days I spend more time with startups and some days I spend more time with their corporate partner. But both are really critical to being able to find those matches.

And so, we spend, a fair amount of our week, having conversations with folks within the business units to understand, you know, what are your strategic priorities? What are the business problems that you're trying to solve? What are you trying to build internally so that we don't show up with competitors, what you're trying to do with your own R and D, but where are there places where you might want to accelerate what you're doing with an external partner?

And based on that information, we will go have conversations with startups and say, all right, how well does this match up against what this person told us? Is this enough of a priority for them to spend the time to talk to this company?

We manage both the funnel of investment opportunities, but also funnel of commercial opportunities where we say, all right, you know, every quarter we will come back to this person in R and D and say, hey, we talked about this last time. This is on your wish list of like, wouldn't it be cool if we could find companies that do this? These are the opportunities that we've identified. Let's talk about how they do and don't match up.

And if there's anything that's sort of serendipitously really aligns, let's make sure that you were able to have a conversation and sort of take that the next steps beyond that first introduction. But it really is on both fronts that we're also figuring out what the startups care about. You know, I wouldn't want to bring a startup in and say, well, our partner is really interested in doing this with you and they're like, we would never consider that. So, there's, you know, a little bit of a needs assessment on both sides.

Brian Ardinger: So, you're doing both the strategic investment and companies are buying equity in those particular companies as part of a fundraise. But it sounds like you're also doing some basically strategic matchmaking from a customer perspective. So, startups are coming to you and saying hey, we'd love to work with XYZ company, or are you a relationship with these? We'd be a good fit for providing services into that corporation. Is that a blend of what's going on as well, or?

Selina Troesch Munster: Yep. Absolutely. And usually our conversations with startups are, look, you may not be fundraising right now, but there are other opportunities that we can facilitate for you. If we have an understanding of your business and an understanding of what you're looking to do with potential partners. That often gets us into conversations with companies kind of in between their formal fundraises as well, because we do have that added benefit of being able to facilitate commercial conversations.

Brian Ardinger: So, you sit in between to a large extent for both the corporates and the startups. What are some of the key, I guess, problems or challenges that you would recommend for both the corporate and the startup to avoid when trying to make these relationships work?

Selina Troesch Munster: I think corporates can be really scary to startups. I think that there are often legal requirements or legal agreements that the corporate wants to enter into that just look like a lot of work from the startup perspective. And look like risk from the startup perspective. And so, for corporations, I would say, keep it relatively simple on the legal side.

Make sure that whatever you send over to a startup company in terms of, you know, whether it's an NDA or a side letter or, you know, commercial agreement that it's not the same thing that you would send to, you know, a bigger supplier or customer. So that's one.

On the other side, I think startups often, rightly, but often see themselves as having so many different opportunities to help their customers or partners. And, if you show up with, like, I can be all things to all people, you're requiring a certain amount of imagination and thinking about what to do with your product, from someone who might have a day job, that they're very very focused on and doesn't have time to think creatively about where you might fit in.

And so, the more specific a startup can be coming in saying, look, this is what we do. This is the opportunity we see with you. And this is how we would propose to work together. The easier it is for that person to say, yes, that's awesome. I definitely want to do that with you or, you know what, that's not quite what I want to do. I would tweak it in this way. Like, let's move forward. Or this isn't right for us. So, it gets you to an answer a lot faster, and it also takes some of the burden off of the corporate partner for doing the work of pitching your business.

Brian Ardinger: To a certain extent it's oftentimes just finding what does that pilot first relationship look like, or that kind of first date and how would that play out so that both sides can become comfortable in that relationship and grow it as it goes along.

The other area I want to talk about is if it wasn't already the case before, 2020 which has really put D. E. and I, diversity, equity, inclusion, front and center for most companies. And I'd love to get your insight and what you are seeing in the startup in corporate venture space and how folks are tackling and talking about D, E, and I initiatives.

Selina Troesch Munster: Yeah, it's something that's very near and dear to my heart. At Touchdown, we've really worked on trying to figure out how we educate ourselves about bias and the impact that those unconscious or implicit biases have on how we do our jobs. But also, how we can actually make difference out in the ecosystem.

It has had a lot of energy. Particularly related to improving the pipeline and hiring of minorities in whatever definition you want to, you know, make that, whether that's people of color, whether that is LGBTQ and funds are really paying attention to their recruiting process. I think it's going to take a while for us to see the results of that.

I don't have any delusions that starting in 2022, we'll have like this wonderful, diverse set of, you know, of partners. That takes time, especially in VC, where partner positions are rare or the ability to raise money has particularly been challenging. I think, you know, the limited partners and allocators are paying more attention to it and making sure that they include that in their evaluation process, especially with emerging managers. It's going to take time. It's going to take a lot of time.

And I think in the corporate space, where I see the most opportunity is using the existing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to apply those learnings and insights and best practices to venture investing. And I've had a couple of conversations where we're talking about potentially announcing an investment and you know, one of the questions is all right, where might we have risks from a diversity perspective in you know, announcing this. Is like, is there enough diversity on this team? And what may we, or maybe not get, in terms of PR blow back from that type of announcement.

Brian Ardinger: So, are you seeing a much bigger push from the corporates themselves to say, hey, we're not only looking for companies in XYZ technology space, but we're specifically looking for minority teams or, or different types of businesses, maybe even, then we looked at it in the past. Are you seeing that from corporates and they're pushing that? Or is it you're helping the corporates come along to that space?

Selina Troesch Munster: It's a little bit of both. I think where we see it the most is actually, if we're thinking about, you know, a particular business problem where maybe the e-commerce team says, you know what, we're really not reaching this demographic. Help us figure out how to reach this demographic through the investment program.

So, it's less about give me businesses that do a certain thing and more about help me understand this type of person that isn't buying from us today that want to buy from us in the future.

Brian Ardinger: And then from the startup side, what are you seeing when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion? Are you seeing startups being able to brace that more effectively in their partnerships and the relationships or what are you seeing on that side?

Selina Troesch Munster: I'm seeing a lot more emphasis on the board level. Finding diverse board representatives. And so, one of our portfolio companies, it was particularly important, I mean, she was a female CEO, but it was particularly important to her to have a majority of women on her board. And so, identifying women with the good experience to help her achieve what she wants to achieve, but also maintaining that diversity of perspective. And so, at the board level, it's a really big focus and I'm seeing more and more advertisement, for lack of a better word, in pitch tags of the diversity of teams. And so, whether it is gender or racial diversity, all of those things are starting to come up more.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing different types of businesses and different types of even locations around the country and that, they're getting on your radar because you're casting a wider net or companies are asking for more and different looks?

Selina Troesch Munster: That's a good question. I haven't actually analyzed what our location diversity looks like. A number of our corporate partners are in the Midwest. And so have always had as part of the strategy, you know supporting startups in their own backyard. I don't know exactly how that's changed over the past year. That's an interesting data point for us to look at.

Brian Ardinger: We sit in the middle of the United States and the venture world is different here than it is in the big markets. And it's always interesting to see how those trends are playing out location or technology or otherwise. I guess the last core topic I'll talk about is what's new and exciting in your world? What are you excited about? What trends are you seeing? What are the things that you're focused on?

Selina Troesch Munster: So, I personally am focused on Ag Tech and Lawn and Garden investing. I manage our program with Scott's Miracle Grow, and it's been a really interesting year because people have, you know, from a consumer perspective, really shifted into spending more time in their gardens and thinking more about growing their own food.

And so, there's been an explosion in interest and technology to help people do that more effective. Both from a macro trend perspective, but also from an environmental perspective. I found it really fascinating how big companies and small are tapping into the wellness and environmental aspects of growing.

So that's been particularly exciting for me. And then on the flip side, in terms of professional agriculture, all of the issues that COVID exposed about the supply chain and how that affects, you know, how food gets to us, how food is grown, the energy impacts of that. I just read an article about, you know, the rising cost of electricity and what that does to greenhouse growers. Because often they're supplementing with light.

And if the cost of electricity goes up and you're running on razor thin margin business at a certain point, it stops making sense. And so how do we help farmers with the systems that are necessary to better manage the business side of their business? In addition to the sort of the plants. So that's where I've been spending my time. It's, there's some of the interesting stuff that I found fascinating, the sort of the big picture problems that we're thinking about.

Brian Ardinger: That's awesome. Well, I want to thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing some of your insights on what's going on. Hope to have you back out in the Midwest sometime soon. And we can talk further about this stuff. The last question I want to know is Giants or Dodgers. I know you're based in LA, but which of the two teams is going to come through?

Selina Troesch Munster: Giants. I am a diehard Giants fan. This is apparently the only thing that is not good about me from my husband's perspective, because he is a diehard Dodgers fan. So, we are a house divided for the, over the course of the series, and we'll see what happens.

Brian Ardinger: It will probably be a tough week. This podcast will come out probably after the series, so we'll find out if you're right, and we'll probably check back in to see how you both are doing.

Selina Troesch Munster: Yes. Let's hope the marriage survives. I think it will.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Selina, if people want to find out more about yourself or more about Touchdown Ventures, what's the best way to do that?

Selina Troesch Munster: I would go to our website, TouchdownVC.com. There you can link to our various content. Our blog is called Risky Business, and I am @SelinaTroesch on Twitter. So, you can also find out what I'm tweeting about. You can follow me there.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Selina again, thanks for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Selina Troesch Munster: Thank you, Brian. Appreciate it.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kaiser Yang, Co-founder of Platypus Labs and Author of the new book Crack the Code. Kaiser and I talk about the mindsets needed to foster creativity and innovation. And some of the pitfalls you can avoid when trying to spin up your innovation initiatives.

Inside Outside Innovation as the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript of Kaiser Yang, Co-founder of Platypus Labs and Author of Crack the Code

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Kaiser Yang. He is co-founder of Platypus Labs and author of the book Crack the Code: Eight Surprising Keys to Unlock Innovation. Welcome.

Kaiser Yang: Hey, thank you so much, Brian. I'm delighted to be here and be a part of your program.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. We got connected through Josh Linkner. I was interviewing him about his new book, Big Little Breakthroughs. And he reached out recently to say, hey, Kaiser's got a new book out in and around this particular subject. You've worked with some great companies out there when it comes to Innovation, Heineken, and ESPN, and Coca-Cola. What are some of the most common problems that companies are trying to solve when it comes to Innovation?

Kaiser Yang: There's a number of challenges that we help organizations focus on and prioritize. But it really starts at the leadership level of prioritizing Innovation, building the right set of rituals and rewards that motivates team members to drive inventive thinking in their day-to-day responsibilities. And so, we do spend a lot of time working from the leadership level first understanding what the desired state is. What some of the desired outcomes are.

And crafting a strategy. And that strategy, it could involve a number of different things from bringing thought leadership to the organization, doing training workshops, running Innovation, bootcamps. Sometimes it even just comes down to creating inspiration and motivation in terms of ideas, like giving them the power to recognize patterns outside of their industry. So, they can innovate their own and challenge the status quo.

So, for us, I think when we first work with organizations, it has to start at the top. Meaning there needs to be a commitment to driving innovation and making it a priority. And then it makes the rest of the initiatives so much smoother moving forward.

Brian Ardinger: That is so important that context setting. Because I think a lot of times organizations get off the wrong track because they don't necessarily define Innovation the same way. A lot of people think of innovation as I've got to come up with the next electric car or new Uber.

And as you know, Innovation can be something much simpler as far as, you know, how do you find it and identify a problem and create something of value to solve that problem. And a lot of the book talks about that creative problem-solving area that doesn't have to be transformational, but it can be little breakthroughs that make a difference.

Kaiser Yang: Absolutely. It's a philosophy that I share with Josh. And his book, Big Little Breakthroughs is all about the fact that we should look for everyday acts of creativity or what he calls micro innovations.

And for us too, when we work with organizations, we obviously want to look at transformational opportunities, high growth opportunities. But sometimes when you look at Innovation, just in that context, it can be paralyzing for most of the team members, right. Unless it's a billion-dollar Elon Musk type idea that it doesn't count.

When in reality, some of the best innovations start with small acts of creativity applied to solving the customer experience or driving improvement in internal processes. And those little innovations can stack up and make a significant difference over time.

Brian Ardinger: Well, you almost have to build up those muscles and, you know, to jump directly to starting a brand-new business or a brand-new idea is challenging, especially if you've been hired to optimize and execute in a particular business model that you know and have some certainty around. Versus a completely unknown kind of environment.

Kaiser Yang: For sure. What we see in many organizations is that there's this tremendous creative readiness, this curiosity, this willingness to drive change. But where it falls short is the implementation side. And it's most often these teams and individuals don't have the right tools or the training or critical thinking skills to apply their creativity to innovative outcomes.

And that really is kind of the point of Crack the Code, my new book. It's more of a field guide, a manual to help you unlock your creativity. And add a little bit more structure to the process. So rather than saying, hey, let's solve the sales challenge or this customer experience problem, or this operational inefficiency and just brainstorming in the traditional sense. These are proven tools and techniques that really guide you through that creative process, so you can realize better outcomes in the end.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about the book. You kind of break it up into these four key mindsets that you believe individuals and organizations need to be building and growing on. Talk a little bit about the mindsets and how they came to be and the thought process around it.

Kaiser Yang: Yeah. I mean, these mindsets are really based on almost like two decades worth of research and real-world experiences, having been a startup entrepreneur and starting my own businesses. Creativity is that one underlying skill set that was applied to drive growth and transformation and performance at pretty much every level.

And so, when we think about some of these mindsets, they may come across to you as common sense, but common sense isn't always common practice. So, for example, the first core mindset that we start out with is this notion that every barrier can be penetrated. It's this inherent belief that no matter how difficult the challenge is, if you apply enough creative energy at it, that obstacle can be overcome.

Right, the most powerful successful innovators out there, when they have a setback or they have a failure, what they don't do is throw up their arms and get discouraged. They're the ones that say not yet.

So, while it seems obvious that every barrier can be penetrated, if you look at organizations and teams, once you have a couple of failures or a few setbacks, a lot of times it's like, eh, this idea is not going to work. Or maybe we should do something else. Instead, we believe that with the right focus of your creative energy, you can really overcome some of the most difficult challenges out there.

Brian Ardinger: And ironically, sometimes those constraints are actually the things that open up the creativity. Having a constraint, forces you to think differently about how you might solve that problem or what problem you're actually solving. And I think that, you know, having that mindset of being able to overcome that challenge and think differently about it is very important.

Kaiser Yang: The other mindset that we often teach organizations, larger organizations we work with is this whole notion of compasses over maps. The main underscoring point is you need to start before you're ready.

Too often, organizations wait until they have a full-on three-year business plan. The ROI has been vetted. They've got every stakeholder approved. But the most successful innovators out there, I believe, trust their instinct to course correct along the way and get started. So, they use more of a compass to guide their innovation journey rather than waiting for a detailed map.

And it's so powerful when you know, you can arm a team to really start taking action and iterative experimentation processes to test a new way to improve customer satisfaction, or get payables reduce by 20%. And just these small incremental wins, it requires organizations to empower their teams to start before they're ready. And that's what the whole compass over maps mindset is all about. So that's one of the mindsets that we talk about in the book.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I like that concept. It's almost like you're in a cave. Innovation is like you're in a cave and it's dark and you don't have a map. So, you have to feel around the walls to figure your way out of it. And I think obviously a lot of people are not comfortable in that particular environment, but the more you get used to knowing that maps can be directionally important, but they're not necessarily the actual be all end all to get you to the end goal. Especially in uncertain environments. The more likely you are to build that mechanism and that muscle of being okay with that ambiguity, I suppose.

Kaiser Yang: Yeah. I mean that ambiguity can be paralyzing for many organizations, where there's a lot of uncertainty unknown. There isn't a clear path forward. But we view it more as that artist's studio where it's all about discovery and exploration. And so, while it's easy to say that much of the work that we do with organizations is giving that toolkit to overcome some of those anxiety driven moments led by ambiguity.

So, here's a systematic process that doesn't stifle your creativity, but rather provides more of a scaffolding around it and helps you guide you through the process. So even when we talk about understanding pain points and customer needs, really for us, that's where the innovation process starts.

Just saying that is one thing but giving you some tools and systems and processes that help guide you through that journey. I think that's super powerful. And it adds structure to that artist studio that many people might feel uncomfortable in.

Brian Ardinger: So maybe we can dig in a little bit about some of the tactics or some of the specific guidance that you have within the book, as far as action steps or things that people can do to both create these mindsets and then take action on it.

Kaiser Yang: Yeah, for sure. There's eight different tactics that are built into the book. And they're all my favorite tactics. And I think Innovation in and of itself, there isn't a silver bullet in terms of ideation or process. Every situation is unique, and we encourage many of our clients to tackle the innovation challenge, using a number of different tactics and strategies, so you can see things from a various perspective.

And then you open up for exploration and deeper discovery. But for example, one of the ones that we have a lot of success teaching organizations is one that we simply called the Borrowed Idea. Right? It's looking outside of your industry for key factors that drive competitive advantage. Drive sustainable success. And taking some of those insights and bringing it back to your own.

One of our partners that we work with often says that expertise can be the greatest enemy of innovation. Meaning when you know too much about an industry, or you've been in your role for too long, it's really hard to embrace new ways or see things in a different way. So, this borrowed idea technique is a very systematic way of looking outside. Looking at business models, right?

So, in what ways are they leveraging technology? What is their customer experience like? How are they driving sales? What's their pricing model? And for example, like higher education. What could they potentially learn from the hospitality industry or maybe higher education? What could they learn from consumers today engaging on Tik Tok? And borrowing those ideas and bringing it back.

And one of my favorite quotes was from Steven Jobs who a long time ago said that he's sometimes embarrassed when people call him creative, because he thinks creativity is nothing more than the ability to connect dots. As we grow older in our careers and become more experienced, we're very good at that one dot that we're paid very well to do, but we forget about all the dots out there.

So, what can we learn from the field of music or athletics or, you know, getting into specific categories? That's the whole concept of the borrowed idea. Systematically exploring as far away from your industry as possible and finding new ways that you can bring back to your organization.

Brian Ardinger: It's surprising how focused a lot of organizations get with, they know a hundred percent what their competitors are doing and everything about that particular customer segment and that, but like you said, don't necessarily take one adjacent step to the left or right to see what's going on, that could significantly change the game. Because most of the people are playing the same game. And if you slightly change the game, you can outpace your competition.

So, we are living in a world of accelerating change. Obviously, innovation is much more important than it has ever been before. And I think a lot of people are now getting that or understanding that. What are some of the trends that you're seeing when it comes to Innovation?

Kaiser Yang: There's lots of trends. I mean, we can categorize it in terms of strategy and technology and, you know, market trends, things like that. But I think at the height of the organizations that we've worked with, one of the trends that we have started to see with larger enterprise organizations is building this culture of rapid experimentation.

We've all read about Facebook and, you know, case studies like Bookings.com, where they have 30,000 concurrent experiments going on at any given time. But even large organizations like Allstate and Mass Mutual, they're building these cultures where they're constantly testing. And I think it's so cool to see because the old school was research and experimentation was a very linear process.

It was measured and calculate. But we're seeing many organizations move to this very iterative model, not being afraid of failure. Taking responsible risks and applying this notion of rapid experimentation, constantly looking for new ways to better the customer experience or to serve their community.

And that shift, you know, for me, is fascinating to see like large 30,000 employee organizations move to this model of rapid experimentation. And whether it's, you know, following the Lean Startup Movement or any of those other models out there, just seeing companies put aside the need for ROI and business plans and you know, every stakeholder buy-in.

But instead, just getting out there and quickly testing new ways to serve their customers. It's one of those trends that hopefully we'll see many organizations continue to embrace, because I think that's the way you find the idea right. Like remove uncertainty through experimentation. Validate your concepts. And quickly move them forward through an iterative process rather than sitting on it for 12 or 18 months waiting for the R and D department to say, okay, let's go forward with it.

Brian Ardinger: Great point. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to get over that fear. You know, that seems to be one of the biggest barriers is people fundamentally understand the theory around, well, I should be experimenting more, but like the incentives aren't there, the rewards aren't there, the culture is not there such that it enables that risk-taking. So, are there any hints or tips or things you've seen that might work to overcome that fear?

Kaiser Yang: I mean, again, like we said, at the start of this discussion, it does start at the leadership level, setting up the right environment that fosters learning. I don't know if I would say fosters failure, but the ability to take risks on behalf of the company and try new things.

So even like there's the case studies of issuing get out of jail free cards and building different rewards that recognize people that have taken action. So, I think it starts there at the leadership level, creating the right environment, that the team members feel safe in.

But more so we focus on the individual level. Because a lot of times that fear manifests itself by the fear of being embarrassed in front of our peers. Or the fear of my idea not being good enough. Or even sometimes it's the fear of success that this idea might actually put me out of a job.

So, we focus more on the individual level of removing that fear by teaching them proven frameworks, to really experiment and validate and overlaying that with some of the mindsets that we talked about.

One of the mindsets that we often talk about, it's not in the book, but it's this notion of, if you fall seven, you stand eight. And the best innovators out there, always find a way of shaking it off, getting back up and no matter what the challenges they persist through adversity. And I think that's kind of that mindset that's critically important to pair with all of these tools and techniques that gives you the confidence, if you will, right. To come up with ideas and stretch your imagination.

Oftentimes when we sit with organizations, it's your natural tendency to come up with the safest, easiest, most obvious ideas. Those are the safe ones, right? And it can be a little bit fearful to push your imagination to further limits, to come up with the wild or unusual, or even unorthodox wacky idea. But those are usually the ones that drive the most change and progress for any organization.

And so, creating the right mix of tools and techniques and mindsets to help team members get there, that's where we see at least for us it's so satisfying to find those what we call aha moments, where that light bulb goes off and you come up with some great, innovative ideas.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. The other thing I've seen that seems to work is oftentimes just changing the mindset. I think a lot of people think they have to have the perfect plan before they can present it to their boss and move it forward. But almost changing that conversation to saying, I've got something I want to try over here. Or here's a little side project I'm working on. Don't have it all figured out, but here's the next thing I'm going to try to do to learn or build out, get evidence that I'm on the right path.

That type of mindset or that type of philosophy around it sometimes change the game significantly versus I guess the old way of I've got to put together a 50-page business plan, figuring out all the obstacles and hope that I'm right. When I actually launch it.

Kaiser Yang: Yeah, for sure. I mean, just building crude, prototypes and running some simple experiments to remove some uncertainty can make a huge difference in the organization's ability to move a little bit quicker. But even what you said about the strategic side, right. That oh my, I have to put a 50-page deck together to pitch our ideas.

We have something that's called the Strategic Canvas and it's an iterative six- step process that really simplifies the strategy building. So you're not, hyper-focused on all the details and business models and assumptions and all of that stuff. But it builds a very strong foundation under your idea.

And it's a very powerful way to be able to present your idea cohesively very succinctly and very efficient. wSo, we try to demystify that business plan process as well, to empower team members, to move a little bit faster and take their ideas and get some visibility and traction around it, in the process.

Brian Ardinger: A lot of our folks that are listening aren't necessarily at the leadership level, they're charged with being innovative or launching new products and that. But sometimes they're at the process of trying to get that buy in from the top. Do you have any recommendations or thoughts around how, as an individual within an organization, to start building that culture of creativity and innovation within their group?

Kaiser Yang: There's a couple of ways we can look at this, but at the first cut is just teams or individuals viewing the fact that creativity is really a muscle, that needs to be stretched out, warmed up and strengthened to do its best performance. A lot of times we just need to kind of shake off the cobwebs and dust it off a little bit.

But, you know, we don't put as much effort into the preparation of creativity I think, then we should. And so, there's lots of energizers and activities to help achieve hemispheric synchronization or to warm up your creative muscles. Platypus labs, we practice a lot of applied improve. Right. That helps you drive expansive thinking, but more importantly, it teaches you active listening and it gives you this platform to really try to explore your creativity in a number of different ways.

And there are so many tools and techniques out there that do that, that if you build a culture where you're practicing things and applying them to your day-to-day business, I mean, it's just amazing to see the transformation and the creative capacity of the teams that we've work with. So, I would start there as really, discover some of these energizers, and workouts, if you will, for your creative muscle, that you can do on a day to day or even week to week basis.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Start local and then go global. Well, Kaiser, I really appreciate you coming on Inside, Outside Innovation to talk about this book, I encourage people to pick up Crack the Code. If people want to find out more about yourself or Platypus Labs or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Kaiser Yang: Our team's website is PlatypusLabs.com. Specific to the book, you can go to CracktheInnovationCode.com and learn more about the book there. There's actually an assessment on that site where you can see if the book is worth your time. So, I would encourage you to take that and see if it might be something of value to you.

Brian Ardinger: Kaiser, thanks again for being on the show, looking forward to working together again in the future. And let's keep this conversation going in the future. Appreciate it.

Kaiser Yang: All right. Thank you so much Brian.

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Crack the Code: 8 Surprising Keys to Unlock Innovation

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Nora Herting, Founder and CEO of ImageThink and Author of the new book, Draw Your Big Idea. Nora and I talk about the benefits of visual thinking, some of the myths surrounding art and business, and some of the exercises anyone can use to think and work more creatively using visualization tools. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript of Nora Herting, Founder and CEO of ImageThink and Author of Draw Your Big Idea

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Nora Herting. She is Founder and CEO at the visual strategy firm ImageThink, and Author of the new book called Draw Your Big Idea: The Ultimate Creativity Tool for Turning Thoughts into Action and Dreams into Reality. Welcome to the show, Nora.

Nora Herting: Hi, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on this show. Because I've been a big proponent, whether I'm working with startups or corporate innovation teams about using visual tools to help you think through new ideas and launch new projects and that. And when I came upon you and the stuff that you're doing in this space, I wanted to have you on the show to dig in deeper about what it all takes to make this happen.

So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How you went from becoming an artist and a photographer to working your way to work with some of the biggest companies in the world, Google and IBM and NASA on this idea of visual strategy.

Nora Herting: Basically, I had started my career off in academia as an artist, going into academia, sort of the most sure-fire fit. You get the tenure track and the health insurance and whatnot. And I was 27. Managed to get a position. And then had this terrible realization that my goal was really just a failure of imagination. That I hadn't really thought or tested what else I could do with my skill set, outside of sort of this academic world.

So, I left my position, moved to New York with no job. And found myself at a division of Cap Gemini that we would call now like their design thinking solution. But this was the early 2000s. And that wasn't really a term we even used there. But it was a network of facilitators that we would put huge corporate projects through these innovative incubators for three days and tell them in three days we could get three months of work out of their team.

And I learned the skill of graphic recording while I was there because they knew I, besides having a Masters, I had also for a little while been an elementary school art teacher, which was actually kind of a great qualification for this particular work. And saw the power of visuals to help business people really clarify their thinking.

Get people on the same page. Sort out a lot of complexity. And in time, my first client, when we started ImageThink was NASA. And I had this real moment there where they had brought in someone to talk about the space glove. They had not been able to innovate a better space glove for several decades. They opened it up to a public contest.

All these teams in turn, but it was actually one solo engineer that designed a better space glove than all of the NASA scientists in a couple of decades. And they were fascinated about how this worked, and they described this guy's process. And while I was there, I'm visualizing the story. And I realized that they're really just describing a series of iterative process.

Things that are really intuitive to tinkers to artists. And that it was just this moment where I thought these things that I've learned that seems so innate to the creative process were mysteries to corporations. So that's one of the joys of ImageThink is not just using the visual tools, but really helping. Tried to demystify that for business leaders so that they can take some of those same mindsets and techniques and apply them to innovation in larger companies.

Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of folks do have that misperception, that businesses over here and art is over here. What are some of the myths that you've seen of how people and innovators should be doubling down on art in the business world?

Nora Herting: Great question. I love this question. You know one big myth is if you don't have the title Creative on your business card and then you don't have an opportunity to think creatively. Just don't believe that that's true. At ImageThink I think that we believe that everybody who has a job that requires complexity or problem solving has a huge creative opportunity in front of them.

So that's one thing is people will think, oh, because I'm in engineering or because I'm in HR, what I don't get to be creative. I forgot how to be creative. Another one is just this narrow idea that, you know, you're only creative if you can paint or write or play the guitar. Right.

So, expanding that idea to things that are more broad and then, you know, just kind of a lack of creative confidence in people, kind of around those ideas. And, you know, we have different ways of trying to break that down and expose people, show people, that they can exercise that muscle. And really, they have that opportunity every time.

Brian Ardinger: Walk me through some of the benefits that you've seen firsthand about getting people unstuck or what really happens when you move into that art visual mode to tackle problems that you couldn't track before.

Nora Herting: One example or one benefit of it is first off is to remember it's a very, very old technology. We've been drawing and using pictures to communicate before, you know, as a species before we had written language. You know, some of the earliest cave paintings are 30,000 BC. And they're basically instructions for hunting.

So, this is something that we've been hard-wired neurologically for a long time to process things and pictures. And when you do that, you're using multiple facets of your brain, including the prefrontal cortex. I like to tell people if they want to look at a problem differently, or they want to use a different set of neurons to fire, ask people to illustrate, or at least use visuals of some aspect of it to really get people just literally to think a little bit differently.

So, one way we do that is first to just have people practice on really low stakes things. We'll do something called like a visual bio. We'll ask everyone to tell us about themselves, really mundane things like their name, their role, but using only pictures to convey that.

And what happens is there's a lot of laughing, people feel a little awkward. But people realize pretty quickly that there's a lot more nuance that gets conveyed when someone is illustrating, let's say their role, than just say, you know, I'm a Director of Innovation at X company. Right. So how they think about that?

So that immediately gets people thinking a little bit differently, even if it's not the problem at hand and understanding that there's a lot of nuance that can be conveyed. And then it's great because you have people buying in pretty quickly to the process of working visually as they start to try to apply that to real problems that they have in business.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about your book. It's called Draw Your Big Idea. It's got a ton of like exercises. I love it because it's very tactical. So, can you talk a little bit about the book and how it came to be and what are some of the things that the audience will get from it?

Nora Herting: Yeah, so what was great about this is the publishers at Chronicle came to us and said, you know, we'd love for you to do something. What are you thinking? And I really wanted, my coauthor as well, really wanted to give somebody something that was practical. That they could use right away. So rather than writing a book, we sort of essentially drew a book.

As you said, I think there's 108 visual exercises in it. A lot of them are versions of exercises that we use for our corporate clients but applied to an individual level as well. So, moving people from kind of the whole cycle of innovation, if you will, Brian. From scanning their environment, assessing the current state, thinking about all the potential ideas that could come out of a problem statement. All of these things, your walkthrough, basically in drawing exercises in the book up until the final chapter, which is you kind of moved through the Innovation process.

And now you're speaking strategically, like how are you going to launch this new idea? Whether that's a new business or a new endeavor or, you know, a personal project. It builds on itself. It takes you through all those things. And for listeners out there, you can also kind of flip to one exercise and say, you know, I really need to do something around mapping my resources, you know, as a team. And there is a visual exercise for you to do for that as well as many other ones.

Brian Ardinger: What do you see holds people back from this? You do see some people gravitate to it, but for the most part, like you said, there's a lot of. For whatever reason they are scared or fearful of what's going on. What holds people back and more importantly, what can you do to overcome that fear?

Nora Herting: Well, I think that in our experience, like on a corporate level, when people are in the room and they see the visuals being done for them, they're very enthusiastic. They see the power of it. They appreciate it. I can pick up a pen and apply this to myself. That's maybe a little bit bigger of a jump, right? And so one of the misconceptions that we talked about is people feeling like, oh, I'm not creative.

Another one is just around the skill level. People will say, I can't draw a straight line, you know, or my Kindergartner can draw better than me. I don't care. Because again, we're talking about leaders. We're talking about innovators. We're talking about communicating. Right. And I try to remind people really, it's not about the artistry, it's about what is being communicated and what the impact is.

And so there's a number of exercises we kind of do to show people that we're wired to make meaning out of images. You know, I just talked about how we've been doing this for 30,000 years plus. So, your audience basically just needs a minimal viable product, right? Stick figures totally work. And so, once we give people a few exercises where they see that they see from other people's bad stick figure drawings, that they get a lot out of what the person's trying to communicate. They can start to see, you know, what it's really just about the end result, which is, am I communicating my idea. Am I aligning people to it? Is it resonating? And that you need an actually very low level of skill to do that.

Brian Ardinger: Do you see particular types of tasks or particular types of projects that this works better for than others?

Nora Herting: At ImageThink we have kind of created this life cycle of an idea, if you will. It's called the ImageThink method. Clients come to us at different points. You know, sometimes they come to us at the top of a project like, oh, we need to launch a whole new product or we're having an acquisition.

But sometimes they come to us later when it's a little more tactical, like you say, or, you know, we need to map out the strategy. So we're able to understand from that where the client is and match different exercises to where they need to be.

We've helped, you know, not just at the beginning of blue sky conversations and innovation, all the way to, how do we market this now that we have it ready to go to our client. So, what I love is that visuals can be helpful, I think, along the whole process. Wouldn't you agree?

Brian Ardinger: Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I like, specifically like about the Business Model Canvas, for example, is it takes that what used to be a 90-page document of what your business idea was, and kind of visualizes it out and to nine core components and you use sticky notes and other ways to think through.

And it makes it much more accessible than a spreadsheet or much more accessible than a document that, once it's in a document, people think it's the perfect thing. It's the perfect plan. But as soon as you add the visuals and that it brings out the messiness, that is the reality that you're dealing with in the real world. And that's why I like that particular type of technique.

Nora Herting: Yeah. I think that that's true. And sometimes people think might be a barrier, but really often actually isn't, is we have a lot of technology clients. So, you know whether it's IT or pharmaceuticals, with a lot of complexity, right? And sometimes they think, oh, this is too detailed, or this is too scientific to be approached this way.

But actually, most of the time, and you might've found this in your work, right. Or talking to other innovators, those people who are such subject matter experts sometimes have a really hard time leveling up from the level of detailed expertise they have. So that they can communicate it to a bigger audience. So, they can kind of engage the cross-functional departments or larger stakeholders that they need.

That's been a real sweet spot for us because we're able to listen to those folks. To steal the big ideas from it. Understand what's going to resonate for other people. And help them simplify it into a story that's a little bit more relatable. So, I'm not sure if you've also found that to be the case when you've worked visually that sometimes the simplification is a benefit rather than a detraction.

Brian Ardinger: And what I've also found is going through the process, your first map is not always the perfect map. Like, can you map it out and you draw it out and it's like, well, that's not exactly right. So you go back and modify it or change it or whatever. And that process gets you to think through what's actually going on in the world, around you, and that.

So, I find it very powerful, and I appreciate you helping us think through some of this kind of stuff. One of the last questions I have is how can you build this type of visual thinking, visual strategy into your everyday practice. Whether it's at work or at home. Are there particular techniques or things to give a non-artist or person who doesn't do this on a regular basis, to build this into their normal practice?

Nora Herting: Yeah, so that's a great question. You know, some things that people feel more empowered by is if they create a set of icons that they're going to use. So, you know, if you're in a particular domain, sometimes I'll have people like basically we kind of do like Business Pictionary. Which is like write out terms that you are often come across or you often need to express.

And then we have everybody create, you know, the minimal viable product of how they would express that idea. And that can just be on Post-it Notes. So, you know, you might have 5 to 10 concepts that you've worked out and you're like, okay, this is the way I'm going to depict this visually. So now when you're thinking about it, and you're trying to practice, you're not inventing these as you go.

And that's something that we do at ImageThink. Right? Like our team, we've been at thousands of meetings. So, if someone says the word disruption, we already have one or two go-to icons for that. We're not having to make it up on the fly as much. So, I think that that's like a good way to just start practicing that muscle. And then seeing if you can integrate that in.

Another example would be the next time you run into a problem is to challenge yourself, to try to depict that problem as a visual as well. You know and see if you might not uncover some different ways of thinking about it or using a metaphor.

There's a great article by this man named Dan Seewald, really great Innovation expert, who talks about using metaphor as a tool for Innovation. Like how is this problem maybe a metaphor for another problem. So, getting people to try to draw out that problem in a metaphor, I think could uncover a lot of different opportunity and be great practice as well.

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Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I encourage everybody to pick up a copy of Draw Your Big Idea and get started themselves. If people want to find out more about yourself, Nora, or about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Nora Herting: Sure, so you can visit our website ImageThink.net. Lots of information resources there. Draw Your Big Idea you can find on our website or on Amazon or if you make it to an in person's book bookstore.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Nora, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. I really do appreciate your time and insights into this world. And I encourage everybody to start drawing and start getting visual out there.

Nora Herting: Thanks Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. The three of us talk about the changing world of open innovation and what it takes to connect and collaborate, to solve big industry problems. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing set of guests. Today, we have Kevin Leland, who is the CEO and Founder of Halo. And Matt Muller, who is the Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. Welcome.

Kevin Leland: Thank you.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you both on the show to talk about a topic that's near and dear to a lot of folks out there. That's the topic of open innovation and how to corporates and startups and new ideas get started in this whole world of collaborative innovation. Kevin you're the CEO and founder of Halo. What is Halo? And how did you get started in this open innovation space?

Kevin Leland: Halo is a marketplace and network where companies connect directly with scientists and startups for research collaborations. It's about as simple to post RFP or a partnering opportunity on Halo as it is to post a job on LinkedIn. And then once it's posted scientists submit their research proposals. We went live in January. Matt and the team of Baxter was our very first customer. So, the earliest of early adopters and they were a really fantastic partner.

I came across the idea of Halo and got into open innovation really kind of by accident. The original concept for Halo was crowd funding for medical research. So, a little bit different, but we would work with technology transfer offices at universities to identify promising technology that just needed a little bit of funding to get to the next level.

And through that experience, I learned that scientists needed more than just funding. They needed the expertise and the resources of industry. Meanwhile, I was learning how industry was actively trying to partner with these scientists and these early-stage startups, because they realized that they were less good at the early-stage discovery process of research. And so to me, it seemed like an obvious marketplace solution. And so that's where the impetus of the business came and how we started.

Brian Ardinger: Let's turn it over to you Matt. From the other side of the table, from a corporation, trying to understand and facilitate and accelerate innovation efforts. What is open innovation mean to you and how did Halo come to play a part in that?

Matt Muller: As you mentioned earlier, I'm Director of Applied Innovation here at Baxter and I am in our Renal Care Business. And so that's the business at Baxter that's focused on treating end stage kidney disease. And that's one of Baxter's largest businesses. As a company, we have over $12 billion in sales annually, and dialysis in the renal care businesses, is our largest business unit.

And it is an area that we've struggled with innovation. And particularly what we excel at, at Baxter is we excel at treating kidney disease in the home. So, this is a particular therapy called peritoneal dialysis. Patients are able to do it in their home while they sleep.

And one of the big challenges that we have today with peritoneal dialysis is that patients need dialysis solution. They use about 12, 15 liters of this sterile medical solution every night to do their therapy. And today the way we do that and the way we've done it ever since this therapy has been around since early seventies is we literally deliver that solution in bags, by trucks. We make it in big plants in the United States and trucks drive all across the country and they deliver it to patients in their home.

And as a company, we, for a long time have said, we really need to change this business model. It's not sustainable for us. It requires our patients store a lot of water in their home or the solution rather in their home. And they have to essentially dedicate a whole room of their houses to storage of their supplies.

So, we have, for the longest time said, we want to change how this is done. And we want to be able to use the patient's own water in their home. And instead of delivering all these bags of solutions deliver concentrates much like if you go on, you buy a soft drink at the movie theater, it comes from a concentrated box of syrup that is, you add water to it and you have your soft drink.

And so that's our vision. And we've struggled for many years of how to bring innovation into the marketplace for making that pure water that we need in the home. We have a lot of very bright scientists at Baxter. The problem is that as Kevin mentioned before, our scientists are really good at solving particular problems in particular getting products to market.

Where we've been struggling is that the science has not or at least we haven't been aware of the science that could really allow us to break this barrier and make the leap to be able to make this pure solution medical grade solution in the home.

And that's why we've reached out to Kevin and his platform as a way to do that is to go out to a really broad community of researchers to bring new ideas into the company, to help us figure out new ways to approach the problem.

Brian Ardinger: The history of open innovation is long. And there's a lot of things that have been tried in the past. Did Baxter try other methods in the past? Or how did you go about trying to determine what things we should innovate internally and try to solve that way versus when and where we go outside for solutions?

Matt Muller: I would say as a company, we probably hadn't been as involved specifically in the university and in the startups space. So, a lot of times as a company, we have a lot of people that come to us with ideas and looking for funding. Most of the time, it's a very common proposition that they give you.

They need a certain amount of funding, and in three years, they'll have a product. Three years is like the magic number. And the reality is that it's frequently the claims and the charity are very oversold, and we haven't been really successful in that type of space. And so, we've been really looking at different ways to engage a larger community.

The other element of it too, is sometimes when you talk open innovation, we're limited by our existing network of people. And so that is the employees and who they work with. Maybe it's the fact we're in Northern Illinois, we're close to Northwestern University and people here have relationships with professors at Northwestern.

So, we develop those relationships and the open innovation opportunities through those connections. We've been looking into how do we expand that? Reach a broader audience and get a global connection, so to speak and open to new ideas.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great segue. Kevin, you've worked with companies also besides Baxter out there and that. What are some of the typical mistakes or challenges that you see corporations making when trying to get started in an open innovation.

Kevin Leland: First of all get started is kind of the big challenge, because there's still some resistance to open innovation, and even the term open can be scary to some companies because it implies, or it can be interpreted as we're letting all of our competitors know what our strategic interests are.

And so, I'm even hesitant sometime about using the word open. I mean, we're really about facilitating partnerships between companies and researchers who have mutually shared interests and can work together to solve problems.

Some of the approaches in the past to me just seemed really inefficient, like traveling around the world and going to conferences and hoping you hear somebody speak or get a referral from someone or just call up the universities. Or just more likely to just work with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are just example of select universities as if there couldn't possibly be great research coming out anywhere else.

And so that was part of the problem that I was trying to solve with Halo in terms of democratizing access to companies like Baxter for all scientists, regardless of where they are in the world, or what institution, where they reside and making the process a lot easier for both the scientists and for the company.

Because one of the reasons that companies don't pass a wider net is because it's a lot of tedious administrative work in terms of emailing and downloading attachments and PDFs. So, the platform is designed to streamline that entire process so they can cast a wider net.

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Brian Ardinger: Are there types of businesses or types of challenges that seem to work better when tackled in this open format or open environment?

Kevin Leland: We're focused on scientific innovation. So the other key difference is that all of our community are PhDs or part of funded startups. So it's not a challenge site where just anybody can submit an idea. So that's one of the key differences.

Brian Ardinger: Are the types of businesses or types of challenges that seem to work better in this type of environment.

Kevin Leland: In the case of Halo, we seen everything from very specific requirements that were similar to what Baxter was looking for where they lay out the actual technical requirements of what they're looking for. And then on the other side of the spectrum, we have what Bayer has done, which is a very open-ended call for proposals around the area of sustainable agriculture.

And so, the platform is flexible enough that it works for either approach. The key difference, I mean, it really depends on the goal of the company. So in the case of Baxter, a lot of our other customers like Pepsi or Reckitt, they're looking for a very specific solution, to a challenge that they have. Whereas a company like Bayer kind of doesn't know what they don't know, and they're just kind of want to see what's out there.

And then from a management perspective, when you do have a very open-ended call, you get a lot more proposals and the more specific requirements the fewer you are going to get. So, it kind of depends on, on what your ultimate strategy is.

Brian Ardinger: That's a great way to segue it back to Matt. I'm assuming that your work with Halo is not the only type of innovation initiative that's going on at Baxter. Can you talk a little bit about some of the other innovation efforts that are going on there and how does your work with Halo fit in with those?

Matt Muller: As a company, really, a lot of our innovation framework is built into our core business objectives. The way we're structured as a company we're in business units. So, as I said, I work in renal care, so everything, we start with our business and understanding what does that business strategy. Where do we want to play as a company? And then what are the key problems that we want to solve?

And I mentioned up front one of the key problems right now that we want to solve, is we want to figure out how to be a more sustainable business and get away from shipping water across the globe. So that's a key strategic initiative for our business.

So, then what we define at that point, what are the key elements or the problems that we need to solve in meeting that strategic initiative. One is how do we purify water in the home? And then we figure out what are the ways, you know, based on those specific problems we find we have, what are the best ways to solve that problem?

So, in some cases, we're at a point where we need more ideas. Whereas a company, we stagnated and we tried these pathways are not fruitful. We're kind of keep banging our head against the wall. Let's really go out there and see what's out there. And that was an example of what we did with Halo.

We also have our own internal engineering organization. We're a global company. So, there are specific things that we may do from an innovation project where we would work on it internally because we feel like we have the internal expertise. Or a lot of times what we will do is we'll look for external partnerships and that may be in the form of through various engineering consulting companies and product development consulting companies that we may partner with because they may have very specific experiences in a space that we're interested in, or maybe an adjacent space.

And that's another big element is we get siloed and focused in medical. But there are a lot of adjacent areas where technologies are being developed and, you know, maybe it's the petroleum or refining industry, or maybe it's, you know, some other area of medical that we just don't play in. And we can bring in these consultant firms that just have much broader exposure. And so that's also an element that we look at. So it's really a mix between this open concept like what we do with Halo, engineering consulting and partnerships, and then internal.

Brian Ardinger: You know the world is changing so fast and everything is happening so rapidly that it's tough to keep up. Even if you're an expert in your particular industry, like you said, even understanding what's going on in cross industries and that. Kevin, can you talk a little bit about the types of industries that you serve and why a platform like this can give advantage to corporate?

Kevin Leland: Yeah, absolutely. I thought it was interesting when Matt was talking about getting inspiration from other industries like oil and gas or petroleum, because that's really what the platform is designed for.

Researchers don't necessarily think in terms of what the commercial application is. They think of what their expertise is. And by collecting all this data on what their focus area is and then on the flip side, what companies are interested in, we can more programmatically find connections that in potential partners where otherwise, it would really have no idea that there might be a fruitful opportunity there.

In general, we've been focused like broadly on the area of sustainability, which can include anything from sustainable agriculture, like Bayer to sustainable packaging or work with PepsiCo and then water treatment, which is what we did with Matt and his team.

So that's a really broad category. We do have a few other opportunities are kind of outside that scope. But we are also looking at doing more in the medicine and pharmaceutical areas as well.

Brian Ardinger: Matt, can you talk a little bit about the early days of finding an innovation effort like this? What were some of the challenges or pitfalls or things you had to do to get buy in and then go and actually execute on this particular challenge?

Matt Muller: It's hard to sometimes in a large company get traction. And so, you need a champion. And Kevin's known that cause we've actually worked together to help to get that traction within Baxter. I think it helped as we got started because Kevin had some prior connections with some core people at Baxter, which helped to get some initiative.

But I think the biggest challenge is getting started and showing the value and gaining the buy-in to get something like this funded internally in a large company. I think a lot of people have an opinion of large companies have endless resources. And can do anything they want. But the reality is everything's looked at very closely.

You're constantly getting distracted with the new crisis or the new area of focus. And people are constantly changing roles and companies. So, you need that champion internally. You need to then be able to get that own internal opportunity to influence. To get the approval, to fund something like this.

But then secondly, you need the success stories to come out of it, because if you don't have that initial success, chances are that then you're not going to get that momentum and people aren't going to believe in following through with it. And that was key to our relationship here is getting really some initial successes that we could point to. And then things have kind of evolved from there.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point. I think a lot of companies are naturally more fearful because failing in an existing business model is not a good thing, but yet to innovate, you know, that there are some things that are probably not going to work and that. Open innovation almost gives you some opportunity to try and test and experiment a little bit outside of your core realm.

Gives you a little bit more ground cover sometimes to have different types of conversations than you would have, just if it was only internal and working from that perspective. Kevin, what else are you seeing when it comes to the benefits of companies reaching outside of their four walls to create their innovation initiatives?

Kevin Leland: The biggest benefit and maybe Matt can speak to this is they're identifying partners that they would have never known about otherwise. So Matt was able to identify a team in Australia. UNSW Sydney. And I don't think Baxter has anyone on the ground there, and probably wouldn't have found that otherwise.

And then the secondary benefit is it's almost like a market analysis tool or market intelligence tool because the companies are learning about new technologies and trends and different pockets of innovation around the world that they really didn't have visibility into previously.

Brian Ardinger: What are you guys most excited about moving forward?

Kevin Leland: I'm really excited to see this working. So, you know, I did a ton of customer discovery before launching Halo. I had dozens of interviews with innovation executives on one side and scientists on the other side. But you never really know until you actually go into the wild and introduce a platform to the users to see if it's going to work. And we've done 20 plus RFPs now since Baxter. We work to put 12 Fortune 500 companies, every one of them has resulted in signed agreements.

And, you know, obviously it takes time to see these products into the marketplace, but that's the next thing I'm excited about is when Baxter introduces a new home dialysis device, where patients can make the dialysis solution from their kitchen and don't have to have 900 pounds of solution sitting in their bedroom.

Brian Ardinger: Matt, what are you excited about?

Matt Muller: Well, I like your vision of the future there, Kevin, first of all. Beyond that, you know, and obviously helping us accelerate, getting the innovative products to market. The other thing that I've really enjoyed is being able to make these broader connections that we never would have before. Kevin used the example of we're connected now with the University of New South Wales on a really interesting research project.

But the other thing that this connected us with is a whole network of experts on an NSF Foundation called New, which is very well aligned with some of our core business and research interests that we never would have had before. You know, if we hadn't been involved with this initiative. And so, it's those types of things that also really get me excited because it really helps us.

You know, at the end of the day we're scientists. We're engineers. We all like collaborating with other scientists and engineers to solve problems. And this is just exciting because it broadens that network for us even more.

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Brian Ardinger: Matt and Kevin, thank you for collaborating here at Inside Outside Innovation and sharing some of the insights on what's working in this new changing landscape that we're in. So, I appreciate you both being on. If people want to find out more about yourselves or the companies and that that you work at, what's the best way to do.

Kevin Leland: For me, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Kevin Leland should be one of the top three, I think, or go to Halo. Science

Matt Muller: And similarly, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Matthew Muller, Director of Applied Innovation, Baxter Healthcare. We also have a company bio description on Kevin's platform. Halo. We also have put out two new challenge statements with respect to some of the key technical challenges that we have in our space. So, you know, go to Kevin's platform and check those out as well, please.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Matthew, Kevin, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to continuing the conversation and thank you very much.

Kevin Leland: Thanks Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Esther Gons, CEO and Co-founder of Ground Control and Author of the upcoming book, Innovation Accounting. Esther and Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Cofounder, talk about the ins and outs of innovation accounting, and what companies should be doing to track and measure their innovation initiatives. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Esther Gons, CEO and Co-founder of Ground Control and Author of Innovation Accounting

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Esther Gons. She is CEO and co-founder of Ground Control, which is a software platform that helps companies measure innovation and co-author of the corporate startup, and upcoming book Innovation Accounting. Welcome Esther to the show.

Esther Gons: Thank you, Brian. I'm really happy to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. We've had Dan Toma, your co-author of the Corporate Startup and Tendayi Viki on the show in the past. How did you get involved in this innovation space?

Esther Gons: I think for me, it's been a journey of entrepreneurship. So, my background is basically being an entrepreneur, starting startups, helping startups. So, I've always been an entrepreneur. And one of my first things that I did when I still was actually in my studies of Information Science was starting a business.

And one of the things that I was asked to do by one of the bigger computer companies was building something completely new around their selling of computers. And I think that was one of the first corporate startups that I did, but it wasn't called that way, way back when.

But I build over the course of two years, a platform with personal logins, with all sorts of new technologies and things that you could do just to sell their computers, to be able to be working from home. So, blog posts that weren't called blog posts.

That was just content from people saying your employees will be so loyal. If you have them working from home, all these kinds of things. I even had other vendors ramped up with furniture, stuff like that. It was an amazing platform. And after two years and a lot of money when we finally launched nothing really happened.

And the computer company didn't understand because there were no sales whatsoever and they just simply pulled the plug. But for me, that was a really important event because I was asking myself what went wrong there? What was the risk involved? Was it too early? How could I have known? And that was a search that put me on the path of pioneering and innovation and understanding how you could deal with that.

So obviously that platform that failed was 20 years too early. If we look at the situation right now and we needed a COVID pandemic to get there. But yes, that got me into the puzzle, discovering things like the Lean Startup methodology when Steve Blank wrote about it and then working with other entrepreneurs to get it working. To evolve it. To make sure that startups heard about it.

So that was when I started to volunteer for a lot of startup activity in Amsterdam. And got involved in that in the tech scene, since I've always been a tech entrepreneur.

Brian Ardinger: Your first book, the Corporate Startup really gave corporations that inside look on what it was like and what it is like, to think and act, and move like startups. And create new business models from scratch. And it was a great opportunity to provide a framework for how corporations think about that. Your new book, Innovation Accounting, I'd love to start there. What is innovation? Accounting, and why is it so important?

Esther Gons: A lot of corporates asked for metrics. You're absolutely right. But they usually ask for the one metric to rule everything, right? So how are we doing in terms of innovation? And then they use innovation as a catch-all phrase. We want to know about all of our innovation, right? We want to see everything in our portfolio. So, what we've seen with working with a lot of clients, because we like to be practical about things that we write.

We want to know that it works. Is that for that startup kind of innovation, which is different from what you do in terms of innovation in the rest of your company, you could be doing a digital transformation. You could be optimizing your current processes with startups. It's all innovation, but if you truly want to do new business model innovation. Breakthrough in disruptive innovation. Then you actually need something else than the processes and the accounting systems that you have in your current company.

And we noticed that if people didn't have that new system in place and they were trying to do Lean Startup and they were trying to build new business models, if they didn't have the whole system, the whole package, then it all turned back into incremental innovation again.

So, then we thought, well, we have to let people know that if they truly want to do new business model innovation, this kind of disruptive innovation, they can measure that with the indicators that they have in their current company with that current system. Because then it will always fail or turn back into incremental innovation again.

So, let's talk about that word innovation accounting, that Eric Ries, once coined as being the system that teams needed to have to be accountable for the decisions they made based on data. And talk about how that evolved into something else. And then what do you need inside a company? What kind of system do you need, need inside of a company to actually measure that kind of innovation?

Brian Ardinger: I think that’s such an important point that corporations really need to define innovation and understand the spectrum of it. You know, everything from, like you said, the stuff close to the core of that optimization of what they're currently doing and how that differs significantly from transformational innovation when you're trying to come up with a brand new business model. Why do you think it's so difficult for companies to understand this distinction and be able to do something about it?

Esther Gons: For a company, it's ingrained in their system, that their goal is to optimize and grow their current system. Right? That's what they are there for. The CEO has been appointed by the shareholders to do that specific thing. So that means that their whole existence, their future is based on, on executing on that core thing.

And that also means that everything that they have gathered around it, their processes, their culture, their people, are based around that. And it's hard to understand something that isn't there yet. Something that is probably really risky. So, if you can't see it, then it's harder to understand and to act around it.

So, I think it's actually a good point that you're making Brian, because what we've seen is that if you do not make it visible by either a new system with innovation accounting, or in any other way, then top level, it's hard to make that distinction because you can't see it. You're just seeing the investment that you're making, but you can see what you're doing.

And what I always say is that you have to look at it in terms of buckets, right? There's buckets that do not have a really high risk, and that have business goals that are aligned with your core business. So fine, you can do that with the current systems and your investment will have to return something in probably a year, because that's what you're used to.

But if you're investing in a high-risk bucket, startups are high risk. I'm a investor myself. So, most VCs know this. This is a high-risk profession, right? You don't know how many will return, what kind of money. And the timelines are vague, could be three years, could be 12 years. So, these high risk buckets needs to have a different approach.

But you need to have some sort of visibility in terms of control. So, if you make the bet in your strategy, just that saying, okay, I have business models that are fading. I need to look at the future. Then at least you should have some sort of visibility of what you are doing with that future. So are you betting on a specific innovation thesis like we've described in the Corporate Startup.

So, then you want to understand how that is going along. Are we doing well? Are we turning that strategy into, into something really practical? Is your funnel turning into a portfolio? So, you need all kinds of indicators to be able to understand that without falling back to your financial indicator. Because naturally, if you're looking for something that is really new, you're searching and your core business is learning, which means that you do not have a return in Dollars or Euros. You have a return on insights and learnings, and that's what you work for.

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Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some of those particular metrics. Traditional metrics might be things like profitability, number of customers, things like that. When you get into, on the innovation front, especially transformational innovation, what are some of the early metrics that you should be looking at?

Esther Gons: That sounds really simple, right? And I can give you like three indicators, but it makes sense to sort of understand first that what we understand in terms of innovation accounting is like a whole package of indicators. Because you do not only want to understand every single individual team and how that idea is turning into a business model, right.

Because we're talking about that journey from idea to business model, and that is a risky journey because you're searching. But you also want to understand how all of the teams are doing inside of the program that you have. Then you want to understand if you have enough ideas to turn that into future portfolio products or services. Is that going along? Do we need more ideas? Is everything stopped at, I don’t know, stage two then we definitely have to look at what's going on here.

And then you need to also understand from a strategic level, if your bets for the future are doing well. And if your total investment in the future is turning into something that you want for the company. So, these are three levels of indicators or different kinds of indicators that have some sort of abstraction from each other, right?

So, at a team level, you need to understand things. Then the manager needs to understand things in terms of how are the teams doing? That is abstracted from the team indicators and strategy level.

They don't want to understand how every team is doing, but they do want to understand how that is translated into their portfolio strategy, for instance. So, I think it's important to understand that where Eric Ries said innovation accounting is for the teams. If you want to do it within a corporate situation, you want to do it in a different setting. So, you need to manage all these things and you need be sort of aware or in control of how all of these investments are doing. And if there is some return, I don't know, in the future.

Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm part of an innovation team and I'm trying to understand if I'm making progress, what should I be looking at? Should I be looking at the number of ideas I'm working on, the number of assumptions that I'm testing? Where should I start?

Esther Gons: For me, the most important thing for, for this kind of innovation is understanding that your core business is learning. So that means there need to be teams that are doing a unified way of working and validating with experiments. Methodically de-risking that business model. Right.

So that means that you want to understand if they're learning well. So how many learnings did they have? Maybe you can look at a experiment learning ratio so that every experiment have a learning or not. Or are we doing experiments for the sake of experiments, for instance. If you put that against time or against cost. Because learning for teams is essentially the core business.

Brian Ardinger: So, the idea of measuring that against velocity, how fast do they learn, and the cost of that learning. Is that what you're looking at?

Esther Gons: So as soon as you put learning the core, you can look at these things, right? So, what is the learning philosophy? What is the learning ratio? What is the velocity cost ratio? How much time do they spend in a certain state, for instance, doing the learnings?

That makes sense if you look at the learnings. That is their core business. But I wouldn't ramp up everything if you start. And just look at the core business and what you want to improve, because you have these indicators to be able to steer and improve of them.

Brian Ardinger: So, at the organizational level, what are some of the metrics at that portfolio level that companies should be using to know if they're making progress?

Esther Gons: That's the top level. You mean the strategic level? I think it's important to understand if you look at that strategic level. The indicators are basically, framed around questions. So, from a strategic point of view, what you're doing is trying to understand how much your company is really under risk of disruption. Right?

So is your current business model under threat of, or fade or disruption? Then that is really important to understand. So, we always say, if you look at your portfolio to understand how much you should invest in this kind of innovation, then look at your portfolio in terms of business models and not in terms of products.

People usually look at it, in terms of products, right? But then if you look at it, in terms of business models, most of these products are, have the same business model, especially in product driven companies. But the question is my company under the risk of disruption, or is innovation driving growth in the company, that will give you an answer into how much of your investment should actually go to disruptive innovation.

And that could then translate into indicators like portfolio fade, stuff like that. And the other questions you should ask yourself is how does my company future look like, right? Am I betting in the right direction? So how is the innovation thesis doing in terms of progressing towards newer stages. Or how efficient is my innovation ecosystem, if I look into the average speed of these innovation going through the stages or are my investment returning something in so many years.

Brian Ardinger: So, looking at things like how much of my revenue is coming from new initiatives, things along those lines?

Esther Gons: Things along those lines, but that's the easiest one. And that's one that corporates usually want to see that. So that's why I usually stay away from those in questions like this, because in essence, of course you want to understand how much of your growth is driven by revenue from these kinds of disruptive innovations. If you are starting out with innovation accounting right now, you won't be seeing that until three years or four years from now.

I think it's then better to look at different kind of indicators on a funnel level. So, what is going on in the funnel? How many of these ideas are actually starting? And how many end up in different stages. Is that progressing well. With one of your innovation theses that you defined, because you wanted to bet in that specific future, nothing is happening after the second stage, you should ask yourself, is this the right pieces? Should we look at it again? So, you need to have some insight depending on the maturity level of your innovation ecosystem, to be able to steer towards a better ecosystem.

Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is you're based in Amsterdam, so I'd love to get your insights, and I'm curious to know what you're seeing as it pertains to European companies and their approach to innovation and how it may differ from what's going on in the U S.

Esther Gons: So, the things I've seen in Europe, but maybe in the Netherlands specifically, is that the Lean Startup and the Lean Startup Methodology is a little bit farther ahead than it is in the U S maybe, especially in terms of the systematic approach towards the Lean Startup and how to do that within a corporate. Which I'm really happy about because that sort of helps me with the innovation accounting.

And then the other way around in the U S there is within startups, I'm not sure how that is in a corporate world. But within startups, there's far more appetite for risk investment. So, in Europe, we tend to be a little bit risk averse. Show me first, and then can you at least show me a revenue first before we do any kind of innovation? So, you're dependent on really early-stage angels, if you want to prove that revenue first. But that differs in country per country.

But if you look at ten European investment funds, that those tend to be a little bit more risk averse then the U S. And you can see that back into the amount of investments. So, if you compare VC investments, in terms of numbers, US are higher than they are in Europe.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Well, I can't wait to go a copy of Innovation Accounting. Your books are always so great because they're visual and they're tactical with templates and guides and that. If people want to find out more about your book or about yourself, what's the best way to do that?

Esther Gons: For the book, definitely go to InnovationAccountingBook.com, where we have the table of contents and you can download the resources and also look where you can order, and pre-order the book. If you want to know more about me or my company, then simply go to ToGroundControl.Com or might be a little bit more difficult as EstherEmmelyGons.NL.

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you Esther, for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to continuing to have these conversations about what makes innovation so great and appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you.

Esther Gons: Love to be here Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at the Kellogg School of Management and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. David and I talk about what keeps ideas from gaining traction and what you can do to avoid friction and resistance to new ideas. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of The Human Element

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have David Schonthal. He is a Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas. Welcome to the show, David.

David Schonthal: Thanks, Brian. Nice to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you here. You have spent a lot of your career thinking about and watching what it takes to make new ideas happen. You've spent time at IDEO. You were co-founder of Matter, which is that 25,000 square foot innovation center in Chicago. Has some venture capital experience and that. And I thought we could start by telling the audience how you got into the innovation space in the first place.

David Schonthal: By accident is the answer. It's sort of a long story, but I wound up becoming the COO of a medical device company in San Diego, California based on a radical shift from what I was doing before, which is tax software in London.

To make a long story short, one of my former bosses called me up when I was just at my lowest point with tax and the UK, no offense to the UK, but it was winter, and it was like dark 18 hours out of the day. And he called me up and all of a sudden, I just, all I remember is him saying, yada, yada, yada San Diego, yada yada, yada. I was like, oh please.

He's like, would you like to know what the business is? I was like, no, not important. So, I wound up going and being the head of operations for an early stage medical device company. And then basically from that point forward was just bit with the bug around bringing new ideas to market either in the startup space, through entrepreneurship or venture capital or in the corporate space through design and innovation.

Brian Ardinger: And you've got a new book called the Human Element. I would imagine it packs a lot about the things that you've learned over that career. Since you've spent a lot of time seeing how early ideas get traction or not, what is the most striking problem that you see most people making when it comes to kicking off an idea?

David Schonthal: I think maybe the best place to start is by most innovators and entrepreneurs’ instinct that the idea is the thing that needs to be addressed. So, if a new product or service or strategy isn't being adopted by the market, most innovators instincts says well, let's make the product a little better. Let's change the way we talk about it. Let's drop the price. Let's promote it differently.

And they make the thing or the strategy or the movement, the center of their attention. And in the course of my career, I've worked on some really amazing, I mean, some terrible, but also some really amazing innovations and products and services. And I was always surprised by how, even though clearly if these things were adopted into the market, they would make the world a better place, no matter how much we tweaked or change the idea that wasn't always the key to success of getting it introduced.

And so about four years ago, turned my attention to thinking about what is it that stands in the way of change and partnered up with one of my colleagues at Kellogg, who was a behavioral psychologist named Loran Nordgren. And together we've been studying this problem from both the applied side, as well as the theoretical side.

And that was the genesis of the book, which is that our instincts about innovation are too heavily biased on making the thing more appealing and not focused enough on helping the market adopt it by removing the friction that stands in the way.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I love that. You kind of start off the book, this battle between what do you call fuel and friction. The idea that a lot of times, just to make an idea better, all you have to do is add more facts or more features or try to get more folks bought into it. But really, it's a lot about how do you eliminate the frictions around that? So, in the book you talk about four frictions. Let's outline and tell the audience how they can avoid them.

David Schonthal: Sure. So, if you think about a new idea, like an airplane leaving the ground or a projectile flying through the air. Fuel, to your point Brian, are all of the things that propel that idea forward. The need that the customer has, features and benefits, promotional strategies, but like an airplane leaving the ground there are also forces that stand in the way, whether it's wind resistance or sheer or gravity.

And so, the book is really focused on these forces, these headwinds of innovation and the four that we specify in the book, the four frictions, our number one inertia, which is our desire as human beings to tend to stick with the status quo. Despite the fact that we know the status quo might be imperfect, our habits are surprisingly powerful. And so, recognizing that inertia is a play anytime you're trying to get somebody to change from what they're doing today, to what you'd like them to do tomorrow.

Effort is the second one. All of the ambiguity, all of the costliness, all of the exertion required to get somebody to make that change.

The third friction is emotion. All of the anxiety and fear that comes along with changing from something that you do today to something you do tomorrow. And you might not think that emotion comes into play for small things, but emotion comes into play when you're buying a pack of gum or when you're putting on a new shirt.

And then the fourth is what we call reactants, which is people's aversion to being changed by others. And each of them show up in varying degrees, depending on what you're working on in spotting them appropriately forecasting them ideally, so that they can be muted and mitigated is really the key.

Brian Ardinger: And a lot of those frictions, they're almost not necessarily irrational, but they're definitely not something that you can take an economic model and say, well, clearly there's a cost benefit analysis and everybody should end up on this side of it because of the cost benefit analysis. But there's a lot of underlying things. And it seems a lot of this frictions around ambiguity or being comfortable with failure. How can you get folks more comfortable with that environment of ambiguity?

David Schonthal: There's a couple of things that are packed into that question. Number one, ambiguity maps to the friction of effort. Effort we assume is like exertion, which is how much time and money will it take me to make a change. But you're pointing out appropriately that the other way effort comes in is ambiguity or a lack of clarity about how to go about doing something.

And sometimes that ambiguity can be so overwhelming that people are afraid to get started because they don't necessarily know how to get started. We talk in the book about a couple of methodologies specifically around helping people with ambiguity. One is around road mapping in simplification. Oftentimes our desire to get people to change is to like keep adding or keep making something better, add facts or add arguments to get somebody to change from what they're doing, to what you'd like them to doing.

I mean, just look at vaccines. For example, in the states. Like there's no ambiguity about the evidence that vaccines help protect against severe illness. There is no ambiguity. There is no doubting, the fact that if you get vaccinated, it will make the world a safer place. But that doesn't stop people from having resistance to that idea.

And one thing might be around the ambiguity about how to go about getting a vaccine. One might be around the perceived effort of getting a vaccine. The fear about getting a vaccine. And so understanding why people do or don't do the things that they do is really the key to addressing it. So simplification, streamlining, making unfamiliar ideas more familiar.

Oftentimes innovators have this instinct that because their idea is new and radical. We need to highlight its newness and its radicalness is part of its allure. Oftentimes that actually works against us because the newer and more radical something seems the less familiar it is. And the more anxiety we have about how we're going to start to use it.

And the great example of that comes from Apple. And if you're old enough audience to remember the introduction of the Macintosh OS. In addition to creating a new machine, one of the things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created was a created was a new operating system for how computers are used. And unlike PCs or DOS-based systems, which you really needed to learn the language of computers in order to do something on a computer, Steve Jobs and other great innovators tend to have their products and services operate the way the rest of your world works.

So, when you're working on an Apple home screen, you're working on a desktop. And when you're creating a document and you want to store that document, you put that document in a folder. And when you want to get rid of it, you drag it into the trashcan. And these might seem sort of like cute user interface principles, but these were deliberately designed to make something wildly unfamiliar to people who had never worked on a computer to immediately feel more comfortable with it because it works, sounds, and it feels the way the rest of your world works. So even though something is new, doesn't mean that it should be projected as radically.

Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm a new innovator or I'm a startup entrepreneur, I've got a new idea I want to start building that out. Do you recommend mapping out these particular frictions or how do you find out what your audience or what your customers are fearful about?

David Schonthal: That's a great question. There are a couple of tools we bring to life in the book. One is called a Friction Map, which is anticipating the frictions that might stand in the way of your new ideas. So, it is a document that you can fill out with your team. Where you forecast based on some clear questions that are asked in the Map. What is the relevance? What is the amount of inertia that might be present? What's the amount of effort, friction that might be present? Emotional friction that might be present in reactants?

And then there's another framework around remedies. How might you take each of these frictions, test them in the market, but also test possible remedies to overcome. And the more you can bring this into your design process.

So, people will fill out a Business Model Canvas based on Osterwalder's work, or they'll fill out a Horizons Framework as they're forecasting what opportunities might exist. We also recommend filling out a Friction Map, which is what are the forces of resistance that might stand in the way. And what might we prototype to overcome those forces as a way of introducing this product or service or strategy.

Brian Ardinger: And then do you go out and actually test those assumptions?

David Schonthal: Absolutely. Each of them can be prototyped. And yes, testing them with different audiences, testing different ways of communicating or making unfamiliar things familiar. Or identifying the sources of emotional friction so that they can be addressed in the messaging, and the way products are communicated. All are easy enough to test in low fidelity and oftentimes save us a lot of effort down the road when it comes to scaling offers up.

Brian Ardinger: One of the other things I liked about the book is that you have not only these frameworks, that people can understand the methodology and that around it, but you also bring out some case studies in the book. And one of them is around Flyhomes, which is a startup company that built a new business model in the real estate space, designed to address some of the frictions in the market. So, can you talk a little bit about that case study?

David Schonthal: It's a great story. So Flyhomes, for those of you who are living in the United States while you're watching this can appreciate, we are in the midst of a bananas housing market, residential housing market. Debt has never been cheaper. Inventory has never been lower. And as a result, desirable homes are just flying off the market almost the same day that they're listed, which creates a whole conundrum for people who are trying to buy homes, particularly first-time home buyers.

Because when inventory is low, typically the offers that get accepted by sellers, particularly when they have multiple offers, are all cash offers or offers that are perceived to be low risk. And low risk offers are ones that don't have contingencies attached to them. Don't have home sale contingencies. Don't have loan contingencies. In order to compete, in order to get a home buyer, you have to either bring all cash to the table or convince sellers that despite the fact that they've got these contingencies, that there's actually a high degree of certainty, that something will close.

Flyhomes is a business that helps address this problem by making all buyers, all cash buyers, they have focused their business model on removing the friction that stands in the way of somebody buying a home in simultaneously removing the friction that stands in the way of a seller accepting the new one offer forum.

They didn't start this way. Flyhomes began, in fact, the namesake doesn't come from homes flying off the market. It came from the fact that Stephen Lane and Tushar Garg who were young entrepreneurs, started the business by thinking, all right, in the world of real estate tech, in the world of residential real estate tech, the big names or the new market innovations where things like Trulia and Zillow and Redfin, that had two primary value propositions.

One we're either going to take all home inventory off the MLS that exists only for real estate agents, and we're going to democratize it and make it so that anybody who's interested in looking at homes can see all available inventory, which is great. And then the second thing they typically did was discount brokerage. Meaning that if you worked with one of their agents, you would get cash back, they would discount their service fee and you would get some of that back in a rebate.

And Steve and Tushar figured there was probably more that could be done in this market. And they being millennials themselves in doing some research, found that millennials, in addition to wanting to own homes, also desired travel, adventure, freedom.

And why is it that when we make big purchases on electronics or appliances on a credit card, we get all the benefits that come with a credit card, like points and travel miles. Why don't we get something like that with homes? And so, they created a product called Flyhomes, which is for every dollar you spend on the purchase of a new home, up into a half a million dollars, you would get points on an airline.

And they partnered with Alaska and Jet Blue. And Jet Blue actually sent out this mass email to all their frequent flyers saying we're now in this arrangement with Flyhomes, buy a home through Flyhomes get up to 500,000 frequent flyer miles on Jet Blue. In the first day, thousands of people signed up for the platform.

And Steve and Tushar looked at themselves like this is going to be huge. And then nothing. Like nothing happened. Nobody was buying a home through Flyhomes. Nobody was actually using the service. There was enough alure or to the idea that got people interested to like check it out and sign up. But that wasn't actually helping people make the progress. They really wanted to make, which wasn't getting 500,000 airline points. It was actually getting the home that they wanted.

Flyhomes could address the real problem or address the real progress. All of these bells and whistles wouldn't make things easier. It would just be bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles.

So almost at the point of going out of business, they decided to pivot. And because they both had their real estate license started selling real estate. And by studying people in this kind of ethnographic way and actually getting out and selling real estate as realtors, they understood that the problem wasn't the points in adventure.

The problem was is that people desired homes in competitive markets that they were unable to access. And after two or three chances of putting in bids and having those bids rejected, people were just giving up on real estate all together. And so Steve and Tushar decided that if they could help address the problem of democratizing the ability for home buyers to buy homes in really competitive markets, that would be a revolutionary change. That would really change the game.

And so, they pivoted over from points to friction removal. And today. Flyhomes is growing like crazy. They do billions of dollars a year in transactions. They just raised a really big Series C at $150 million. It's all because they changed their business model from fuel addition to friction removal.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent example. Now you've got a number of them in the book and that. What other hidden gems in the book that people should be excited about when they pick it up?

David Schonthal: I think the most interesting stories and we try to have as many of them as possible in the book, so the ones that are counterintuitive. Like the ones that really check our biases and our assumptions about what we think the right way to do something is relative to what the science and the data tells us.

And one of the things that I think readers who read this book will find is that in many cases, our instincts about what we ought to do to affect change are actually in some ways the opposite of what we ought to do to impact change.

And we actually start the book off with a really fun story about the world's most successful car salesperson. A guy named Ali Reda, who works in suburban Detroit, in Dearborn, Michigan. Who outsells every other average car dealer in the United States, by a factor of 12 to one. He single-handedly sells as many as 1500 cars a year, which is more than most dealerships sell in total.

And when you study Ali, and when you interview him and when you understand how he approaches car sales, that is so much different than his peers, what you learn is that he just frames his job radically different than every other salesperson. And I won't divulge too much about the secrets of how, but there's lots of examples in this book about how people who go left when everybody else goes right.

And to succeed, but it's not just that they go left, it's understanding the psychology of what it is that they're doing differently than enables them to experience that success. Which is really, I think the beautiful thing about partnering with Loren on this is not only do we have examples about how these things work in practice, but we can also help people understand why they work psychologically.

Brian Ardinger: So, you've been in this innovation industry for quite a long time. What are some of the biggest changes that you've come across and how do you see the innovation space kind of evolving?

David Schonthal: That is a, the ability for people to create new ideas and make them real has never been easier. The cost of starting a new business, the cost of creating a new product or service with digital technology has enabled everybody who once had an idea on a napkin sketch.

You now have the ability to make that sketch into something real and tangible and available in the market. And what I find now is, we've got a different problem, which is that the world is flooded with new ideas and flooded with new technologies. And whereas before it used to be hard to make an idea into a real thing. Now it's getting people to notice and pay attention and actually adopt your real thing.

And one of the ways that we think about doing it is spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising and SEO and SEM. And yes, that's part of building awareness. But we don't often think about awareness as being one side of the equation. The other side is how do you make it easy for people to say yes.

Well, one of the things we noticed about new products and services, particularly when you're creating a new consumer product is people will learn about it. They'll even go to the website, they'll put it in their cart, but at the moment before they check out, they'll abandon their cart, which means you've done half the job, right.

You've gotten them interested to come to the site at the beginning. You've gotten them interested enough in the features and benefits to actually add that, or imagine that in their lives, but something is holding them back from actually pulling the trigger. And I think, now we've created a world where making the idea come to life has never been easier. But how do we make sure that it's easy for people to adopt that into their lives so that they can say yes, and to get noticed in that way. It's no longer about features and benefits. Now it's just about making things as frictionless and as effortless as possible for people to adopt.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: And the great thing about that is that's becoming easier as well. And people like yourself are helping in that process. So, David, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit about some of the secret sauce behind all that. I encourage people to pick up The Human Element. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

David Schonthal: HumanElementBook.com is a landing page that shares information about the book. You can find me on the Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management faculty page, just Google my name, David Schonthal. And usually, you can find me there and I'd love to hear from you.

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you David, for being on the show and look forward to continuing the conversation as the years and the innovation evolve.

David Schonthal: Thanks Brian. Me too. It was great to be here.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford's d.School. Sarah and I talk about her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People and dig into a number of the exercises and activities that innovators can use to move ideas forward faster. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript of Sarah Stein Greenberg, ED of Stanford's d.School and Author of Creative Acts for Curious People

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thanks so much, Brian. I'm really excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: You know, as a person in the trenches, trying to help companies and teams think through the innovation process. It's kind of hard-to-get people on board half the time. And you've taken and created this new book, that's really the tactical guide of exercise and experiences, almost a roadmap for that. What made you decide to tackle this topic and what do you hope for folks to get the most out of it?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Oh, great question. We're living through this historic moment right now, where on nearly a daily basis, each of us are trying to solve problems that we have not faced before. So, as we were getting going, we were talking about the challenge of having one kid vaccinated. One kid not vaccinated. People are back in school. There's lots of different risk factors.

Folks are starting in some cases to return to offices. Like what's the new social etiquette. And then at the same time, there are these like community level issues or global issues around whether it's wildfires, which are happening in my area, or really different perspectives about politics that we're experiencing all over the country.

And it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty. So, while we might be used to thinking about like, how do we apply our creativity to innovation and coming up with new products and services, there's also this whole realm of use for our creative abilities that has to do with these kinds of both small personal and large global challenges.

So, I wrote this book because I think that design offers a set of abilities that are really useful when you're trying to tackle problems where you don't know the right answer. Maybe there is no right answer, and you have to bring your full creative self.

These are the kinds of skills and abilities that we seek to help develop in our students at the d. School and with executives and teachers and folks all over the world. And I think there's something in here for everyone, no matter where you are in your creative journey. I think you can find something that will be of use to you.

Brian Ardinger: A lot of folks are understanding that to a real extent this idea of living in constant change and ambiguity and a world in flux. What are some of the key skillsets that you find are important to be able to dabble in that world?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: One is the act of noticing and observing how the world is changing. And, you know, we get really habituated to the routines and the things we see every day. But when you look at what amazing designers do, somehow, they see opportunities that no one else is noticing. But there are really a set of ways, I have a few great assignments in the book based on this to cultivate your own ability to observe and notice differently.

So, one of my favorites is called the Dureve, in which you are able to take a walk and navigate around a space or your neighborhood, or your office building, by using the practices in the Dureve. All of a sudden you notice things that maybe have been there for 25 years, and you haven't noticed these elements. And it awakens you to recognize how many opportunities are around us all the time that are just lying in plain sight, but we are not seeing them. So that's one of those skillsets.

I think another key one is just, we talk about this all the time in innovation and design, but it's about collaboration. Right. And how you get to a state of true creative collaboration and how much trust that requires, an openness, and the ability to navigate together with a group of people who may think very differently about the same things through a creative process.

Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, the difference between problem finding and problem solving. Can you outline that and why that is so important to understanding how to work in this innovation space?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, for me, that was one of the critical ahas that I experienced when I first started learning about design when I was a grad student. You know, I think in a lot of more analytical disciplines, you are taught to take the problem that you've been given, break it into small pieces and then figure out how are you going to solve that?

And that is a very valuable set of skills, but in design, we add some stages before you start working on problem solving. That's about problem framing, as you said. And the reason for doing this is that often the way a problem has been framed is a conventional way, right? It's kind of the way that's either out there and sort of the obvious way.

It is what we assume that our customers might need, or we assume that people would care about. But in fact, if you allow yourself that stage of problem finding that's often what drives the innovation, is when you reframe an opportunity and then you start to see it in a whole new way.

Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples that you can share around that?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. One of the examples that I go into detail in the book is the example of a team of students who ultimately wound up founding a new company. And they were tasked with working with a partner, a hospital, a cardiac care hospital in India. And they thought that their mission as a team was to design something that could really assist with like efficiency or sort of patient flow. They thought that they were going to wind up designing something for either the clinicians or maybe for the hospital administrators.

What they saw when they started doing their research was a completely different set of opportunities. What they spotted was the fact that there are many people in the hospital who were coming to accompany their family member and then winding up waiting for hours or days even, and not having a lot of information about how their family member was doing, what their prognosis was.

The students really like feed into this and wound up designing something for those family members. So they have now launched this organization that provides healthcare training to family members during that waiting process. And what that allows is that the patient then goes home with a trained caregiver who actually has the largest stake in the outcome, the health outcomes.

And they've trained over a million people. They work in over 150 hospitals across South Asia. It's a really unconventional solution. It's so powerful because they just took this completely ignored opportunity and created a very low cost, very effective solution that helps reduce the rate of hospital readmissions. It reduces complications following surgery.

Those students would not have been able to get to that outcome if they didn't have the permission to really do the problem finding work, right. And not take the problem as given but find a new opportunity.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important because when you work with corporate teams, a lot of times they think they understand the problem because they've worked with that customer before, they understand a lot of the dynamics versus like a startup. Maybe that's working in a green space idea. What kind of advice can you give for a team that's working in an existing environment to give them permission, to think about things differently and tackle the problem side first.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: I'm going to give two examples of assignments in the book that I think are incredibly relevant for the scenario that you just depicted. And neither of them are a huge investment of time. So, when people are always worried about like, hey, we just got to jump right into problem solving mode, taking one day or even just a couple of hours to check whether or not there might be solution space is it's such a good investment of time.

The first one that I'll mention is an activity called Experts Assumptions. And it's based on the practice of Assumption Storming. Everybody knows about brainstorming, but there's a really cool practice created by a guy named Craig Lauchner called Assumption Storming, where you list all the assumptions that you have about what your customer needs, or what the market opportunity looks like.

I really list all of them. And then you start categorizing them based on whether they're fact or opinions or guesses. And actually, what you discover is there's a lot more opinions and guesses, behind most of our assumptions, than you would think. Anything that's a fact you just disregard for the sake of the exercise, but anything that's an opinion or a guess, you challenge that.

So, you flip it and you say, well what if this opinion were not true, what could we design them? What could we make then? And oftentimes it just reveals that like our assumptions are built on this foundation of a lot of guesswork and it gives you the opportunity to do that right up front when you're starting something.

The other practice that I would advise in this case is called shadowing. And shadowing is just the practice of following in the footsteps of whoever you're trying to design for for a full day. We have a lot of experience running this with educators who follow a student for the entire day, from the bus stop to the drop off at the end of the day.

And they come back with the most interesting and unexpected insights, right? So those are people who are in the school context all day. They think they really understand what's going on, but until you put yourself in the shoes or you walk in the shoes of someone else, you don't realize how much of the experience might be altered from having that different perspective. And again, it helps you challenge those assumptions, and it helps you spot all of these opportunities for creative work or innovation that you haven't noticed yet.

Brian Ardinger: So, you've worked with a lot of teams, and they'd gone through a lot of these types of exercises and that. What are some of the biggest aha moments or obstacles and where do people get stuck and how do they overcome it?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: I love it when people get stuck, because that means it's a challenge worthy of their creative abilities. I think getting stuck has a bad rap, but actually it means you're doing important work and you're stretching and you're learning. One place where we often see students in our classrooms get stuck is during the phase when you're trying to light on the direction for your project, kind of synthesis phase, establishing a point of view.

I also see our teams get stuck when everybody's gone off and done the exploration research separately. And nobody has actually like gone to interview users together and had the aha that comes from having two different people interpret, oh, is that what that person was saying? There's a real missed opportunity there.

And then there was a wonderful moment of feeling the pressure of the final deadline that often causes a lot of angst and tension within a team. And what those moments often are is what's called productive struggle. So, there's research from mathematics education that says that when you struggle, when you're first trying to learn a new skill in math, you actually wind up learning it more deeply. And you're more likely to be able to transfer that knowledge to other kinds of problems.

And so people who kind of get things right away the first time, that doesn't mean they're deeply learning. So again, I welcome the struggle. I think the struggle can be a sign that the task is worthy of your attention and that you're going to have to stretch and grow while you're conquering it.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that I've seen working with teams, a lot of times that keeping the momentum and the consistency is difficult. A lot of times they go and get excited, and they go out and do customer discovery and then they think they can check it off the list and then be done with it. Do you have any hints or tips for, how do you keep that momentum and consistency not get pulled away to the executing and optimizing mode, that too many people get pulled?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Really establishing upfront that you're going to go back to customers multiple times is critical. When you first interpret whatever you learned during that exploration and research, you can kind of be like, oh, I'm onto it. Like I've got this new idea. It's new to me. It's exciting. But if you don't actually go back and test your assumptions by exposing those early prototypes to real people, then you're not really closing the loop.

So, treating those first insights as a hypothesis, but then continuing to test and make sure that you're getting real feedback from the market or from colleagues or from anyone who has an external perspective to the work, I think that's what really helps you avoid that pitfall that you're describing.

And a lot of people, you know, it is easy to get into that like solution optimization mindset. And a lot of that comes from this sense of, I need to work fast. In my opinion, and I think the experience with, you know, a lot of innovators would bear this out, if you take the time to do those tests, you really save yourself risk. Right.

You really help get the right product to market or the right innovation going rather than some kind of more arbitrary internal deadline. It's so easy to like lose sight of that fact in the pursuit of, you know, getting to the preexisting timeline rather than actually thinking about what is right here, how am I solving the right problem? How am I going to come up with something that's truly meaningful to some customer somewhere?

Brian Ardinger: The key is accelerating the learning, not necessarily the outcome itself.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the learning also is useful to a company or a team, not just in this particular project, but then going forward. So, if you think about, am I optimizing for learning, what am I really doing to make sure we come out of this project, having a great outcome, but also like setting the team up for success in the future. That's the exact right mindset. That's the learning mindset that you want to cultivate.

Brian Ardinger: So, as you're out in Silicon Valley at Stanford. So, technology is obviously a core component of the whole region. How do you see technology changing the way we design and some of the new trends that you're seeing out there?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: One thing we've all gone through in the past 18 months is much more remote collaboration, particularly for many people in the world of design than we have experienced before. And I think that that's been certainly a challenge, but it's also provided a lot of new opportunities to design new types of interactions, new types of practices.

So, there are increasingly ways to be testing at scale through online platforms that we maybe haven't used in the past. Personally, still think that has to be complemented by the kind of depth human, you know, more individual, small qualitative research approaches. I think a blend is really useful.

It's challenged all of our teams in terms of how do you build trust? How do you build resilience? How do you build the kind of collaboration that we're talking about be necessary when you're not, it's easy to have less empathy for your team members when you're not seeing them every day?

And you know, not maybe scheduling in time to have those more human conversations that kind of coffee chat just happens in a in-person office environment. I think you can design for that remotely in a distributed culture, but you have to be conscious that that's an important thing that you value.

Brian Ardinger: Like I said, there's, I think over 80 types of activities or exercises that you have in this book. Are there particular ones that you like or want to talk about?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Sure. I mean, one example that I'll give, and I feel like this is the epitome of what we talk about when we say these are unconventional approaches. So, one of my favorites is an activity that I lead every year with students called Distribution Prototyping. So, this is like phenomenal for small businesses or large businesses.

Too often in design or in engineering we like think about the thing that we want to make or the service we want to deliver, but we don't think about how it's actually going to reach the customer. That's such a miss because there is so much innovation and creativity that can happen in the distribution and the marketing and the sales experience and all of that.

So, thinking more broadly about where innovation can show up, that's a favorite idea of mine. And in this particular assignment, I have people stretch a string across the biggest room they have, or the longest hallway that they have. And then imagine the thing that they're trying to deliver to the customer at one end and the place where it's either being the person being trained to deliver the service, or you know, where it's being manufactured at the other end.

And then systematically you hang cards using paperclips or whatever you have at hand to represent all of the different steps along the channel. And there's something very powerful about the embodiment of that, right? Like you can get your head around it. You can build a model. You can put it on a spreadsheet.

It doesn't do as much for you as if you physically do what's called body storming and make that physical representation. So, you will have kinds of insights about, oh, we could cut some costs here. Ooh, this could be a really nonsense traditional agent in my channel who might really change how people are experiencing the delivery of the service. Or you might think differently about the economic arrangements or some way to incentivize retailers that you haven't thought about before. So that's one of my favorites. That's really what I'm taking a string and putting it... That is the kind of embrace of the more playful unconventional approaches that can really work.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that literal mapping of a customer journey gives you so many different dimensions to look at. It's almost like the whole business model canvas versus a running of a business plan. It gives you a visualization of things that you can move around and change. I really like that.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. And I would say like the visualization is a huge part of it. And then that one step further into the physicalization is like, there is a reason that when you walk into any design studio, it is usually cluttered with so many different objects. It's because designers think with things and there is some really magical part of your brain that gets lit up. When you do that.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: I appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk a little bit about the book it's called Creative Acts for Curious People. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: They can reach us at dschoolbooks.Stanford.edu. We are going to be delighted to get this into people's hands as soon as possible.

Brian Ardinger: Go and grab it at Amazon or wherever books are sold. And we're excited to have you on the show and thanks very much for being a part of it.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Wayne Li, Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech and Director of Design Bloc. Wayne and I talk about the growing importance of design and design thinking, and we explore some of the changing trends when it comes to technology, tools, and tactics for building new products and services that matter. Let's get started

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Wayne Li. He is Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech, Director of Design Bloc. Welcome to the show, Wayne.

Wayne Li: Hi thanks. Thanks Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on, because you have had a long career in this whole world of design and innovation. You were a founding class member at the Stanford d.school. You've worked with great companies like Ford and Pottery Barn and VW. And I think you were a part of the original team that helped develop the original Tesla Roadster. I think I'll start off the conversation with where you're currently at with Design Bloc and how it got has origin.

Wayne Li: Design Bloc is a multidisciplinary Design Thinking initiative on Georgia Tech Campus. So, you can think a center. We try to bridge different schools and colleges. Think like a large university, they're separated in different units or colleges. You have a college of engineering and college of design, college of natural sciences.

And what Design Bloc tries to do is to teach in a multidisciplinary type of way. And so we partner with professors from all over the Institute to try to offer courses that teach not only Design Thinking, but do it in a way that bridges more than one unit, more than one college. We have things like Bio-inspired Watercolor Painting all the way to Transportation Design.

Community Engagement and Service, like a humanitarian design project. And again, you can see that those problems exist. They exist beyond just the sphere of one unit. For example, you're saying, okay, I'm going to address developing countries energy grid. That's not just engineering that requires public policy. It requires cultural engagement and community knowledge. You have structure or architecture there.

So, you can see a problem like that is multifaceted. We shouldn't be teaching in a siloed or singled mono disciplinary manner. You know, I learned this really early on, probably back when I was still in college, actually. But I worked at IDEO product development very early on in my career.

You know, I think the reason why it came to be like, you mentioned, like, you know, what is it, how did it get started? Was that when I went to undergraduate, I was both a fine arts and engineering major. I kind of saw how the perception of an object, its beauty, its appearance, had a cultural relevance to it.

And then you coupled that with how well it was engineered. How well it was built. What it was actually intended to function as and whether or not those mesh together well. And I think that's kind of what got me to my work at IDEO. But I think that was the benefit.

And so about almost seven years ago, an alumnus from Georgia Tech, Jim Oliver, went back and visited the Institute and just notice that the College of Engineering and the College of Design really didn't talk to each other that much. Even though he himself had had a similar background. In undergraduate, he also had a mechanical engineering and industrial design background just like me.

So, he basically put out a search and said, I want someone. I will donate a certain sum of money. And I want someone to establish this kind of initiative, whose goal it is to teach students in a more well-rounded way. And so, I'm very lucky and very blessed after a nationwide search that I managed to get it. That's kind of how it came to be.

So, we started about six, seven years ago with basically one class. With 8 students to 12 students in it. And now we teach about 20 classes a year, with about a thousand to 2000 students. Right? So, it has grown. It's wonderful to see it. I love being the director of it and seeing it grow and getting partners and collaborators who are really psyched about it.

And the cool thing is, yeah, you actually see professors who have a PhD in something, so they're very, very intelligent about something. All of a sudden get intrigued, like I never thought of myself as a designer. Well, everyone, little d design.

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point because obviously people are beginning to understand that design is a core component of every facet of their life nowadays. But tell me a little bit about like what's the process of Design Bloc and how do you go from an idea to creating something valuable in the market? So, walk me through the whole process of Design Bloc.

Wayne Li: Design Bloc, the initiative, right? Is you, like you mentioned, I did my graduate work at Stanford. We were in the class that helped to found the Stanford d.school. So, let's take like the little d design. Don't think like I'm a fashion designer or I'm a software designer or I'm a car designer. Let's take the little d design. So, design, if we just think about design process, right.

Stanford has a certain method for their design process. They call it Design Thinking Process. But if we just think of it as a process, when anyone goes through steps or goes through mindsets or phases in order to create something, they go through a design process. Design is a very flexible word. It's like Smurf, it's the only word where you can almost use it like six or seven times and still get the actual understanding.

Like I could say, well, I'm designing a design that will design a design to design. So, and you'll be like, what? But that would make sense, right? I'm designing a design; I'm creating a blueprint that will create a robot that will actually learn and make something of use. That's what it is.

The idea of course, is that when they build anything. They're going through what we consider a process, a design process. And again, this isn't something that necessarily is taught at an Institute. You know, an Institute will teach physics, or it'll teach mathematics or Latin. They're not actually teaching the process of how you create novel, useful, effective ideas, right, for society.

The Design Thinking processes that Stanford created along with the Hasso-Plattner Institute in IDEO. Talks about how can you hone and better your design process regardless of what it is. Regardless of what you're building. So, I think in that sense, Design Bloc is also trying to create courses that allow students to learn about the design process, hone it, and foster good mindsets and behaviors as they go through it.

Like for example, with pick something relatively trivial, but let's just for kicks. You get up in the morning and you want to make eggs for your partner or your wife or your spouse. That's a design process, right? You're making something that serves a need or a benefit to someone or some entity. So technically you went through a design process.

Now the question is, if you think about it, if you really wanted to make eggs well for your spouse or partner, what would you have to do? Well, you kind of needed to know what they like. So, if they love poached eggs and you give them hard-boiled, they might not like that. And then you also have to be creative.

You have to know how many different ways can you make eggs. You also have to think about whether or not it gets well received. Obviously, if you don't know your partner or spouse very well, and you make horrible eggs for them, they'll let you know about it. So sooner or later, and of course that last part is the cycles, the iteration, the more and more you do it, the better you get at it.

Right. The better you get at making eggs, the better you get at making the eggs the way your partner or your spouse likes them. So, you can imagine that's another, like a semi trivial one day activity. But whether or not you're making eggs, an electric car, a public policy, a courtroom drama, novella, all of those are design processes. Now apply it to something more serious and you get my drift.

Brian Ardinger: Is there a standard iteration of step one, do this step two do this. Or is a lot of it driven by the learnings that you find by moving the idea forward in the first place?

Wayne Li: Yeah, no, this is great because I mean, there are many design practitioners and researchers and, you know, people who are designed professors, people who study design, and the people who practice it, who have put terminology around their design process. You might hear these in the industry, right. You know, Google will say, well, we use Design Sprint, it's an Agile Methodology. You might hear maybe a traditional company say, well, we use a double diamond approach, right? Where we go out and we go in, they have their terminology.

And of course Stanford's Design Thinking Process is empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, or evaluate. And they've put words to that. I think when people get a little bit tripped up on is when they hear things defined with either a series of words or a diagram that like, it looks like it moves to the right.

It's like, oh, arrow, arrow, arrow moves to the right. They get into this mindset that if I blindly follow a process from start to finish, I will be guaranteed a great result. And that's where I think practitioners understand that the design process is not linear. It's messy, it's cyclical. It repeats it folds on itself. It goes backwards. You jump two steps forward or back.

Part of it is the sense and respond. That's why, what I mentioned before, the more and more you practice your design process through experience, and through each phase, you get better at understanding how the design process is going to affect the final result.

And that takes some skill. It takes experience. You know, it can also be taught. It can be learned. As you go through a phase, are you sensing how it's going? Do you understand the implications of what you're doing at the time? And then can you respond? For example, if you're in a ideate phase, it is a creative phase. I need to know how many different types of eggs I can make to address my partner.

Let's say I only know how to make one. I only know how to boil eggs. I don't know how to poach them. I don't know how to fry them. I don't how to scramble. If you only make one solution and then go get that tested, chances are you're wrong. You know, one out of 10 shot that or one out of seven shot that that's right. If you're not creative by nature or your company doesn't have a creative culture in it, then blindly going through that phase of creating or ideating, isn't going to help.

So, if you don't know how to ideate, you're going to be in trouble because that phase will result in the same ideas you always come up with. Part of that is again the sense and respond. Knowing how you execute. Knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are in each phase and whether or not you can cultivate those.

If you know, you're not a very creative person in the sense that you very quickly drill down to one possible solution, and then you're very dogmatic about it, then realize that's a weakness in your creative process. It's a weakness of your design process. At the same time, if you're really blue sky and you just love imagining all day and at the end of the day, you need to put something in front of someone, otherwise this product doesn't get built, then you're going to have to learn about your execution and critical thinking skill.

At a certain point, I think we try to instill in our students is that, you know, the design process is fluid, it's living and it's part of you. You need to understand how you use it, and then you need to understand how companies use it. Cause that's not always the same thing.

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. Are there particular areas that you find, doing these workshops and working people through a process, where people tend to get stuck? What's the biggest aha moments about teaching a process and how to think about designing?

Wayne Li: A lot of this is cultural, right? A lot of this deals with people, and of course you see this right with various established or rigid companies that have very, very well-documented well hewn, traditional processes. They love buying out startups. Why? Because the startups are small four employee kind of entities that are usually young. They take risks. They don't know what they can't do because they've never been slapped on the wrist so many times.

For them like big companies who are really staid, who don't encourage or empower all levels of their company to come up with ideas, will usually get into this group thing. Like, well, I can't possibly be right. No one values my opinion. The only person that's valued is the CEO or the executive management or the senior vice president.

So, then that just destroys a kind of innovative culture because the creativity is not fostered. It's not empowered across all levels. I see that often, usually when I'm brought in to consult with a company or a company comes in and wants a project with a Design Bloc and we do projects for companies. You know, they're always like looking for something like, let's just show something we don't know.

That they usually, something will surprise them. And part of that is because young students don't know what they can't do. When they come up with an idea, a lot of the times, the reason that large companies can't or companies that don't have an innovative culture, they don't ask that question anymore.

Right. So, like maybe three generations ago, they stopped doing it a certain way because they learned something. But now the business environment has shifted and no one's bothered to really question why they can't do it that way. Or why they can't do it in a new way. Right. It's always so we've always done it that way.

Well, yeah, that's the group thing, right? No, one's empowered to ask and go, wait a minute. Yeah, that was true 20 years ago, but the technology has shifted around you. The audience has shifted around you, the people that use your product has shifted around you. Why not go back and question some of those baseline assumptions.

Brian Ardinger: Have you learned any techniques that you could help folks that are in that particular environment to open up their thinking or open up their exploration and not fall into this typical traps?

Wayne Li: There are a lot of different ways that you can do that, Brian. What I tend to always ask is when someone is in kind of that group think is to say, okay, wait Taguchi calls it Root Cause Analysis.

I think Dev Patnaik uses, who teaches Needfinding at Stanford has taught like a Contextual Ladder, which is like a How Why Ladder. If you're confronted with a problem, do you understand the constraints with which you are assuming are already frozen. Taguchi method is just, why does that exist as a root problem?

That's not necessarily creative, but what it does is it tries to ask, do you understand your context? If you're confronted with, I only know one way to do this, or this is the way that we think the company always wants to work, then at least questioning that constraint to say, well, why do we do it this way? What assumptions are we making about either our processes or our customers, that make us decide that we should be doing it this way?

Brian Ardinger: And basically being okay with the fact that let's assume that this is an assumption. And then like, how do we find evidence to figure out is this assumption true or false? I think a lot of people don't go back to that process, like you said, and just double-check like, I know we've been doing this 20 years like that, does it still hold true. Its an important part of the process.

Wayne Li: And one thing I always love is just pushing constraints, right? I mean, ultimate creativity is having no constraints. But it's difficult in a business environment because you always have some type of like time and money are always going to be constraints. You don't have infinite time. You don't have infinite money.

If you had those, you can make anything you wanted and take as long as you want it to make. So you always have some type of constraint. But what I always like to do is push against it. So if you say something like we can't build that, that's too expensive. Then if you say, okay, well we'll hold on a second.

What are those assumptions? And then say, there's inherent assumptions in that way. You're building it the same way. That's one assumption. If you built it with a different material or different process, you could maybe save money. If you built it with a different volume, it could be cheaper. So you're like, well, you're assuming that we can only sell that to 10,000 people.

What if we sell to 10 million? Or you're assuming no one will pay for it at a higher cost. So again, really, it is about pushing on that constraint to say, we can't do this. Flip that and reframe it. What are all the different ways that we can actually push beyond that boundary? And I take each, sometimes I'll take the top three constraints and kind of see if they're related and in tandem, push against them.

Sometimes I'll take each constraint and basically brain on each one separately. Right. But ultimately I'm always asking why is this assumption here and why is this constraint here? And, you know, sometimes somebody will say, well, that just defies the laws of physics. I'm like, no, that just defies the laws of your creativity of your brain.

Right. You're not framing it well enough. The only meaningful attribution you have is that that must be a mechanism that follows the laws of physics or follows the laws of finance. Like it has to, you know, supply demand. You must sell something for more than you make it. But those laws are inherent in a human assumption.

Somebody is using that device. So the laws of physics change if a 10 year old uses it versus a 30 year old. So if you're like making a shovel, a kid's plastic shovel is way different than a 30 year olds Gardener's shovel. So one shovel is made out of metal costs, maybe $25, and one's made out of plastic and cost two. So again, your physics law didn't change, but your framing did. Part of that is understanding your framing when you'd make an assumption,

Brian Ardinger: I'd lIke to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about some of the things that you're seeing, what are some of the interesting trends in UX, UI design, and maybe even technology that you've seen and where do you see this whole I guess, industry going Brian?

Wayne Li: That's a great question. I mean, I work with industrial design students and mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer scientists, human computer interaction, math graduate students. Definitely the thing you see faster and faster and faster for UI and UX is both portability and anticipation. So let me kind of explain what that means.

Portability in the sense that devices get smaller, they get more personal, right? No, one's out of client terminal. There's no client terminal relationship anymore. So the portability meaning your ability to consume data, manipulate software, has to be more and more flexible, more and more intuitive. You basically be at the will it like, you know, sooner or later, you might not even use your hand.

It's going to be so fluid and so natural. Then you can talk to it. You can gesture at it. The interactions will be more and more natural and quicker, faster, smaller. Now the other thing, like I said is the anticipation. Everything you do is being logged so sooner or later between the machine learning algorithm and the companies that are constantly monitoring your data, they'll be able to truly understand what you are based on your behavioral pattern.

If you've read the Singularity Is Near, they basically say, you know, pretty much by 2045, your consciousness will be digitized. So in that sense, if we, if we got what 20 some odd years, 24, some odd years to get there, that basically means AI will be conscious by then, in the sense that hopefully if I live long enough, I could go back and go, what did Wayne think in 2019, every thought that you put into Instagram, Facebook, anything you put into your computer will be logged and kept. So every thought you've ever had.

You may no longer corporally exists, but someone got a, what would Professor Li have thought in 1998, about this vehicle. And based on the machine learning though, well, Wayne said this about certain vehicles. And this vehicle and this vehicle people are very similar. So even if I'm not alive in 2080, and there's a 2080 sports car, they're going to go, well, what would Wayne have thought about this 2080 sports car?

And they would probably, the machine learning algorithm will say, well Wayne talked about these vehicles or design these sports cars. And these were his thoughts on them because they've all been logged. And by the weighting metric I have, he would have liked it. Or he would have said blah-blah-blah send it. Sooner or later, we'll have digital avatars that anyone can consult. And so that's the anticipation part. If you can anticipate that now how will that change, what you do

Brian Ardinger: Tomorrow is Tesla's AI day. And they're gonna be talking a little bit about some of the new mind of the car stuff that they're working on. Similar to what you're saying, where the car can anticipate based on its surroundings, what's happening and self-driving and everything else around that.

But you know, you take that beyond just transportation. You take that to everything else and how does that change the world and what we're looking at? Even things like I think about technology and how it's accessible to anybody now. So I have to be a coder, for example. A lot of no code tools and things along those lines that allow you to experiment and build and try things that 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you had to have a design development team to make that happen. So it'll be interesting to see where that trend takes the world of design as well.

Wayne Li: Yeah, no, absolutely Brian. I mean, going back to what you said. I mean, obviously the sort of research area of mine, because I have an automotive interface, a human machine interface lab at Georgia Tech, right. That looks at futuristic automotive experiences. And absolutely you're right. I mean, thinking about it this. Not only can all the cars, right now is 5g. Like let's just think, think about 5g.

If 4g was something like, oh, it was novel for us to have one HD movie streaming on our phone. Like that's the data of 4g, without major compression. 5g is like 40 simultaneous HD streams. So for example, if we just take some of that bandwidth and each car is communicating to the 15 nearest cars next to it, and those cars are connected and getting next to the internet enabled lampposts signage traffic stops, then that information is being shared very, very quickly.

So if there's something that optimizes traffic flow like a stop says, well, this is open, right now. And there's really no need for a green light or a red light or a yellow light anymore, because everyone's already talking to each other.

Brian Ardinger: Tie that into a person's phone and you realize, well, Joe's a crappy driver and he's, he's in the lane next to me. I probably need to adjust for that.

Wayne Li: Yeah. Every car in the compass directions around you will notice that, right. Or based on your driving pattern already know that you're a bad driver based on your previous driving history. Right? So that economists levels between semi and fully is tricky. But that data, if it's freely shared, is there.

The same thing and will be the minute you tell your car where you're going. So if you say, oh, I'm going to work and it's like, great, I'm driving you there. That's great. It will then ping everyone who's also going to work with you. And so it'll just say, oh, well, you know your neighbor down the street who works at the same company, why don't y'all platoon together.

And all of a sudden you match up and you can streamline your traffic. Right? So, same thing, if you, all of a sudden, you tell the car out, I'm going to a concert. It's a new thing. It'll ping everyone on the internet who's interested in that same topic, who's going to the concert with you. And your windshield will turn into a screen.

We actually have this in the lab, a windshield that is an augmented reality screen. And then you can then meet 15 people who will meet you at the door. Cause you'll be all dropped off at the same time to the same concert. So now you can go to the concert with not only the friends in your own car, but feel close kinship to 15 other cars that have the same people going at the same concert.

It's an interesting concept when you can share that much data that quickly, and you see that as a trend. Yes, privacy is an issue, but you don't really see people pushing against it that much. They're sharing their information.

Brian Ardinger: I love what you're doing and some of the things that you've seen in the past, and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about Georgia Tech or Design Bloc, what's the best way to do that?

Wayne Li: My email's fine. That's just my name. W A Y N E . L I @ design . G A T E C H - Georgia tech.edu. If you want to know more about Design Bloc, basically design bloc without the K so D E S I G N B L O C.ga tech.edu. So they can go to our website and then see what we do. There's a contact us button there.

Obviously, if you're a Georgia tech student or a prospective high school student, plenty to learn about what we do, which classes you can take. We do do workshops and not only for students, but we have done workshops for other entities. And so we are in the process of getting those things approved by the Institute. Right.

But we have mechanisms in which we do give workshops to companies or groups like the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. We've done Design Thinking workshops for them. So you'll see a list of all the workshops we tend to give. And if it's something that you are interested in or you're interested in giving to your company or entity, then there's a connect to us button and we can talk about that.

Brian Ardinger: Wayne, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, look forward to seeing what the future brings

Wayne Li: Me too. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Naomi Shah, founder of the venture backed modern media company Meet Cute. Naomi and I talk about some of the innovations and trends in the world of audio and new media formats, as well as her insights for moving from the world of venture capital to becoming a founder. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Naomi Shah, Founder of the venture backed modern media company Meet Cute

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Naomi Shah. She is the founder of the venture backed modern media company called Meet Cute.

Naomi Shah: Thank you. It's so nice to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here on the show because you've got a hot new startup that we want to talk about. You've got to innovate a company, innovative story. So, what is meat cute? How did you come up with the idea to start a new media company at the age of 24?

Naomi Shah: So, Meet Cute, just to start with, with what it is I do every day, is an entertainment brand. We make original scripted, romantic comedies. And these are audio stories that are completely written by a network of over 500 creators. Directed, produced, and voice acted professionally. And we distribute them on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you get your audio.

And really what we're trying to do with Meet Cute is show that you can create a lot of scripted content and create trust with an audience because of the consistency of how often you release the stories, the types of stories, and really become the best storytellers in original scripted content.

Brian Ardinger: You've got an interesting background to go down that particular path. My understanding is you started out as a macro equities trader at Goldman Sachs. You studied mechanical engineering with a minor in human biology at Stanford. Then you just started working at Union Square Ventures. How did you go about kind of that diverse background to end up where you are at?

Naomi Shah: It's a really good question. I actually will start even earlier than graduating from Stanford and that is when I was growing up, I saw both my parents working on a company together. My mom was the president. My dad was the vice president, and it was always part of our family dinners, our family vacations. We always heard about what they were working on.

It was this like subliminal informal look into what it's like to run your own thing. To be a founder. And to manage people and to bring people along with the vision that you have. And I never really knew how that was going to play out in my life. But I did know from a young age that was impacting the way that I wanted to go to school, study, and then start my career.

And so, at Stanford, I went in wanting to be a surgeon and I left with a mechanical engineering degree. And so that kind of explains why I was a mechanical engineering major with a minor in human biology.

And what fascinated me about human biology and why I wanted to be a doctor in the first place is I was really interested in the research process. Like how you ask a question, how you create a research project to answer that question, how you're very analytical and then how you convince people to listen to what you have to say.

And so, in high school, and actually in middle school, I ended up going down this path of working on a lot of research. Presenting it at a lot of conferences. So, I did a TED talk when I was 15 and it was my first foray into, wow, you can have an impact on the world, that's a lot bigger than the immediate community around you.

Fast forward a few years, to your point, I went into finance. I was really excited about pattern recognition in public markets and how it affected trading decisions. But I really was looking for something a little bit more creative. I always felt like I had this creative side of my brain that I couldn't really exercise day to day at work.

And that was because my resume was very technical. It was very based on engineering and data and math, but I loved creative writing and I loved storytelling. And that was something that I felt like was part of my personality that I couldn't bring to work every day.

So, in venture capital, it gave me a look at how founders would kind of marry different skill sets together. Make that the foundation of how they run their company. And I was really excited about that whole process, but really hadn't seen myself as an operator just yet. But I spent a lot of time at USV, which is the venture capital firm I was at right after Goldman. Our company was focused on human wellbeing. So, what are things that we do for fun?

And one of the things that we do for fun is we consume content. We read books; we listen to podcasts like this one. We go to concerts with our friends. And I realized that there was kind of a gap in the market where there wasn't a lot of original scripted stories being created in a really scalable way. Where venture investors felt comfortable taking that risk and investing in a company that was working on that problem.

Instead, it felt like you had Hollywood investors that were used to taking out risk profile and venture investors were like, oh no, we only do software and product. And so, I wanted to find a way to bring those two things together, which I felt like there wasn't really a company working on that out there.

And that led me to starting to come up with the business model for Meat Cute. At first, from the investment side of the table, where I was looking for that company to invest in. And eventually I took that leap of faith into founding and said, if we're not seeing this company out there, let's go be the ones to create it.

Brian Ardinger: So, as you were in venture, kind of looking at particular companies, did you ever think that you were going to jump to the other side of the table or was it something that came about based on your interactions with founders and that?

Naomi Shah: I think it was a little bit of both. I think it kind of goes back to growing up and seeing that that was possible. I did see my mom as a leader, and I knew that at some point I wanted to follow in my parents' footsteps in some capacity. Where it's you have an impact outside of just the immediate people that you touch. And I think that that's really what inspired me with founding is that you can have an impact on millions of millions of people who use your product or listen to your stories.

And that was really exciting to me. Another thing that I'll say besides seeing my mom in a leadership position early on is that I'd always seen myself on this path of, okay, I'll go to school, I'll work for a few years and then I'll go back and get my MBA. And what I saw when I was in venture capital, Is that so much of the learning that comes along with founding is just natural.

It's baked into the process of struggling with how to figure out HR and how to negotiate contracts and how to hire people and how to inspire people like that. And I thought, okay, like I always saw myself on this really traditional path where it felt like if I went to business school, I could do all of these things.

And being at USV and interacting with these founders, I started to see a different path for myself, where I thought, I don't have to go down this, what I felt like was a safe path for me. And I could step off that path and do something a little bit different that felt riskier in the moment. But I knew that it was a risk worth taking because all of these people before me had done. And you just learn on the job and that's just part of the CEO gig.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned a little bit about experimentation and that. When you started Meet Cute, what was your initial thesis and then how has it pivoted or changed based on what you found out in the marketplace?

Naomi Shah: It's so interesting how these like subtle pivot tap in, and sometimes you don't even realize that they're happening, but you're learning with every single day or every single story that you make. At first, we wanted to just test, can we make a 15-minute story in audio. No one had done that before in a way that you could start, tell, and end of story, in 15 minutes, in a cohesive way.

Everyone is used to 90-minute films or 22-minute TV shows, but we wanted to do it in audio and bring people in and capture audiences to the point where people felt like they were listening to a movie in their ears.

And we wrote our first story. Our head of development wrote the entire script. We found a producer to make it. And we put it out there in the world when we just started sharing it with our friends and family. And we said, hey, we're working on this thing. We'd love for you to listen to it and give us feedback.

That was probably the moment where we were like, okay, we're doing this now. We actually have content out there in the world with our name on it. We have conviction in short form audio content. And then the next step for us became, okay, we know we can make one story. Can we make hundreds of stories? And so, to our investors, we said, our goal for the next year is really to prove that we can make stories at scale.

Anyone can make one story if they put their mind to it. But we want to tell hundreds of these stories consistently and give people something to look forward to every single day. And so that was kind of like this subtle change in the way that we thought about ourselves, where we no longer were just proving the idea of storytelling. We were now proving storytelling at scale.

So, the next challenge for us became, can we grow a creator network, large enough to tell so many diverse stories within this set container. And for us, our container was we were audio only. So, we had to engage an audience without any visuals.

We wanted to tell 15-minute stories. We found that a 15-minute story broken up into five three-minute chapters, really engaged people and people wouldn't leave in the middle of the story. They would stay until the end. And then finally, as we were making so many diverse stories, we learned that there were certain categories of stories or certain techniques that we could use to engage audiences even more.

So, with every story that we put out there, we captured listening data, engagement data, and use that to turn it into the cycle where it fueled our development. So now we were taking our learnings from the stories that we'd already put out there and pulling it back into development and making more of those stories.

The idea is we're no longer just a hit driven company where we're making all the decisions. Our listeners are the ones that are teaching us about what's right, and what's wrong.

And so today to bring it to present day, what we're working on is scaling this storytelling engine, this incubator to millions of listeners, to get more and more feedback on our stories and then make each story better. And that's really towards that goal of becoming the official source of romantic comedies, the best storytellers out there. That's what we think sets us apart.

Brian Ardinger: I'm curious, how much did you look back to old technologies like radio and the old radio shows of the past? We've kind of come full circle in some ways. Obviously with different types of distribution models and that. But talk about what did you learn and take from the past and how are you evolving that into the current day.

Naomi Shah: I think radio plays are one of the best analogies for Meet Cute. Some of our listeners, you know, even though they're listening to us on podcast apps, they're like this doesn't really sound like what I imagine a podcast to be. Where podcasts are generally conversational, and they're more interview based, or news based.

We're really taking that older analogy of taking a radio play and turning it into something that people in the digital era can consume on whatever platform they're on, making it super accessible to people whenever and wherever they want a story.

But to your point, there are so many historical analogies that this works and that consistent storytelling in a tight format is what people actually crave. Another really good example of it is you look at pop music where every single pop song is about three minutes long.

And there's a reason for that because not to go too far into this rabbit hole, but when records transitioned to the 45 RPM record, there was only enough room on that physical record for three minutes of music.

And what that meant is that as you created a cheaper way to make records, you also needed to fit the content into that physical constraint. And so, it's interesting because people relisten to music over and over again, because it's only three minutes. And so, you listened to an Ellie Goulding song or Lady Gaga song on repeat, and you don't feel like you're wasting your time. But that behavior hasn't really translated into audio storytelling yet.

And so, by changing our format to be something that we know works. With repeat listening, we found that actually our listeners keep coming back to Meet Cute stories and tuning into one chapter that they resonated with or the happily ever after, or the Meet Cute moment, in the same way that they would listen to pop songs.

And so, they think that it's really fun to say let's build a next generation of storytelling, but let's look backwards at what's worked and what's engaged audiences to do that. Last example, P & G invented the soap opera literally to sell soap. And it was this really interesting tool for branded content that didn't feel super on the nose as an advertising tool. It was a story. It was something you could escape into.

And I think that that's a really interesting analogy for Meet Cute. We're we're trying to create escapism and that can be a vehicle for so many things. Like the message, like a social message, or it could be a vehicle for a brand to talk about what's important to them. But through the context of a story, which is a lot more emotional than a pure advertisement, or like the news cycles.

Brian Ardinger: P & G built itself on that soap opera platform and change the way they sold soap and became a massive company around it. So, talk about your business model and is it more of the traditional advertising model? What are you seeing and what kind of expectations do you have for the future?

Naomi Shah: Yes. So, I think we're in a really unique position because we see ourselves as the intersection of technology and Hollywood. So, technology and media, let's put it that way. Where on the technology side, we'd love to test business models, like let's create an engaged community that cares about this content and wants more access to exclusive content and create opportunities to deepen that relationship with the community that we're building.

So, we're using things like. Let's engage people with shoulder content and other podcast feeds and exclusive interviews with guests. And then let's release more content in a subscription form. We just launched on apple podcast subscriptions, which is the tried and true business model on the technology side.

On the media side, advertising to your point is an incredible way to be able to bring other companies and other brands into the mix, into the storytelling process. And so that's something we're definitely exploring.

We're also exploring how do we engage with our communities outside of audio? So we've gotten a lot of interest from production companies and streaming platforms to start bringing this content into video and licensing our audio to other platforms that need more content.

Because while we love being the sole distributor of our content. We realized that there is constantly a lack of content in the world. People always need to tell more stories. And so we can be that source of stories for other people.

And so I love it because that really allows us to say let's form a relationship directly with our listeners and our audiences and be that direct to consumer entertainment company. But we don't have to stop working on creating stories for the industry and bringing our stories to audiences in ways that Meet Cute might not be the right platform for.

For example, we're not a full in-house video production studio. So we want to partner with the right people there to tell our stories in the best way possible for video production as well.

Brian Ardinger: Well, you brought up video, you know, what made you decide that we're going to start tackling the audio format first versus new platforms like Tik TOK or YouTube, that seemed to be getting a lot of traction because of the video format.

Naomi Shah: So, audio, what I love about it is that it's such a unique format that has the constraint built in where you can't see the characters. And at first, we were like, oh, that's really tough. It's hard to engage without seeing the characters. But that's just because people haven't done it before. And what we're trying to do is really create more intimate connections with characters and plots and narrative arcs, where people start to visualize the stories in their head.

So, if like the main character Natalie goes on vacation, we want the person listening, the audience member, to say, oh, what was my last vacation? Like, let me put myself in Natalie shoes and it becomes a very intimate experience. And I think audio is an incredible way to engage in a deeper way with listeners and really have them be a part of the storytelling themselves.

The other thing is audio super accessible. So, you don't need to sit down and watch something. You don't need to take time out of your day. It can really go along with you in whatever you're doing. So, we have found that our audiences actually don't listen to Meet Cutes in the traditional entertainment viewing times.

Meet Cutes are consumed throughout the day from like 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM, when you're getting ready for school, getting ready to walk to your classes, getting ready to get lunch ready for your kids. These are the times that people really incorporate Meet Cutes into their daily routine. It almost feels like a meditation or an escape because it's so consistent. It's so predictable, you know exactly what you're going to get at the end of it.

So, it's been this really interesting shift in what we thought entertainment behavior was or entertainment consumption was, where we're seeing people develop new habits because they haven't had cinema in audio before. And we wanted to start to push back on assumptions about what that looks like and create new behaviors around it.

Brian Ardinger: As a founder, I always like to get founders opinions and insights into what recommendations can you help other folks who are out there, whether they're within a corporation, trying to spin up a new idea or an entrepreneur. What are some best practices, resources, or advice that you would recommend for folks trying to get off the ground?

Naomi Shah: Great question. And I relied on so many people that came before me for advice. I would say, getting off the ground relies so heavily on conviction in your idea and standing by your idea in the face of other people telling you, I think you should do it this way, or I think you should do it that way.

While it's so important to take advice from people. If you are not certain in what you want to build and the vision for your company or your project or your idea, I think it's really easy to be taken off track and to do things in a way that's already been done before. And that's not the reason that you go into founding, you go into founding to do something that no one has done before.

And so actually through the fundraising process, because I just went through that in the pandemic, I learned that in meeting hundreds of really smart people, you have so many opinions coming to you every day. And it's really important to like take time, block off your calendar and like reflect on what you're hearing, because some of those things will actually help you shape your vision for the company.

And you have to filter out the noise because there are going to be conflicting opinions that might not be the vision for your company. And it's really important to take time to reflect on that. Otherwise, you could find yourself in a completely different place that you didn't want to end up. So, I think having conviction is probably the number one piece of advice.

And the second thing is finding people who are going to support you no matter what. I think that can be in the form of team members, it can be in the form of investors, can be in the form of people outside of your company who are your personal board of investors. Without those people, sometimes founding can be really lonely and really a little bit isolating.

And I think that with those people, you find that you have sounding boards or people who will tell you, okay, you don't need to overthink that, focus on this instead. Having those people in your life makes, makes you feel like you're not alone on this journey as you're like climbing up the mountain and trying to figure out what this vision is for five years for the future or 10 years into the future. So, I would say people and having conviction are probably the two most important building blocks in the early stage.

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Brian Ardinger: Oh, they're fantastic building blocks. And I want to really thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, telling your story and giving some focus, some insight in what it takes to really do something innovative.

So, thank you for being on the show. If people want to find out more about yourself or Meet Cute, what's the best way to do that?

Naomi Shah: So great to be here. Loved, loved this conversation. Finding out more about Meet Cute, were on every social platform. So, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok. And the best way to learn about what we're doing is to tune in to some of our stories on any podcast platform, where you listen. Subscribe on apple podcasts.

I am also super available to talk about anything entrepreneurship, business related, entertainment, podcasts, and you can find me on Twitter or on LinkedIn as well. Just feel free to DM me.

Brian Ardinger: Naomi, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck in the future for you.

Naomi Shah: Thank you so much, Brian,

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jonathan Brill, author of the new book Rogue Waves: Future-proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. Jonathan and I discussed the coming rogue waves of change and how to prepare your company for resilient growth, innovation, and decision making under uncertainty. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Jonathan Brill, Author of Rogue Waves

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jonathan Brill. He is the author of the new book, Rogue Waves: Future-proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. Welcome to the show Jonathan.

Jonathan Brill: [00:00:58] Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: [00:01:00] Well, I'm excited to have you on the show to quite frankly learn about what you've seen over your amazing career, when it comes to innovation. To give the audience some context. You are a senior leader and global futurist at Hewlett Packard. Creative director at Frog Design. You've probably helped create over 300 plus products in the innovation firms that you've worked in.

And you've been a contributor to Ted and Singularity University and Forbes and Harvard Business Review. And the list goes on and on. Now you've got a new book coming out. So, I really wanted to dive right into it. The title of the book is called Rogue Waves. So, let's start there. What is a rogue wave and why should companies start preparing for them?

Jonathan Brill: [00:01:38] So in the deep ocean, literally out of nowhere at the snap of a finger, 120-foot wave and pop up and sink you know, a 600-foot ship. We used to not think these things were real. We thought they were kind of sailors’ tales, but it turns out that as we're having better tracking and satellites and whatnot, that these things are happening every day in a major storm, that one of these things might pop up about every eight or 10 hours.

So, the issue isn't that rogue waves are rare it's that the world is large. And to use that metaphor and in many ways, the same types of mathematics apply. We're moving faster as a society. We're becoming more connected as a society. The reason, and so more freak occurrences will occur, and when they do, you'll see more contagion, you'll see more movement between those occurrences.

And so, when you think about business. When you think about something like COVID right, why did COVID happen? And SARS was a pandemic. It didn't scale in the same way. Mers was a pandemic. It didn't scale in the same way. Lots of reasons.

But I would argue that the biggest was we've put a population, the size of Los Angeles into the wilderness and outside of WuHan. So, we increased density, but we did that at the scale of literally the population of the United States and China, over the last 20 years or so. Connected them by 16 high-speed rails.

Since 2010, we've increased travel out of China by 10 times, making China the largest spender on tourism in the world. Literally coming from out of nowhere and that didn't just happen in China. It happened in India. It happened across Southeast Asia and it's happening in Africa.

And so, what was containable, 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, is suddenly not containable today. Not because of the disease, but because of all of the things that surrounded. All of those overlapping trends that surrounded. And when you think about a rogue wave, that's what it is. It's these independently manageable waves of change that overlap to become massive and unmanageable.

Brian Ardinger: [00:03:43] It's not the one particular thing that is necessarily the disruptor. It's the blending of emerging technologies and changing demographics, and the data economy, and all of this colliding at once that creates that seismic events so to speak.

Jonathan Brill: [00:03:57] Absolutely. And there are something like 10 major trends. And I picked these because they're the 10 sort of highly trackable trends by analysts and whatnot. And they tend to be highly quantifiable trends, that are overlapping over the next 10 years to virtually guarantee that the next decade will be more volatile than the last decade.

And so, what that means is that we'll have more risk. Risk is a measurement of volatility change over time. And most people sort of, a lot of traditional risk management looks at that and says, okay, well, how do we push back the future? How do we protect ourselves from it?

But the reality is when a rogue wave comes at you, you cannot protect yourself from it. What you can do is position yourself to try and ride it. Be more resilient. And if you're more resilient, take advantage while your competitors are trying to recover from being capsized.

That's a radically different way of looking at the future. Looking at the world, then business schools have been teaching us for the last 30 or 40 years. They kind of assume that even though new competitor might disrupt you, and a new technology might disrupt you, that the rules that the playing field, the game board will stay the same. And that's simply not true anymore.

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:13] Do you think companies are getting it so to speak? I mean, obviously COVID was a major factor, I think for most individuals and companies alike. Where I think we've been talking about change and disruption, you can see examples throughout the ages about this. But rarely did it hit everybody at the same time. So, are you seeing companies being able to fundamentally grasp that this type of change is here? And are they getting better or worse when it comes to navigating this type of change?

Jonathan Brill: [00:05:40] So within that question, there are so many other questions, right? At the board level, is there an awareness that we need to focus on resilience? Yes. The number or percentage of meeting topics on agendas, that are focused on resilience has gone through the roof. The number of topics that have focused on innovation and other things is also dropped through the roof.

And so, I don't know that at the investor level, at the board level, we yet understand that resilience and growth are intertwined issues. You can't focus on one without the other. It's a balance because if you don't have that resilience, if you don't know where to position yourself, it doesn't matter that you're better, you're faster. That you have a life jacket, right? Like you're still out at sea.

Brian Ardinger: [00:06:30] So tell me about this book. How did it come about? And what's in it for the readers?

Jonathan Brill: [00:06:35] I spent the last several years at HP as the Global Futurist. And a lot of our study was looking at long-term change. What could happen? What risks did we think were static risks? Like hundred-year pandemics that were actually dynamic risk. And so, if you are in that community of people who look at these things, pandemics were becoming more and more and more likely over time.

And yet most of us, most of our leaders, 8 of the 10 largest companies in the United States, failed to identify pandemics as a risk in their SEC Risk Filings. So, we were in denial as a, an economy about what was happening. A lot of my job at HP was also to figure out, okay, If the world is changing, what are the new opportunities?

Not just what are the risks and how do we become resilient, but how do we turn those into new opportunities? And one of the things our group focused on was how do we deal with disease diagnostics? Because we know that the population is getting older. We know that something like a pandemic can rapidly accelerate this type of work.

And I actually just published an HBR article about how to balance that kind of resilience and growth that we experienced at HP over the last year. I've recently left to write this book because it's, and it's really about what I learned as a practitioner. Right. I spent 20 years as a consultant working on contract R and D. All of a sudden was a practitioner and you had to figure out how to actually drive change in the 58,000 person organization. And it turned out that it's a different problem entirely.

And so, this book was really about how do you blend that world, that the knowledge of the consultant versus the reality of the practitioner. What are the simple steps that you can take? And there are really three and I call them the ABCs of Resilient Growth.

First, you need to increase your awareness as an organization that the world outside is changing. And you need to think about the range of ways it could impact you. It's really easy to look at the world and say, okay, you know, our technologies have to change, or our workforce has to change or whatever.

What we discovered over the last year is actually that all has to change at the same time. A lot of times, things overlap to become unmanageable rogue waves of change. So, you need to create awareness, not just of what the changes are, but what would happen if they overlap.

Brian Ardinger: [00:08:56] On that front, is it something where you can't manage it incrementally? It is something where you have to transformationaly change these things to actually be able to keep up, or are there opportunities to, to do a more incremental approach to, to this.

Jonathan Brill: [00:09:11] I think there are two answers to that. Yes, there are opportunities to do an incremental approach, and that's the only way that works. You can't change your culture overnight and you can't change all of your processes overnight. And by the way, if you do that, there's a better than even chance that you'll, that you'll sink yourself.

So, it's this balance. The first piece is building that awareness of there is stuff going on outside. The second is building the skills, the behavior change within the organization. Because even if you know that the wave's coming, if you don't know how to swim, it's not a good idea to pick up big wave surfing. So, you got to build the skills.

And then the third is the culture, right? You have to, I don't believe that you can really change corporate DNA. I think that's consultant speak. But I do believe that you can change the RNA. When you think about DNA, this is the deep code that causes life. That allows life to build itself.

But RNA is the code that controls the types of proteins that you use to regulate your body. That RNA can actually be changed relatively quickly. If you take a look at an octopus, for instance, or a Cephalopods, like a squid, a cuddle fish, they can change 60% of their RNA in a lifetime. And companies do it all the time.

You change your processes, you change your hard incentives, right? Bonuses, bonus structure, and whatnot. And you change your soft incentives right? Who do you encourage? Who gets ahead? Those, those kinds of things. So, you can change that stuff pretty much overnight, but the change is incremental, right? The company has to catch up to the reality that you're serious and that you can sustain the change over time.

And that's the real challenge. I see a lot of these sort of change efforts. I read, the other day in Harvard Business Review that 70% of change efforts fail. And so there, I think are two things there, right. One is, do they fail or do people just not keep at them long enough? Do the leaders not convince their population that they're serious?

And I think there are kind of like four phases in corporate change of any type, but certainly in becoming what I call a resilient growth organization, right. The first is you come, and you say the future is going to be different. The sky's falling, whatever your story is. And everybody looks at you like you're insane. But you get a few early adopters.

The second is that people start saying, well, actually you're not the legitimate person to make that argument. I am. Your arguments dumb, my argument's better. It turns out that's actually a win. And as a, as a manager, if you're asking people to be change agents, you need to recognize when that shift occurs. And that that's actually the big win.

What you see though, is that people take whatever the change message is, and they start covering the first page of their PowerPoint deck with it. To justify whatever it was they wanted to do, all right. It's a shift. It's an important shift. It's about being future compliant, as opposed to actually thinking about the future.

The third one is when they start actually asking for budget to do new things, and this is where I think a lot of change management breaks down, right? You can get through the first one. Sure. You send in your Avant guard; you send out your Scouts. And you send out your missionaries and they, they preach the future.

Couple of people believe it. The better politicians figure out how to do what they already wanted to do. But then a couple of people say, no, I want to find out if you're serious and I'm going to start asking for money. Not like a hundred thousand dollars, like a million dollars, $10 million. A meaningful amount of money and, and talking about large organization terms. Right.

And if you say no, think about what happens. Their ideal is almost destined to fail, right? It will be right. It's almost destined to fail. And so, if you're a rational manager, you say, well, I'm not going to invest in something that I know is going to fail. And if you don't support them, when they do fail for trying, you cut off the opportunity. You cut off the change.

And I think that's where a lot of change management breaks down, right? That you have the senior manager incentives on an annual basis, versus a senior manager incentives on a long-term basis and they get disconnected. And then the third piece is when your senior managers start looking at this as a process and saying, okay, we're going to embed this in the process. We're going to take whatever the change is. In this case, becoming a resiliently, a growth organization.

And we're going to have it be part of our annual decision-making process budget process. And we're going to set a minimum that we spend on this thing. And that's when I think you start to see the long tail of growth from this work. But it's often, you know, it's a three-year or five-year process. It doesn't happen in six months, and it doesn't happen because the board woke up on Tuesday and realized that they'd been cutting resilience for 20 years.

Brian Ardinger: [00:13:59] Absolutely. On that you've seen and worked with a lot of different companies and have seen this progression. Where are the biggest struggles or obstacles that companies are facing going through that? Are most of them dying at that stage one stage two stage three? Or is it a combination or, or what are the things that people should be preparing for as they go along this journey?

Jonathan Brill: [00:14:19] I think there are two answers to that question. The first is really at the board level, you know. Are you serious about this? If the board has a cocktail party and they say we should be more resilient than, you know, that verbals down, like that happens a lot. That happens a lot. That change isn't going to happen.

And the people who participate in that change, especially in performance driven organizations, tend to not keep their job. So you've got to figure out, okay, well, are people serious about this? And that's why phases one and two happened. That I was talking about earlier. That's why they happen. The second question is, if you are serious about this, you know, can you be serious about it from the bottom up?

Can you make that change from the bottom up? Or do you have to make it from the top down? I think it's probably generally a bi-directional process where you have to link the communications between the senior leadership and the edge of your organization. And that, that's a huge political challenge, especially like in organizations where you have high longevity of career. You know, where you have 20-year careers and whatnot. It gets really hard to do that.

You know, people in the middle, don't like, you know, the people in the center talking to the edge, you got to break through that. And I think that's one of the real places where the issue breaks down.

And I think the third, and this is really important to, and I think this is why I wrote the book, or one of the main reasons, is that if you have somebody, if you're headquartered in Indonesia and you have somebody who sees a rogue wave on the horizon in Mozambique, right.

That person in Mozambique, probably even if they can talk to the CEO, probably doesn't have the skills to the language, the context. They're just going to sound crazy. And we've all been in that conversation, right? We've all been in that conversation. And so the key thing is you also need to increase the executive judgment, executive communication skills far lower in your organization. If you want to have an innovative organization. You can't trust people to innovate if they don't understand the context. You know, and they don't understand how to take risks, as opposed to just manage.

Brian Ardinger: [00:16:32] And maybe that comes back to some of that, like you were talking, one of the first themes is, is awareness. And it's not just awareness at the board level or at the CEO level, it's awareness across the organization that these risks are happening and exist. And what can you do to both understand them, as well then do some behavior or cultural things around it to actually execute or, or take advantage of that.

On that awareness front. Are there things that you've seen that can help companies think outside their industry and see what's going on and explore in areas that they don't typically explore. Whether it's technology or human resources or whatever.

Jonathan Brill: [00:17:08] Right. So, in a pre COVID world. One of the things that I did was I'd bring teams who'd been in Europe and the US their entire careers. High potential leaders or whatever, and I'd bring them to China. And this is one of these things where if you're an American and you try and explain the Grand Canyon to a European, they just don't get it.

If you're an American and you haven't been to Beijing or Shenzhen or Shanghai, you just don't get it. That, you know, every two years, literally they're using the concrete that the U S poured in the United States in the 20th century. The scale is unimaginable. And once you get there, once you see that. Once you see your Grand Canyon, once you see your Beijing, your mind can't go back to the same place.

And so that would be my first thing is just kind of, how do you get that cross-cultural awareness of, of what's happening. The scale of change in the world. The second thing that I really suggest is figuring out how to create peer groups outside of your industry, but at your level. And ideally across the world. And that's some of what I do is building those peer groups, so that we can have those conversations.

Because otherwise you don't actually understand the challenge. You don't understand the scale of the opportunity. You don't see the rogue wave coming, right. If you were sitting around and you know, you were very specifically, you know, stockpiling face masks for the US government and you see, you know we can get these things cheaper in China. Like let's shut down our supply chains. Let's shut down our local manufacturing. Yeah. That all makes sense. Right? Because it's a price performance issue. Like all the incentives are there to do that.

Until you look at the bigger picture, risk is changing. Everyone's going to need all this stuff all at once. And we're going to need it when we need it on a sustained basis. And by the way, it's super cheap. Right. Like there's no, which is the entire problem, right? There's no margin in this. It's so cheap. There's no margin in, this.

It totally makes sense, as a middle manager that you'd say let's get rid of that thing. But as a senior manager, as a senior leader, you need to say, okay, that doesn't make any economic sense today, but in the long-term, we're going to have an inevitable need.

Brian Ardinger: [00:19:34] So how far out in the future do you think companies should be preparing or looking. To, or is, does it depend on the rogue wave that you're looking at?

Jonathan Brill: [00:19:42] How far out should you be preparing and looking are interesting. There, there are two different questions. What I really am interested in is that there's a range of possible futures. There isn't one, the closer you get to that future that, you know, the more the rank shrinks So the farther out you're looking at the broader the range should be obviously. But the goal isn't necessarily to look at 7 years out or 10 years out, or 3 years out, or 1 year out. It's to figure out, am I prepared for the types of threats and opportunities I'm likely to see?

And so I think about this as kind of like, what are the financial, operational, external, and strategic aspects of my corporation of my organization. And what types of waves would impact it? What types of challenges or opportunities might you see? And the same thing applies to customers, by the way. Could a static threat, a hundred year disease, suddenly become a dynamic threat, right?

We're starting to see these more often. Could a symmetric threat, it's going to impact everybody the same become an asymmetric threat? So you take a look at a Toyota. Their investment in semiconductors, after the Daiichi nuclear explosion in 2011. They looked at, you know, we had an asymmetric thing happened to the us, all those American manufacturers they didn't get hit by this nuclear meltdown. But we did. What would happen when the next thing happened.

And how could we move that from a situation where we get hit and no one else does, to we survive and then everyone else gets hit. So how do you shift between symmetric and asymmetric threat? And the result of that is in 2016, when there was an earthquake in Taiwan, China had a six-month supply of chips and they kept operating just fine. Everyone else got hit.

This past year, same thing happened. How do you move things from synchronous to asynchronous threats or the other way around? So how do you move them from things that hit everybody at the same time to things that hit people at different times, because you know, often all you really need is enough buffer.

All you need is enough time to respond. And then the other is to think about which issues are temporary and which ones are permanent. So, what's amazing to me about the U S response to COVID is this thing that really should have been a 10 year, five-year, ten-year issue historically. Appears at the moment, you know, to have been shifted from a permanent issue in the United States to a temporary issue.

Now we're going to need to manage our response permanently. Right. But the economic impact may be temporary. It's one of the greatest innovation moments, you know, I think when we look back 50 years from now, we changed the path of nature. It was one of the great innovation moments of the 21st century.

Brian Ardinger: [00:22:36] It's, I mean, truly fantastical times, we're living in, in a number of different ways. Are there particular trends or things that you're seeing or want the audience to pay attention to that they may not be as familiar with?

Jonathan Brill: [00:22:47] So we can talk about trends you might be unfamiliar with, but I think the question that you should really be asking is what happens when the trends that you're familiar with collide? I mean, a lot of the things that I talk about were in the news.

Can you take a look at the growing risk of a pandemic? I mean, and all of the things they talked about, high speed rail Maglev in China, the explosion of urbanization around the world, massive increases in Chinese Asian travel, the explosion of low-cost airlines around South Asia. Right? These were all front-page news. The issue is that people weren't putting them together.

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Brian Ardinger: [00:23:25] It's a fascinating book and I love folks who are listening to this to take a deeper dive. It really is a really good framework for how to start thinking about these things. And you dig into a lot of the tactics and examples around that as well. So I encouraged people to pick that up. But if people want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Jonathan Brill: [00:23:44] Jonathanbrill.com is my website and there's piles of useful tools, HBR articles, Forbes articles, advisory options, surfaces, and they're all focused on being useful to you.

Brian Ardinger: [00:23:58] Well Jonathan, I want to thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your thoughts on this. I'd love to have you back. You know, as the world changes and we get more used to seeing innovations and digging in and being a part of it, I'm sure things will pop out new best practices and that will emerge. So, I appreciate you sharing what you know now, and hopefully we'll have you back on to talk about the future as the world evolves.

Jonathan Brill: [00:24:21] I'd be glad to anytime. Thank you very much for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with New York Times bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle, Brant Cooper. Brant and I talk about his upcoming book, Disruption Proof, and provide a sneak peek into our upcoming IO Live event on September 20. Let's get started

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Brant Cooper, CEO of Moves The Needle

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Brant Cooper. He's the founder of Moves The Needle, New York Times bestselling author of the Lean Entrepreneur, and author of an upcoming book, which I'm so excited to talk about called Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value and Drive Change. Welcome Brant.

Brant Cooper: [00:01:07] Thanks Brian. Pleasure as always.

Brian Ardinger: [00:01:10] I'm excited to have you back. As our audience knows you've been a part of the lean scene for a long time. You had a chance to speak at our IO2020 Summit. And we're going to do a little something different with this podcast episode, because we're having you back on September 29th for a live event. It's part of our IO Live series. Basically, we're going to have an hour to talk about the book and have audience questions and do a little bit more in depth stuff with you.

So, I wanted to save this episode more as a preview to get folks excited about the book and excited about some of the things we're going to be talking about. So, with that, you got a new book out called Disruption Proof. Tell us how you got to the point of writing a new book and what's it all about?

Brant Cooper: [00:01:50] Yeah. So, I guess it's been in the works for a couple of years, actually. It seems like so pandemic ready, but that was maybe just fortuitous that I was already embarking on it. And then of course the pandemic itself hit and business kind of dried up. So that gave you the opportunity to really crank it out.

You know, over the last seven, eight years taking some of that lean stuff into the large enterprise. And it's just, that was an interesting journey in the sense that, you know, all of this lean startup, lean innovation stuff really started in Silicon Valley startups.

I mean, honestly it preceeded all of that, but you know, us tech startup people like to feel like we've invented everything. There was a movement. Right. And so, starting in startups and then we bring it into the big companies. And inevitably we start with the innovation groups. As I'm trying to work through the change that is required inside of these companies, I really realized that there's uncertainty everywhere inside the enterprise.

There's something happening here, way bigger. And this is perhaps obvious to a lot more people. It takes me awhile. I think really this fundamental shift from the industrial age and management practices and even management organization, that's based around the industrial, really this level of complexity and endless disruption that is in the digital age, leads to this uncertainty.

And we continue to try to tackle the uncertainty the way we did in the industrial age. And it just creates more angst, and it creates more doubt and people just really wondering what the heck is going on. Then the pandemic hits. And I think we blame all of that angst and anxiety on the pandemic. And now people are like, ah, man, I can't wait to get back to the old normal. And yet the old normal was still filled with that uncertainty.

And so that's really what the book ended up addressing. So again, I didn't start out with writing, you know, sort of this post pandemic book, but because I was writing it right in the middle of all of this, there really ends up being these pandemic…and how do you respond to it? And what does this mean in that bigger picture that ends up being what the book is about?

Brian Ardinger: [00:04:05] It's interesting because I think, you and I have I've been talking about disruption forever. And innovation groups have been talking about it and trying to figure out how to do this. And the pandemic really seems to have taken that theory and made it real for most people.

I mean, everybody on the planet to some extent has been disrupted by various means of, of what happened during the last 18 months. And it really, I think has brought out the conversation where it's no longer theory we're talking about. It's like, yeah, I get it. But now I really get it. But I still don't know what to do about it.

So, you know, I've seen a proof of your book in that you really capture it and talk about the five elements of what you need to be doing to embrace this new world of work. So maybe talk through a little bit about that and some of the things you found out.

Brant Cooper: [00:04:48] Yeah. So, to me, the key is to all of this, is that it's not really the technology, even though we're in a digital revolution and we're doing digital transformation and we're working in innovation. It just really isn't about the technology because there's not that much uncertainty around the technology.

It's really about the mindset and the way we have to change our thinking and our behavior relative to this massive change in technology. And so, I described the behavior change that we need based upon these five elements.

And so, empathy, exploration, which is basically admitting what we don't know. And so going out and learning. Leveraging evidence, so data plus insights to help us inform decisions. We don't want just algorithms and AI deciding for us, but certainly what we go and figure out needs to inform our decision.

This concept of equilibrium, which is building a balance between the execution, everything that we know we have to get done, and this exploration work, meaning that we have to go and learn something first. That's a continuum throughout the organization. Even your core business needs to do some amount of exploration. It's not this bifurcation of one side of the house is execution. And one side is exploration. I think that's industrial age innovation thinking.

And then the final one is ethics. And with all of the data problems that we have, and with livable wages and all of these other things that have really come to the fore, it's really incumbent upon businesses to figure out how they live up to their own values that they establish and that they broadcast.

And again, that ends up being something that we have to drive down into the human behavior. And so rather than some of the big management theories on how you do change, which is very top down. I wanted to describe the behaviors of what people actually have to do day in, day out inside of their jobs. And it really is a ground up initiative.

It requires obviously leaders to buy in and go, yes, we're going to change. It's kind of a pincer move, but you have to start with developing that behavior on the ground. And I guess the one other point I would make about it is the reason why I'm somewhat optimistic about that is this behavior already exists, right?

The people that are subscribing to your podcast and that read your stuff, Brian, Design Thinkers, and Agile people, and Lean Startup people and entrepreneurs, people that are doing side gigs, these are people that already have this mindset. And so, what we have to take is not put them all in this silo, but rather get them to be the leaders of tomorrow, bringing this diverse mindset, this exploration skillset to the rest of the business.

Brian Ardinger: [00:07:32] All the stuff you talked about, it's just so messy. And I think everybody's still looking for that silver bullet. Like if you do this, this, and this follow this particular path, you will have success. And Lean Startup was never meant to be the perfect path. Even if you follow lean startup 100 percent, you're still not guaranteed a successful product, service, whatever you're trying to create. It's that journey.

You have to put on those exploration hats or backpack or whatever. I talk about going into a cave. The only way you can get out of the cave is you got to stumble around and figure it out. And the challenge is we don't reward that stumbling around.

We don't provide the tool sets or the skillsets for folks that are not inherently like the entrepreneur that kind of has that built into their ecosystem. So, what can an average Joe hearing about this, understanding theoretically, like they need to do this. Are there tactics or things that you've seen that help start building that muscle?

Brant Cooper: [00:08:26] There's a couple of things in there that come to mind. Number one is go find the like-minded people. Go find the people that maybe already exist inside of every big business. So go find them. And it could be just doing an innovation mindset happy hour once a week or every other week.

But it's something that you want to try to spread throughout the organization, because these are your early adopters. And what you find is that there are leaders that actually belong to that group. And suddenly you make, you have these areas where you can start running experiments even with budget or even with permission. So, number one is finding like-minded people.

Number two is to not wait for permission. To go and run experiments and come up with data. And then when you actually are seeking permission or advice or input. You're actually bringing evidence to the table and not just ideas. And I really do believe that ideas are a dime a dozen.

Every big organization I've worked with has no problem with ideas. And I think leadership and middle management and all the rest go, yeah, we really need to empower the ideas of people. It's just not taking it far enough. If you've got thousands of ideas, literally it's how do you choose those ideas?

The people on the ground need to themselves, not just go ask for stuff. They need to be able to provide evidence for what they're asking for. And I think that that added layer is actually going to start changing the conversation.

And then the third thing that I really encourage people to do is to try to go and get empathy for their leadership. And so, it's kind of a funny concept because we often in that hierarchical command and control structure, are either afraid to do that, or don't think that we're even allowed to do that.

And it doesn't mean that we are to whatever the whims are of the leaders. There's a selfish aspect of developing empathy in the sense that the more I understand my bosses, the more I understand how I'm going to get what I think that I need. Right.

So, you're learning just as if they were a customer. You're learning how to navigate your relationship with the leader in order to get what you think is the right thing for yourself, your team, and your company.

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Brian Ardinger: [00:10:45] Yeah. Oftentimes it is a balance. You still have to hit those quarterly numbers and still do what you're designed to execute on and optimize but knowing full well that if you do that and only that you're not going to get to where you need to be or not create the next future, whatever ends up on it.

Again, we can go and talk for hours and we're going to do that here in the coming months. So, I encourage people to go to Insideoutside.IO. We'll have information posted there about signing up for the IO Live event here with Brant Cooper and in the interim, if people want to get a little sneak preview, find out more about yourself, more about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Brant Cooper: [00:11:20] Yeah. So, I'm brant@brantcooper.com. Brant Cooper on all the social media. And I really encourage people to reach out. I respond to everyone. The website is Brantcooper.com right now. And people can pre-order the book as well as get some other goodies and we'll be sharing a content from the book in the coming months. As we prepare to join you on your show.

Reach out, say hello and join the conversation. Really. I think that one of the things that you said, Brian, is that there isn't a formula. I mean, there's actually not one way out of that cave. And that's what complexity is right. Is that there's no best practices.

And so, all of these different variables that people face based upon their businesses and based upon the history and based upon the people that are inside that business, everybody's going to have to figure out their way out of the cave, but there are some fundamentals.

And also, what we want to do is try to create community around what works. We can share, what works and what doesn't work and those types of things. So, all of these people can start figuring it out, what works in their organization.

Brian Ardinger: [00:12:21] Excellent. Well, Brant I'm excited for this conversation. Thanks for being a part of it. I look forward to having, again, a more in-depth conversation with the audience and encourage people to come out for that. Participate in that. And we look forward to talking in about a month or so. Thanks again for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.

Brant Cooper: [00:12:35] Thank you, Brian. Great to catch up, man.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation. And we sit down with Jennifer Henderson, CEO and Founder of Tilt, Jennifer and I talk about Tilt's startup journey and helping companies reimagine the HR leave process, as well as the trends, challenges, and opportunities companies are facing in this dynamic new world of work. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Jennifer Henderson, CEO and Founder of Tilt

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Jennifer Henderson. She is the CEO and founder of Tilt. Welcome to the show.

Jennifer Henderson: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat today.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show as well. We met through, I think the Rocky Mountain Venture Club and Nebraska Angels and Tilt is an amazing company. I'm very excited to be a part of having this conversation with you. It's in the HR talent tech space. And it's re-imagining leave management to help companies with retention and streamlining their processes, helping with compliance, but to think you called it, bringing the human back to leave.

How about you tell us a little bit about the Tilt story. How did you conceive the company and how did it get started?

Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, sure. The origin story for Tilt. Not that unique, I'm sure to a lot of the other guests that you have that have founded a company. It was completely born out of personal experience. So, my past life was in corporate America.

I worked for 15 years in Fortune 500 companies and I loved it. I absolutely loved my career. I gave everything I had to it. I got very accustomed to promoting every two years and being the go-to person and being in the top of the nine box. Really just got comfortable sitting at that proverbial table, so to speak.

And then I got pregnant and overnight everything changed. I wasn't that person anymore. And that was devastating to me and frustrating to say the least. So, at the time stage of my career, I really turned the other cheek and kept moving forward, you know, clamoring my way back up the ladder. And then five years later, different company, different stage of my career I became pregnant with my second.

And this time I actually had a promotion rescinded. So that was enough for me to say this isn't right. I don't quite know yet what the solution is, but I do know that I just can't turn the other cheek again. So, I founded Tilt four years ago. Again, not really knowing what the solution would look like at that time, but we've done all your necessary stages of a startup: iterate, MVP, beta tests, listen to users, see what sticks, and here we are.

Brian Ardinger: So, moving from that corporate world to the startup space, how did you start adapting to the fact that you were moving from, you know, that exploit stage working in a company that knew its business models were on that certain kind of path. Versus jumping into a startup environment, which is much more in the exploration phase, where pretty much everything is uncertain and unknown. Talk me through how that process went for you.

Jennifer Henderson: Very humbling is how that process went. I felt pretty competent in my business acumen, my ability to build a team, my financial acumen, kind of everything that comes with to your point of more put together and structured organization. Turns out that doesn't all translate, and the world of entrepreneurship has been a very, yeah, I just I'll use the word again, but humbling experience to know that it's not a translatable and, you know, this worked here, so it's going to work there, type of a scenario.

I actually used to in interviews say, Oh, dealing with ambiguity is one of my towering strengths. I didn't even know what ambiguity was until I entered this world of entrepreneurship. It is a whole different world. The short answer to the question, it was a very, very jarring transition and I was not ready for it. And I've spent four years adjusting and learning and throwing myself into doing work different as an entrepreneur.

Brian Ardinger: Are there particular resources or hacks or things that you've learned along the way that you would recommend to those early-stage founders going through the same thing?

Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, it's a great question. My road to competence in entrepreneurship was just leaning into every free webinar, resource, book, person, who back in the day that we could sit and have coffee would have coffee and teach me. And I really leaned into one of my early leaders, told me to be a sponge. And I love that advice. And I really truly like embodied that and tried to soak up, who's done this before, what lessons have they learned? And how can I learn from that?

I think structurally I'm a big fan of Brad Felds. So, I love really all of his books, course works, podcast interviews, et cetera. I think he speaks in a very accurate and real translatable way to being an entrepreneur.

Brian Ardinger: You just went through the Techstars workforce development cohort and congratulations on getting through demo day. What's that journey been like going through Techstars program and more importantly, I think, what do you see the journey is post demo day?

Jennifer Henderson: Well, I got into this program with Tilt after four applications. So, we tried four times to get into Techstars. It's been an aspiration of us as a company for quite some time for a lot of reasons. Most notably, it is very high on the brand recognition spectrum in terms of validation of coming out of Techstars as a graduate.

And that was something that we wanted quite honestly to have on our resume. So to speak is a Techstars alum. And, you know, hindsight 2020, everything happens for a reason. This was the first cohort of the workforce development track in the Techstars ecosystem. And it was absolutely meant for us. Right. We had 11 other brilliant companies around us that were either selling to the same customers or fighting the same ecosystem battles. And it was just a lot of great synergy going through that program.

Everything that we would have hoped for and more in terms of plugging into the Techstars network, having the validation of being an alum, as well as the content, I was very firm in that I wanted our organization to have a strong foundation of all of the components of building a scalable and sustainable startup.

And I mean, you really can't look to much more tried and true than Techstars to get that type of a foundational acumen. So that was delivered. And then some. And then to answer your question and where we go from here, we have a lot of great tailwinds, both internally and externally in terms of the problem that we're solving at Tilt.

And coming out just this week as a grad of Techstars, we plan to continue that momentum through the network connections that we made, through the board additions that we made, and really go heads down for 2021 to prepare us for our Series A. You know, that's a whole new world. And, and right now we're getting that perfect product market sales market fit so that we can just pour fuel on that fire.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great segue because I wanted to talk a little bit about that product building aspect of the business. You know, especially at the early stages, I think a lot of people, when they hear stories, they talk to founders and everything's been built and, you know, you hear the war stories, but not often you hear the stories of like, what's it like right now when you're in the process of determining and evaluating which particular features to build, or how do you build out your product?

So, can you walk us through a little bit about your product building approach and what's working and how's it going?

Jennifer Henderson: Yeah. I think one of the benefits of starting this out with very little capital, we, we bootstrapped for three years before we took a very small angel investment to get those couple early adopters. So, the benefit of that is that we didn't build anything unnecessarily because we couldn't afford it.

So, the adage of building a staircase to nowhere has never been a part of my product map or strategy in that if we're going to build a feature, we've figure it out on the backend, the high friction solution, we've done it pen to paper, we've done it manually to know this is where the automation needs to go.

While that is painful at times, and certainly my team would say we probably waited too long for some feature development, it's what I believe the most fiscally responsible way to build out the product so that we know that when we're building an automation in a step or an integration, that number one clients are asking for it, or our team has demonstrated the business case essentially as to why it's going to impact, you know, and I'm talking minutes saved or reduced complexity steps.

I mean, we're measuring these types of things in the product roadmap down it's minutes. And that's been the methodology to this point that will likely continue to be the methodology, caveat being is that we're bringing in our first senior product owner, senior designer and that individual having really a whole new world view to bring to the next evolution of the product. I just, I can't wait. That's going to be a game changer for us.

Brian Ardinger: I'd love to talk a little bit more about the customer discovery process and how you actually work with customers on that. Obviously, you came to this idea, basically being a customer and understanding the pain points in that. So how do you incorporate customer discovery into your process?

Jennifer Henderson: It's integral and it'll never go away. It's the fabric of what we build and how we build it. And it's evolved through the four years meaning, you know, back when I call it my analog days of pen to paper and my predominant network being an enterprise, that was just a lot of discovery interviews. Like what is the pain point at its most basic level. Pie in the sky, what's the most perfect scenario in terms of a solution you can imagine.

And then building and iterating and getting enough data to pull the trigger, so to speak. And from here, you know, we are, luckily we're in a solution that has a service element built in. So, we have a very strong connection to our users inherently in the, in the solution that we're providing. So those feedback loops are already very tight and we're able to get those real time feedback product development asks continually.

And then it's really internally with the team, how are we categorizing those? How are we quantifying those? What is the qualitative and quantitative components of those asks? And then really in 2021, looking towards putting more, even more rigor around getting user groups stood up and actually having more of a formulaic approach to that type of a product dev.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about the results and what are some of the case studies or things that you're seeing that are really resonating with your customers. And, and where's Tilt really expanding and going forward?

Jennifer Henderson: This is where actually my 15 years in industry does bring some support to what we're doing today, in that I feel very passionately about ROI and what the results to your point, our clients are seeing. The top of the ladder, no question about it, is retention. So, when we're able to look at pre-Tilt or doing leave without Tilt, we know 40% of women in particular fall out of the workforce after having a child. And that's only one part of the leap support that we provide. But in terms of comparative analysis, it's compelling.

So, 40% attrition and then post leave, we've had almost 200 leads go through our program. Majority of them being parental of some sort, and we've had 100% retention through our program. So, it's, something's working. The recipe is working. And then quantifying that for our clients to say, we know the cost of turnover, we know what to the dollar is saving you.

And when you look at the current world of work today, even more of an amplified emphasis on employee engagement, employee wellbeing, definitely retention in this world that we find ourselves in. And then from there, you know, those other ROI measures around administrative savings. So, we've quantified a 90% administrative saving for our HR users. Which is also very easy to quantify.

And then the third layer, I really point to as more of an insurance policy, we have built the entire product to be compliant with all of the different lead legislation that spans the U.S. And that is changing literally by the day. So, there is a kind of a set it and forget it value prop that we're able to give to our companies to say, we know when New York paid family leave has changed the amount of weeks that they're requiring you to have, it's built into the tech.

You will automatically be alerted any adjustments to your leave policy will be recommended to you in terms of like a plug and play. So those are the three big value adds and quantifications that we've provided our clients and continue to build more rigor around.

Brian Ardinger: I'd like to dig a little bit more into the trends that you're seeing in this talent tech space. I just read a report today that said a quarter of employees are planning to quit post COVID. And so, you're seeing this massive reshuffling of the deck. You're moving, you know, from remote work. And then you're going to have this second shift from all remote to this hybrid. So, what are your thoughts on some of the trends that you're seeing and, and how the world of work is changing?

Jennifer Henderson: We may have actually read the same article. I love the way that they coined it. There's a tsunami coming. And the way that we at Tilt have really watched this phenomenon continue to evolve with the last almost 12 months, is an acceleration in our opinion of 10 years of conversations happening right now.

And what that means is that companies are no longer able to ignore some of these expectations that employees have asked for, and are now demanding, and they're demanding it by walking out. And that is in our world, very exciting, because we are a new benefit. We are turning leave on its head. We are doing something that has been done in our opinion, very antiquated to this point.

So that shuffling of the deck, so to speak, is incredibly exciting for us. And in our opinion, is it's just the beginning. This is not a just now, and we're going to settle back into a norm type of a phenomenon. This is a, as I said, accelerated the conversations companies who don't choose to deploy, a new way to support their employees will be left behind in our opinions. No question.

Brian Ardinger: And it's not just supporting the employees. It's, it's the, like you said, the compliance not around that has changed. And you know, when you have workforce that can work from anywhere, the companies themselves are put in a different type of environment that they could control before. You know, if you're going, everybody's going to work in Colorado, everybody's going to work in Nebraska. It's a little different when that's spread out all over the world and you've got to comply to that as well. So...

Jennifer Henderson: A hundred percent.

Brian Ardinger: Do you have any go-to tools or resources or hacks that you can recommend to other fellow founders or product builders out there that would be helpful?

Jennifer Henderson: Well, I'll answer this from two different veins. So internally our favorite tools as a team at Tilt, we live in Confluence. So that's our chosen methodology within the organization. In addition, we're recent clients of Front, which has been an amazing collaboration tool for our client success team. So, I'm a big, big fan of that organization, and excited to bring them on board.

I think if I answered the question more from a, how are we continuing to evolve and become better as an organization? You know, our company, we are 15 strong now, looking to double if not triple that by the end of 2021. So, with that comes a lot of moving pieces and a lot of changes to how we're doing things, somewhat by the day.

So, myself and my leadership team, we really lean into OKR methodology, making sure our KPIs are very clear that with all of that change, we keep our North star front and center making leave suck less. And that we grow into this larger team with that as our main reason why we get up and do this every day. You know how that manifests itself continues to be a moving target in terms of all hands and stand-ups and things like that.

But yeah, we have an amazing culture doc, that hats off to our COO Kate Feeney, developed for us. That culture doc lays out very clearly who we are, why we're doing this and what we're all aligned to do in terms of values. And we use that as a touchstone very frequently.

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Brian Ardinger: It sounds great. And I want to really thank you for coming on the show to talk about not only what you're seeing when it comes to the trends in this world of work but giving us some insight into what it takes to be a founder in today's world. And I really do appreciate you come on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or Tilt, what's the best way to do that.

Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, we can be found at the URL, ourtilt - O U R tilt.com.

Brian Ardinger: Jennifer, thank you very much for being on the show.

Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, thanks for the chat, Brian. I really enjoyed it.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Josh Linkner, Author of the upcoming book, Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results. Josh gives us a sneak peek of his new book, shares some of his research and stories about how you can take action and be more creative and innovative every day. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Josh Linkner, Author of Big Little Breakthroughs

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with us is Josh Linkner. He is a creative troublemaker, jazz guitarist, founder of five tech companies, keynote speaker. I think you've done over a thousand keynotes. And you've written a new book that's coming out called Big Little Breakthroughs. Welcome to the show Josh.

Josh Linkner: Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be with you.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm so excited to have you on the show. And I'm excited to have you because you have a brand-new book coming out. You're an author and have written a lot of stuff out there. What made you decide to start in another book and what's it all about?

Josh Linkner: Well, so Brian, you and I share the passion and love for human creativity in all its forms. And bringing that to life and in the business sense. And that's really been my whole career again. I started as a jazz guitarist and I built and sold several companies.

I've been involved in a launch of about a hundred startups. But what happened is that to me, Innovation, I think is so misunderstood. And even though I've written three other books on the topic, I really said, could we flip it upside down? Now, most often we think of innovation as these massive change the world things.

But in that context, that's not for most people. You know, most people aren't wearing a hoodie or a lab coat. And so, I tried to make this like Innovation for the rest of us. It's really focused on helping everyday people become everyday innovators. So, I tried to demystify the creative process, lots of fresh research.

I spent over a thousand hours in research and interviews with people all over the world. And what we came up with is this notion of big little breakthroughs, which are small everyday acts of creativity that add up to big stuff. It's sort of like the little baby steps of creativity, but when you think about it, in terms of high velocity, lots of little approaches, it's way less risky.

It's way more accessible. It's way more fun. And they can all add up to great things, while we're developing the skills. So I think that most people have Innovation backwards. It's not swinging for the fences. It's actually going after it. One little, teeny idea at a time.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think that's so important. You know, the work that I do with companies and that. A lot of the times, first thing we have to do is kind of level set of what innovation means. And I think you're right. A lot of people think that innovation has to be, you know, I've got to create the next Uber or the next Facebook or whatever the case may be.

And a lot of the real value is created at that iterative approach almost. Where it's like, how do I spot problems in my workplace or in my life? And how do I solve those? And it can be something, you know, fairly simple or small. But those things add up over time and it's good to have that level set of what innovation means.

Josh Linkner: By the way real quickly. So new research out of Harvard shows that, you know, we think that our economy is driven by Elon Musk, inventing some new spaceship or whatever, and yes, that grabs the media attention.

But a new study from Harvard shows that 72% of our gross domestic product here in the United States is driven not by crazy giant ideas. It's by the little ones. And yet sometimes they show up as incremental. Sometimes there's just little things that don't capture the media attention, but maybe you make a tweak in the way you pitch your product or service, and your sales go up 11%. Or maybe you hit your factory floor. You, you find a new way to be more efficient and those little things are less glamorous, but they're absolutely impactful.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. What holds people back from taking these creative steps and that. You know, is this something that's found in every one of us or what holds people back from creativity?

Josh Linkner: Absolutely in every one of us. And the research here and I've been studying human creativity now for 20 plus years is crystal clear. That all human beings have enormous reservoirs of creative capacity. Much of it is dormant, but we all have that capacity. Our hardware's there. Like your brain and Picasso's brain are pretty darn similar.

You know, we all can be creative. Now, we don't all develop those skills, which is kind of sad, but we all have the capability to do so. That level set number one. What holds most people back is not natural talent, it's fear. So, fear is that poison of course that robs us of our best thinking. And you know we've all done it.

You're in a meeting and you have a crazy cool idea. But instead of sharing that one, you share your safe idea. Because you don't want to look foolish or be embarrassed or whatever. And it's a totally natural thing, but fear and creativity cannot coexist.

So, we've developed, and I share in the book a number of systems and processes, and even techniques. Think of them as like idea extraction techniques that are way more fun than brainstorming, way more effective than brainstorming, but they essentially help people cut through the fear to get their best thinking forward.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about that. Like how do you generate the best ideas and actually take something small that you may think is meaningless at the time, and then create something of value from it?

Josh Linkner: Well, I've studied this a lot, you know. If the premise is that we all have dormant creative capacity and by the way, mine's dormant to. I still have, you know, extra capacity, we all do. Then the question is like, how do you extract it? What's the best technique to get it out into the surface and drive the outcomes that matter most to all of us.

And so, what I've learned is that brainstorming, which is the technique that most people well use, is just awful. Like it was started in 1958. I mean, a lot of things have changed since 1958. And furthermore, it’s actually a good tool if you want to generate mediocre ideas. Because again, you know, fear creeps in, right. Just not a good technique. So, over the years I've developed a toolkit of like 13 way more effective and way more fun techniques that help people get that creativity really flowing.

Just a couple of quick examples. One of them Brian is called role storming. So instead of brainstorming as you, you're brainstorming in character. So, let's say we're on a meeting together and instead of you having to be responsible for every idea, let's say you're now playing the role of Steve Jobs. Well, nobody's going to laugh at Steve for coming up with a big idea. They might laugh at Steve for coming up with a small one.

So now you, in this case are liberated. You can say anything you want. There's no fear of retribution. So, the simple way it works is you take on an actual real-world problem, but you pretend that you're someone else. You could be a movie star; you could be a sports hero. You could be a villain; you could be Bart Simpson. And you pretend that you are that person solving the problem. And I'm telling you that the results are dramatically. People's creativity starts to soar. Just a couple other, really fast. One of them that we do is called the bad idea brainstorm.

So presumably you're brainstorming to come up with good ideas, but there's all this pressure. And like, we get uptight about it. So, there's a two-step process. Step number one is set a timer like 10 minutes, and everybody brainstorms. What's the worst idea you could come up with? What's a bad idea. What's an awful idea. What's an illegal idea. What's an immoral or unethical idea. And you write all the bad ideas on the board

First of all, it's hysterically funny. Everyone gets really into it. Your juices start flowing. Then, part two, an important part two, is you don't do the bad ideas. You then examine them and ask yourself, okay, is there something in there? Is there a nugget? Is there a kernel that we could give it like a legit flip and turn that bad idea into a good one?

So instead of being bound by the incremental gravity of traditional approaches, this pushes your thinking way to the edge and yes, you have to ratchet it back to reality afterward, but you're better off starting far and then reeling it back in later on.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I like that approach. And especially in the corporate realm, obviously a lot of startups have different constraints in that, but in the corporate realm, where you have a set of teams and a set of business models that you are optimizing and trying to build, and you know how to do that.

It's very difficult to change and flip that switch to get out of that mindset and get out of the competitive framework that you're working in and think differently. So, I like, I love the idea of even putting a different role on it. Just to change your own framework of how you look at a problem and deal with it.

Josh Linkner: Yeah, couldn't agree more. You know, one thing that also happens is that we very often commingled two distinct parts of the process. In other words, there's the ideation part. Where you're coming up with ideas. And then there is the execution part, where you're executing the ideas. And we've developed skills. Most of us, we're masters at that, but our idea generation skills might be a little bit underdeveloped.

So, what happens and we've all done it, you know, you're in a meeting, someone comes up with an idea, Oh, what if we did this? And then everyone else in the meeting becomes a self-appointed, idea police. And they tell you all the reasons why the ideal won't work and you know, there's not going to fit in the PowerPoint and Doug, the boss, isn't going to like it and all this.

And so, you extinguish the ideas too quickly. The problem is that we then lose the potency of those ideas and we lose the idea that leads to the idea that leads to the idea. So, my suggestion is let's bifurcate those. Let's have separate distinct meetings. Meeting number one, it's all about idea jamming.

It's about getting the great ideas as messy and scrappy and raw they may be. Let's get those sparks out. Meeting number two, we can then evaluate those ideas, sort of the good ones from the bad ones, decide which ones merit further exploration. And we can use our executional skills all day long. Well, let's not mix those two together because when you do that, you actually pollute the innovative process.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, there is almost two different types of brain functionality that you're looking at from that perspective. So, we're living in a world, COVID obviously has shaken up the entire world. And, and I think as you and I've been in this space talking about disruption and talking about innovation, and yelling from our top of our lungs that, Hey, you know, you should start preparing for this. I think this year has kind of made that a lot easier to make that case.

People now realize, oh yeah, that disruption thing, I probably should start thinking differently and that. What have you seen in the marketplace in this last year, that's changed the way people view innovation and creativity and what are companies doing about it?

Josh Linkner: You're exactly right, that this crisis, and obviously that's not a good crisis, but it has been sort of an accelerant. In other words, people who said, Oh, I might someday get around to doing things differently. I feel like the whole entire world has hit a giant reset button. And so, we're resetting the way that we interact, and eat, and live, and sleep and we're interacting and changing the way our relationships, and we're changing the way our loyalties are to brands and business partners.

And so that's creating a real opportunity for people to try something new. And I think that this moment in time is not going to happen again very soon. So, I would hate for us to squander that opportunity, as opposed to seize it.

Brian Ardinger: And so, what are you looking forward to over the next six to 18 months? What are the trends or what are you seeing out in the marketplace that's either getting you excited or scared about what's going on?

Josh Linkner: Well, one thing I don't think we should do is over-correct. You know, sometimes you swing the pendulum too far the other way. And then that creates a whole new set of problems. It's like that whack-a-mole game, you know, solve one problem, and another problem pops up. So, I don't think we should do that.

I think we should be deliberate. And I think we should really anchor our Innovation primarily around service. I think if we can anchor innovation on how you can extract more dollars, it's just never a good outcome. But if you can say, how can I use my creativity to better serve others?

Whether it's a customer or a team member or a partner, those are the ones that, that really push the boundaries. The other thing I think we should do is focus more on what makes us different than what makes us the same. So, there's another technique that I love sharing. I call it the judo flip.

So, let's say you're trying to solve a problem or sees an opportunity. Well, first thing we do is take an inventory. Like how would you ordinarily solve that? What are the typical approaches? What does everybody else in the industry do? What's conventional wisdom? And then like draw a line down the page and ask yourself what's the polar opposite. What's the opposite of each of those entries?

And by forcing yourself to push the creative boundaries in a totally different direction, it actually can be very liberating. And I think that now more than ever is a wonderful time because the market is craving freshness. It's craving new approaches, craving new solutions.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think we have to start thinking about different solutions and it gives us a great opportunity. I mean, if you look at the different industries out there and what's actually disrupted, you know, it's oftentimes not the key competitor you've been fighting against in the battles beforehand. It's something that came out of nowhere because of this crisis or other things that have made you think about the business differently.

Josh Linkner: There's also, you know, so many macro trends that are just opening wide opportunities. I know you have a lot of entrepreneurs on the show. Interviewed all these amazing people for this book, man. I'm so excited about it. One of them I interviewed was I got a Nicholas Horbaczewski who invented the drone racing league.

So, he figured out drone racing. And it was like this cottage thing, and people were using like pool noodles. And he started the entire professional league. Like he built the technology underneath it. Now they have all these drone races that are like these, it's almost like you're inside the Star Wars Phantom Menace Movie.

And it's amazing. Like people wear goggles, the fans get the same stream as the pilots. It's just the coolest thing ever. But I think again, there's opportunity like that, when you look at some of the macro trends and technologies that are opening things wide for entrepreneurs. One other funny example, I interviewed a guy named Tarus Krawcheck. He likes motorcycles.

Well, I guess who doesn't, but you know, when you think about Tesla and their success with an electric car, well, who's the Tesla of motorcycles. Guess what? It's not Harley Davidson. It's not Suzuki. It's not Ducati. It's not Honda. It's Tarform. And Tarform started in a guy's Brooklyn, little greasy garage. And he like figured it out.

He found people on Craigslist and in record time and only 18 months, he built the first production, fully electric, unbelievable cool motorcycle. That's like the Tesla of bikes. And he's now achieving like incredible results. But again, these macro trends, whether it's electric vehicles or whether it's drones or other activities, they open up a huge amount of opportunity for those that are willing to explore it.

Brian Ardinger: We oftentimes think about innovation and creativity from an individual perspective, you know, can I be creative and that? What role do you see teams and other people playing and making these big little breakthroughs?

Josh Linkner: Yeah. Awesome question. It is often misunderstood. You think of Hemingway isolated in a cabin penning the great American novel. And there are times certainly to be individually creative, but I'm more a fan of the collaborative. Again, my background is as a jazz musician and in the way jazz works. It's sort of like a conversation like you and I didn't script our conversation today. We're kind of like riffing off of each other. And in jazz, less than 1% of the notes are on the written page. The rest of you make up as you go.

There's like a cultural thing in jazz where if you play it safe, you just play the same thing over and over. You get kind of like laughed off the stage. No one wants you back. But if you take a risk and you screw something up, it's okay. You just call it art. Everything's fine.

So the cultural elements supports creative risk-taking and it supports collaboration. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say I'm playing a jazz gig and I play a little something on the guitar that's kind of cool, but it wasn't great. But the bass player hears it and is like, Oh, that gives me an idea. And it takes it and plays around with a little bit more.

And then the drummer says, Oh, you know what I heard a little rhythm in there that was cool. And picks that up on his solo and then the sax player takes it and rips this amazing solo to the delight of a standing ovation crowd. But who came up with the idea? I mean, yeah, it was a sax player solo, but we all sort of had our hands in it.

And I think that innovation and creativity is like that. That when you have small teams that there's safety, that there's trust, and you can rip it and play off of each other's creativity, then you get this collaborative dynamic process that ultimately yields far better creative output than the lone wolf in a log cabin.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I love that example. Well, what else can we expect with this new book Big Little Breakthroughs. Are there particular stories? What's your favorite nuggets that you want to share with the audience?

Josh Linkner: So, again, I'm really proud of this. I spent over a thousand hours in research and interviews here. So we reveal a whole bunch of interesting new scientific research in academic research, brain MRIs. We debunk the myth of left brain, right brain. There's all this fascinating new scientific research, but it's not a scientific book. It's a book for normal people like you and me.

So the bulk of the book covers eight core obsessions of everyday innovators. These are the patterns that I discovered from talking to everyone from Grammy award-winning musicians to billionaires, but all the way down to everyday people.

And it's how do they think and act. And so they're fun and surprising. One of them is the notion of start before you're ready, which is, you know, don't wait for permission or directive, but getting after it.

There's some fun ones in there. There's one called don't forget the dinner mint. Which is essentially saying, okay, before you ship a piece of work product, is there a little creative flourish, a little way you can plus it up just less than 5% extra creative effort that ultimately transforms the work output altogether.

And there's one around resilience called fall seven times stand eight. And it's how do you overcome adversity? Not just with dogged persistence, but with the intersection of creativity and resilience. All of these are backed up by, you know, a lot of rich storytelling from all over the globe.

And it's not the story of Apple and Netflix, cause we already know they're innovative. These are stories of the guy who came up with the first electric bike and, you know, the person that you've never heard of before. So it's fun. There's a lot of really rich details, surprising stories, but essentially it does this, it arms normal people to become innovators and to drive the outcomes that matter most.

And if that outcome is a business outcome, great. If it's a family outcome, if it's a community outcome, if it's something with your kids, it allows us to use the principles of everyday innovation to drive anything in our lives that we care about.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: I know its coming out soon. If people want to find more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that.

Josh Linkner: Yeah, actually just visit biglittlebreakthroughs.com. It is available for pre-order, but even if you don't buy it, there's tons of free resources there. There's a free assessment tool. That's kind of cool. There's downloadable worksheets. There's all kinds of toolkits. So if this is a topic that resonates to you, whether or not you buy the book, I hope you do, but if you don't, that's okay too.

Check out big little breakthroughs because again, there's a whole bunch of goodies there that I think can be helpful and it can be sort of as an accelerant for you to become and develop your innovative skills.

Brian Ardinger: Awesome. Well, Josh, I do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Give us a little sneak peek of what's going on and hope to have you back on soon and keep in touch.

Josh Linkner: Thanks brother. Keep doing the great work you're doing as well. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

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Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Steve Blank. Steve is the author of the Startup Owner's Manual and is also known as father of modern entrepreneurship. Steve and I had a chance to talk about the evolution and changes since the inception of the lean startup movement, as well as some of the coming changes we see in the world of work, education, government, and more. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me we have Steve Blank. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve Blank: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Steve. I'm so excited to have you on board because you have led the way when it comes to lean startup and all the methodologies around that. For the two people in my audience who haven't heard of you, I'm going to give a quick bio. You're a serial entrepreneur turned educator. You're known as the father of modern entrepreneurship. You've helped create the lean startup movement, which has really changed the way startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, how companies and governments are looking at this whole space. You're author of a couple of books called The Four Steps to the Epiphany and the Startup Owner's Manual.

Both of which I recommend highly to my clients and startups. You also teach at Stanford and Columbia and the list goes on and on. So, I'm super excited to have you on the show. But I thought we'd start off going back to 2013. You wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review titled why the Lean Startup Changes Everything. And it was one of those quintessential articles that I think kicked off a movement and kicked off a lot of conversation around innovation. What surprised you the most since you wrote that article and what surprised you during that journey?

Steve Blank: That's a great question. You know, the lean startup big insight was that the startups weren't the smaller versions of large companies. For the seven years, since the HBR article, we've discovered that companies aren't larger versions of startups. Meaning that corporations started adopting startup methodologies because they were being disrupted by startups and globalization and China, and then new technology and said, Hey, we can run incubators and accelerators and we could just operate just like that.

But in fact, what I think we've created in the last seven years is mostly innovation theater, rather than innovation in large companies. And not because anybody is being stupid, but because we're learning, what people have been talking about for 20 years, is that 99% of your company is actually doing execution. That is executing that known business model. And all the processes and procedures and OKR and KPIs are designed for execution. But those things tend to strangle innovation in its crib.

And unless you're going to fix all those processes. And that is specifically create what was labeled in the 20th century, the ambidextrous organization, that is one that could innovate and execute. You're going to end up having great posters and coffee cups about innovation, but not much innovation because what'll happen is, you'll create these islands of innovations as innovation activities, but they really won't be connected to the rest of the corporate infrastructure. The output of those incubators will die. And it's again, not due to malice, but due to the fact that you really need to make some more fundamental changes, if you want that to happen. Or you just need to acquire companies rather than try to do it internally.

Brian Ardinger: It speaks to an interesting point. So, for years, we've seen major shifts coming on the horizon, whether it's the rise of startups, accelerating technologies. Now we have a pandemic. Why do you think companies are still getting caught flat footed when it comes to disruption and being better able to handle the new next?

Steve Blank: If you really think about who runs large companies, if you're great at managing hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people, you're a world-class executer. There are very few companies that are still run by their innovators or by innovators. You know, the ones that are, we see both the good and the bad. The canonical poster child right now is the Elon Musk. Created industries from scratch and as certifiably insane. There's good news about working at Tesla and there's bad news in directly reporting to Elon. And before him, the poster child was Steve Jobs. Created industries from scratch and probably, you know, a horrible human being to work for.

Versus working in a stable corporation where there are processes and procedures and things unfold in a regular basis, and you can know what to expect when you show up in the work. That works great when your competitors are operating the same way, and it's a steady state world outside. That's in fact exactly who you need is an executer. Well, when things are chaotic and disruptive or technology has changed or something else, those world-class executor's have a real hard time figuring out what innovation looks like.

And in fact, the worst case that I see, and I don't mean it as a dis, but you sometimes will even get the innovation head nod from those leaders. Is that you'll try to describe to them what they need to do inside their corporation, and they'll nod and "Oh yes, you know," in fact, sometimes they'll even say, "Oh, innovation is third pillar of our agency and whatever."

And then, okay, well where's the exec staff table. "Oh, it's three layers down in our org." Well, have you changed any of your HR or security or policy or anything else or "no." Or do you have a 10% contingency for unplanned innovation? "Oh no innovation stands in line for next year at the budget table." And then you realize it's gotten nice words, but it's really not baked into the DNA.

You know, I'm not a believer that everyone in the company needs to be an innovator. I believe that we need to understand that the people who do world-class innovation and world-class execution come to work for very different reasons. And we can build innovation processes into existing P & Ls in divisions for what McKinsey used to call horizon one and two. We also need horizon three people who are working on disruptive stuff.

And as I said, some companies just can't change their culture to do that. So they need a process to acquire innovation, whether it's people or product line, or P & L, etc. But again, as some of those companies run into problems, when they try to integrate those acquisitions, they tend to kill innovation. Google, and all the robotics acquisitions or Google and Nest are great case studies of what happens to innovation companies when they meet execution organizations.

Brian Ardinger: So now we're living in this pandemic and I think you've called this a mass extinction event for a lot of companies. Whatever business model you are working on in January of 2020 is probably not the same or is obsolete or definitely needs to be relooked at. The problem that I see is a lot of the companies, they don't have anything to pivot to. They've never really thought about the model beyond what their original model. So do you have any advice or thoughts on how companies can better discover new opportunities or plan for a future that doesn't exist? You know, something entrepreneurs do daily, but something big companies don't do.

Steve Blank: Just a couple of thoughts. One is you could pray for V-shape recovery, which I do think evidence says that's probably unlikely in the United States. And by the way, in some industries it's just been done to you, regardless of what you think. If you're in travel or hospitality or whatever your business has gone down by 90 some odd percent and more importantly, the assets that were important before now, albatrosses, you know, there's a couple of things to think about it is there's some business that just unrecoverable. Meaning people who booked in your hotel, you can't get that lost business back.

There's some business that's pent up, meaning it will come back. It's just delayed, and it might come back. It could double. But if you've been a world-class executer and you're in a large company or a company with more than 10 people, sitting inside of your organization, are innovators who, in fact, if you unleash them, they actually are pretty good at figuring out new business models. This might be the innovators finest hour. I would make the problem a corporate wide problem and say, Hey, anybody has any ideas about new businesses that we could go into or how to repurpose or our channel or physical assets, or is there a way to do what we've been doing physically, virtually?

I have to tell you the most interesting example I've seen is a very small business. That would have been dead. There were these women who did kids' birthday party entertainment, and we went well, that's over, right? You can't show up at somebody's house and put on the clown nose or do the balloons or whatever. And they were like, okay, we're you know, going on unemployment, until they realize that no parents were now stuck at home with kids who really did need to be entertained. Well, what the heck, let's try it on Zoom. And they discovered that well, it didn't have obviously the proximity and they couldn't throw things to the kids. They could do more events per day virtually and parents were just happy to have entertainment events, that their business actually doubled.

And I used that as a proxy of who would have thought if you would have told these same people pre-pandemic that you could do kids' entertainment birthday parties via video conferencing. You would have got laughed out of the room. Because the other thing to think about is that the pandemic has now educated hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, about new forms of work, new forms of communication, new forms of entertainment that would have taken decades for us to become aclimatized to.

I'll give you a specific example, is that, well, I think we've now proven, at least for a first sales meeting, a video conference is probably just fine. Subsequent meetings for high dollar sales probably do require in person calls, but I think everybody's kind of understood no a get to know you video conference is probably good enough. Boy, that's going to change travel. That's going to change cost of sales. That will change productivity. And I don't think he could have ever convinced people that.

Same thing with showing up at work. We've in general concluded that you know what you really don't need to drive 45 minutes to go to work, to sit there all day to do email and video conferences and drive back home, five days a week. But I think we've also discovered that human beings need proximity to each other for socialization and being able to read body language, etc. And so, the nature of work might be you show up and one or two days a week inside a physical location.

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Brian Ardinger: We talked a little bit about remote work or the future of work in general, but the other big industry that's being disrupted is universities and the world of education. What are your thoughts on that and how COVID will impact the way we learn?

Steve Blank: Well, it's very funny, as you mentioned, I teach at Stanford and Columbia and at least this fall at Stanford, it's still going to be mostly a virtual university and we're now going to four quarters year round and a lot of my students are just taking a gap year or going, you know, I didn't sign up for this. You know, I want not only the education and the brand, but I also want the socialization and what that means. And here's the punchline is boy, there's a bunch of schools you probably couldn't have never gotten into before.

I'd be applying now. The first year might be virtual, but you might be getting in the schools that actually you're going to be happy you applied for. I think this is all also acclimatized, a lot of people to online education. And for those, who've had young kids at home. You're hoping that ends yesterday because just having those kids under foot are kind of difficult. And more importantly, none of the classes are standardized. That is your second grader has a different package than your fourth grader. And boy, they don't have it. So you're trying to figure this out, but same is true for universities. I think a lot of people are discovering that some learn just as well online than in person.

I happen to be an in person to learner, but some people might actually get a lot out of it. And it's done not the top tier research universities that are gonna get hit, but people who were paying, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for mid and lower tier universities might be going. Well, wait a minute. You Udacity or EdX or some of these online universities, Arizona, that actually have standardized online classes. Like what's the difference. And so, I think we're might see is some impact on not on the top tier schools, but on the mid and bottom tier schools.

And the other part of the impact that goes unsaid though, the schools certainly understand that. Is somewhere between 10 and 40% of depending on the school, enrollment are international students who can no longer come into the United States, but when you cut that out and that was, kind of the reason why a good number of them were still in business in the 21st century, when in fact the economics didn't work with just U.S. students. And that might be the biggest killer. I think the combination of foreign students not being able to show up and the opportunity of online learning.

The other thing is online learning allows you to do is think about new careers in a way that you never could have pivoted before. If all of a sudden, you're thinking about, do I really want to spend my life building fart apps versus maybe I could go into medicine or something else, given all this social justice things going on around us or all the healthcare things. It's pretty easy to test some of this stuff by taking some online classes and thinking about maybe I ought to think about a new career.

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point, especially when it comes to startups. So Silicon Valley has been the epicenter of a lot of innovation technology and that. You're seeing with methodology like Lean Startup, pushing the rise of the rest and these things can be spun up pretty much anywhere. Do you think that Silicon Valley will remain the epicenter of technology innovation?

Steve Blank: Silicon Valley is no longer the epicenter of innovation. When I came out here in the seventies, it was between Silicon Valley and Boston. Silicon Valley then dominated. But in since then, obviously, I'd say there's now maybe 10 or so centers of innovation with two of them, at least two of them in China. You know, Northwest Beijing and the Pearl River Valley. New York City was literally architected by Bloomberg in its second incarnation of a innovation ecosystem. Boston and San Diego emerged as life science. You know, we've talked about tech, but there's a parallel universe in therapeutics and diagnostics devices, digital health. So, I'd say Boston and San Diego. Israel invented themselves from scratch from a socialist country into an innovation ecosystem. You know, I would have said London, but I think they shot themselves in the head with Brexit.

We could argue if there's any others in Europe. At the scale for me, innovation ecosystem, just by the way, for your listeners, it's no longer where does innovation occur and where are entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs are everywhere. And in fact, angel funding is almost everywhere. I mean, like in your grandmother's basement, you could find, you could find a seed round, but the question is how many places in the world can you raise a hundred million dollars for a crazy idea?

And then when I say innovation cluster, you really think about it. A cluster requires innovators, but risk capital, angel and venture capital at scale. And that's the word at scale. And the other definition of a cluster is that it's a magnet, not a jobs creation program for local residents. That is people come from around the world to that location. And then as I said, there's probably about 10 of them in the world. I'd probably throw in Singapore as well, but there's not too many. Now to answer your question, you know, will Silicon Valley continue to dominate, I think it will continue to dominate the U.S. In hardware and software. But I think the, the notion of as a physical place, that's a different conversation because I think we've discovered you no longer need to live in San Francisco.

And it's a meta question of do you know, no longer need to live in an urban area. And will the urban areas that were magnets for innovation clusters like New York and San Francisco and whatever, still be those dominant places where innovation occurs versus where the risk capital lives. Does that make sense?

Brian Ardinger: Yeah Absolutely. The last core topic I wanted to talk about is this idea of startup and corporate collaboration. And how do you see the world changing with new technologies being spun up? The effect of COVID and that? Are you seeing more startup collaboration with corporates? How do you see the two different worlds living together?

Steve Blank: The thing I'm most hopeful for is the collaboration between government and startups. You know for the last 200 years, ever since Washington crossed the Delaware in a leaky boat, they've been arguing about what's called acquisition. It's how does the government buy stuff.

And you know, ever since that leaky boat, they've been arguing about what's the best way to buy things from private industry and from the government. And historically it was, well, we'll give you a spec. We'll try to think of all the features way before we actually need them and here go bid on it and then deliver it. And of course, by the time you got it, the need is changed or you're late or something else. And by the way, the reason we asked for it is so we could operate it and use it to do whatever we want.

And therefore, you had a design manual, so our soldiers could operate it, etc. But now people have realized about 40% of what the government, particularly the military needs could be bought by outcomes rather than things. And by outcomes. I mean, If you think about it, you know, the government was building their own rockets first through contractors. And then they started going out to people like Space X and Blue Origin and buying, you know, their rockets until someone said, well, wait a minute. Why do we even like, want the rockets? Rockets are just a means to an end, which is we want to put stuff in orbit. So why don't we just buy outcomes? Which says, no, no, no, we'll pay you when you deliver this payload. You guys operate the rockets and you guys do something.

Imagine we were buying outcomes. And in fact, NASA has kind of led the way in this. One of the latest procurements was something called the Gateway, which was a space station around the moon. And a very short description was no, no, no, we'll pay you when you deliver the space station in lunar orbit. Whoa. Wow. That's a really insightful...then of course you can't buy everything that way, but you know, I can imagine someone in the Navy waking up and say, gee, for 50 years, we had submarines and unmanned vehicles trying to map temperature and salinity to figure out where Thermo climbs were, etc.

Just imagine if the Navy I said, no, no, no, here's a $10 billion business here. We're going to create. All we want is that data. And we could actually start an entire startup ecosystem if we said no, no, no, we're buying thermocline data for the South China Sea. Anybody who wants to bid on that? That's all we care about is the outcome.

And I'm using that as examples. And by the way, obviously that will apply to companies dealing with startups as well. I might not want to buy the thing. I might want to buy the service. And in fact, you know, Amazon Web Services is a kind of instintation of that is we no longer think that we need a server closet or a server room or data center. We kind of buy outcomes of having those machines, you know, at some point we're going to buy outcomes of having results. You know, I don't care about having all that customer data. All I care about is upsell or cross sell or lift. That's an outcome versus the data. Does that make sense?

Brian Ardinger: Oh, absolutely. The last question I want to talk about is we're living in uncertain times, but what are you most optimistic or excited about.

Steve Blank: That the sun comes up every morning and that, you know, in uncertain times, we forget that most of our history has been lived in uncertain times and that the stable times are actually anomaly. Out of that crisis almost always comes opportunity. And that if you're an entrepreneur, you're going to be looking around going well, things have changed. And some of them are permanently altered for sure. People's behavior has been changed. And the question is how much of that will stick and how much is that an opportunity for our new set of things to occur?

I think that's true just for businesses, but also for the way, you know, for social justice and other parts of our lives. The world who kind of looks a little different. I'm old enough to have lived through a couple of these things. And for most part, it is made our country and our economy better and more inclusive, but when they occur, they're painful. But as I said, out of chaos and crisis comes opportunity.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. The more problems we have, the more solutions we can find to solve those particular problems.

Steve Blank: As long as the sun comes up the next morning.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Steve, I want to thank you so much for being on Inside Outside Innovation, coming and sharing your insights and that. It's been an honor. I've obviously looked up to you and all your work and appreciate you coming on and sharing that with our audience.

If people want to find out more about yourself, about your books, about what you're working on, what's the best way to do that?

Steve Blank: I have a website called SteveBlank.com and it has some pretty interesting blog posts and tabs on top that are worth exploring. And hopefully I'll see your listeners there.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Steve, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation.

Steve Blank: Take care. Thanks for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Rita Gunther McGrath, best-selling author of books like The End of Competitive Advantage, Discovery Driven Growth, and her latest book Seeing Around Corners. Rita and I talk about what companies need to do to navigate the pace and intensity of today's changing environments and what needs to happen to foster the skills, the culture, and the metrics around innovation.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Rita Gunther McGrath, Author of Seeing Around Corners and Professor at Columbia Business School

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me is Rita Gunther McGrath. She's the author of Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. Welcome Rita.

Rita Gunther McGrath: It is a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I can't tell you how excited I am to have you on the show. I've been a big fan for a long time. You're a best-selling author of a number of books: The End of Competitive Advantage, Discovery Driven Growth. You're a sought-after speaker and consultant and a long-time professor at Columbia Business School. So, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your insights about innovation.

You've written this new book, Seeing Around Corners about how do you navigate and become better prepared for this inevitable change. What made you decide like this is the right time for this particular book and it came out right before COVID.

Rita Gunther McGrath: For once I got the timing on a book right. Well, the idea of strategic inflection points intrigued me beginning back in the nineties with Andy Grove's work on how Intel had to make this incredible transformation from selling memory devices, to selling microprocessors and what a courageous journey that was for them.

And there hasn't really been a lot done on that theme since then. Not a lot. As we were looking at inflection points and, you know, before the pandemic, the ones I was watching were certainly digital touching every part of everybody's life. The merging of strategy and innovation as separate fields, we know they've really been separate for and now I really, as competitive advantages, get shorter, I think they're really emerging.

And then perhaps the whole issue around productivity, automation, what's the right kind of social contract. And it seemed to me, these were all the kinds of change which feel really slow moving until they hit some kind of tipping point. And that's when you have the inflection point. And what got me intrigued about the book at this particular time was how far ahead you can pick up the weak signals that something really is brewing.

And if you keep an eye on it, right, it can take your business to new heights. And if you sort of stick your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening, that's where we see the great corporate catastrophes.

Brian Ardinger: And your book breaks it down really into three core questions. Like how do you see an inflection point coming? How do you decide what to do about it? And then how do you bring the organization along with you to make that happen. To set the stage, how do you define an inflection point. What's out there? And why is it so important to identify an inflection point.

Rita Gunther McGrath: Yeah. So, I define an inflection point as some external force that exerts a 10X pressure on something about your organization or your business. That would be, that often is technology, but it could be other things. It could be a regulation, it could be social norms, you know, it could be a number of different things. So, for instance, if you're in the energy world today, you know you're staring at dramatic pressure on the fossil fuels business, and that's not a big mystery.

And it's not going to happen overnight, but you know, that's something you're going to have to respond to. So, the reason I think this is an interesting way of thinking is that if you think about it, any business, any organization is born at a certain point in time. And there are things that are possible and things that aren't.

You can almost think of it as like living within an envelope of constraints. So, 30 years ago, if I wanted to get a video message to millions of people. I had to be Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Sky News. I mean I had to own satellites and production equipment and camera crews all over the world. Huge investment required to do that.

Fast forward to today and if I want to get a message that's compelling to 30 million people, you know, I can pick up my device. Hopefully I'm talented enough that I can post it on Instagram or wherever if it goes viral, Voilà. And what have you spent almost nothing.

And that to me is an example of the kind of inflection point that overtakes businesses sometimes before they're really aware of it. Because we built our assumptions around what's possible at the time those assumptions were formed. And when those assumptions change, it's super easy to miss them.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I mean, the pace of change is absolutely accelerating. We've got technologies, markets, access to capital. Think about we're filming this a couple of weeks into January. If you think about the first three Wednesdays of January, you had a riot on the Capitol, an impeachment, and an inauguration, and that's just the political side of change.

Is it the inflection points? Are they coming more frequently? Is it the number of inflection points that are happening right now that's making it so dynamic or is it the intensity of these inflection points or both?

Rita Gunther McGrath: Yeah, I kind of go with intensity, right? If I go back to my media example, to think that in the span of just a couple of decades, you went from something that was literally a multimillion-dollar, tens of million dollar required investment to something where any kid on a scooter can do it for nothing.

You know, that to me is just an intensity level of inflection point that I don't think we've really adjusted to. The other thing I would argue is that these inflection points happen before our institutions catch up. And there's always a lag between what's possible, human and technology wise, and what the regulators are there to provide and what is happening with institutions.

So an example that's playing out right now is the whole conversation about personal privacy, the data mining and advertising business that's made out of money, people's personal data and the whole third party data selling kind of things. And in my book, I talk about this as an issue where, you know, institutions and the public in general, just haven't caught up to practice.

So if I go all the way back in time and look at the previous regime, like, what was privacy, how was privacy defined? How was it valued? And an interesting artifact is the National Librarians Act. And in the National Librarians Act, it was actually considered completely unacceptable for any librarian to record the information someone came into a library to seek because that could be considered an invasion of their privacy.

If you were looking up diseases or you were looking at political parties, or you're looking up something that might be a little dangerous and their librarians were sworn to secrecy, that they would not betray that. Which seems almost ludicrous, when you look at what's being done with our data today. And that to me is an example of an institutional norm, which is just beginning to catch up to the reality on the ground.

Brian Ardinger: So, do you, you think with COVID, the pandemic has made your job easier? Has it made it more evident for the majority of companies out there to realize like, Oh yeah, I've been hearing about change. I've been hearing about these challenges, but yeah now it's actually at my doorstep. Do you think that the majority of companies out there realize the dynamic nature that they're operating in now?

Rita Gunther McGrath: Well, the good news is I don't have to explain to people why they need to change. I don't have to make the case for, so that's good. I would say the nature of my work has changed in kind, in content tremendously. What I used to get asked for a lot was, you know, come give us this entertaining amusing thought-provoking talk about your research and your book and bring people into our conference, because you've got a good name and people are interested in you.

That's really not. What's top of people's minds right now. What I'm getting a lot is help us figure this out. Help us understand how the tools of innovation can help us get through this unprecedented uncertainty we have right now. And the good news is the tools that innovation really do help in a time like this, as you would know, and your listeners would know.

But there's a vast number of people out there who've never touched the tools of innovation. So, it's all new to them. And it's a lot of, you know, help us make sense of this, help us define the next steps, help us get ready for what unknowns may yet come. And I think that's been very interesting for me. It's certainly made my life very interesting because I'm getting asked to sort of sit with companies facing real existential decisions that they have to make. And to be helpful in that regard is very satisfying, but it's definitely changed the nature of what I do.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig in a little bit about the book and the tactics and that around it. You outlined eight or so different themes that corporations and people within organizations should be thinking about when it comes to innovation and seeing around corners, things like being able to live on the edge and find information outside of their core. Things like small, empowered teams and that. Why don't you outline some of the core tactics that are outlined in the book?

Rita Gunther McGrath: As you said, the book is really around. How do you see them? How do you decide what to do about them? How do you bring the organization with you? So on the seeing front to me, there's a couple of questions to ask yourself.

The first question is, am I getting enough exposure to where these small changes are first making themselves felt. And Andy Grove put it really well, he said, if you want to know where spring is making itself felt you must travel to the periphery because that's where the snow is most exposed. So, the way I talk about that is snow melts from the edges.

And what I find is, especially as you get more senior in a company, it gets harder and harder to get absolute unvarnished information. And you just have to make much more of an effort because everything gets sort of packaged and beautified by the time it gets to you. Similarly, your words and actions have so much impact on people that you may not even be aware of, that you could be ineffective, inadvertently cutting off valuable flows of information.

So, when I say getting out to the edges it's practices, like personally getting it to the edges, it's things like what David Cody used to do as the CEO of Honeywell, he would finish most major decision-making meetings by turning to the youngest, the least senior person in the whole room and say so, you know, what do you think of this?

And of course, this young person would be totally terrified. What does my boss think? And he's like, no, no, I want to know what you think of it because I know what we all think of it, but I really like to get your perspective and made it really clear if somebody could come up with something that was a different point of view that was valued.

So, getting diverse perspectives, making sure that you regularly, as Steve Blank would say, get out of the building. You know, don't just be doing your email and talking to your inside people all the time. Developing an external focus, you know, hugely important. Don't just listen to the internal noises, face your attention outside.

And then, you know, from science fiction, we have a wonderful phrase. You know, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. As William Gibson, very famously said. And so, think about where are the bits and pieces of the future that are starting to show up that I could go visit.

You know, not that they're fully formed. Not that they're exactly what it would be, but you know, if I were in the 1950s, where would I go look at a picture phone. Today where would I go look at what AI is doing or what the ten-year-olds of the future are doing or something like that.

So, it's little hacks that you can insert in the course of doing your daily business, that can just help you get that opportunity to get exposed to something that's quirky or that's different, or that's never worked that way before. When did that start happening? You know, those kinds of questions. And once your people become aware that you're interested, you'd be surprised at the number of ways you can develop of getting, you know, information that may be a little bit contrary to prevailing norms.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagine it's a trickle-down effect as well from the standpoint of the CEO at edge, maybe seven layers deep or whatever, but the same principle can apply to the middle manager who needs to get down to the two levels deep to understand what's going on.

Rita Gunther McGrath: Oh totally. You know, one of the interesting things that I've found when researching the book was there was always somebody that knew, always. You know, that if you look at Nokia, there was somebody that knew these smartphones were going to be an issue.

If you go talk to the people at Blackberry, if you go talk to IBM in its dark days. So, there are all these people that know because often they're at the edges, right. They're exposed to it, but they don't have access to the strategic decision makers. They're not regarded seriously. Oh, he's a geek. What does he know or worse yet? They're always sounding the alarm about something or other. So, when they finally get one, right everybody thinks it’s not wisdom. You know, so that was an interesting thing.

And so, another question your listeners can ask is who in my organization would be likely to know? And it's very often the scientists, the programmers, the technical people that, you know, they look at data and they form an opinion based on the data. They don't have an opinion and then go look for data to support it. That's not how they're trained. And so, they're often invaluable. Now they may be cranky. They may be awkward. They may not be socially fluid. They're often very knowledgeable about what might be happening.

Brian Ardinger: When it comes to culture, do you think a lot of this has to be driven from the top down? Or is it a bottom up or how do you perceive creating and fostering this innovative culture that can see around corners?

Rita Gunther McGrath: Well, if the top isn't on board, it's very difficult, because you're working around the power structures in the organization and at that point it's nearly impossible. The kinds of things you see that go wrong at the top are yeah, yeah, I see this as a big problem, but my contract ends in three years and as long as I can keep the stock price where it is for three years, I'm good. So why should I take on all this work of transforming the organization when the next person's going to benefit. If you've got that kind of mentality. It's going to be very hard to get traction.

So, I do think the top needs to be at least supportive, at least get out of the way. At best, you know, really encouraging and leading the charge. I do think there's a lot of mythology about culture and innovation that gets in the way.

So, you know, I've seen companies that go off on these, Oh, we've got to foster a culture of innovation, you know, so we're going to have innovation boot camps and post-it notes in their thousands are going to die and it's going to be great. And no idea is a bad idea and you've all... innovation theater. We've all been down there, but you know, real innovation is, as you know, Brian is, it's a process, it's a set of practices, it's a set of structures. You know, you can't run an organization where 9 to 12, we're all like, Ooh, what does blockchain mean for the future of Persian rugs?

This is actually a thing I found out about this on LinkedIn yesterday. There's this guy who's selling Persian rugs who thinks if I can detect the origin of the Persian rug by linking it to a blockchain, I can sell more Persian rugs. But anyway, so in the morning, you're all about blockchain and Persian rugs, and God knows what. And then the afternoon it's all about so what happened in this quarter's shipments? And what's the delay.

I mean, you just can't do those things as human beings together. So, you really need. It's separate kinds of work, separate work streams, separate structures. And it's very hard to build that without real support from the top of the house.

Brian Ardinger: That kind of leads to the question around metrics and measurement. And how do we know if we're getting better at this as an organization? Or what should we be looking at? I know in the book you talk about lagging versus current versus leading indicators and that, but can you talk a little bit about how we measure if we're getting better at understanding these dynamic changes?

Rita Gunther McGrath: As you mentioned, so a lagging indicator is great data, but it's about something that's already happened. We can't change it. Current indicators tell you where you are. So, what's happening right today. And then leading indicators, which are the hardest to get, give you some insight into future possibilities.

So, a couple of caveats. First is I'm not a huge believer in prediction. I mean, who could have predicted what happened at the White House on January 6th? Civil insurrection would not have been at the top of our minds when we woke up the 5th of January. So, prediction's really hard. What I do think you can do is prepare.

And so, the measure of a good leading indicator is did it expose us to scenarios in the future that were realistic enough. It merits putting some investment in preparing. And this is where I think, again, a lot of companies, either they settle on a point forecast of a preferred future, and that's where we're going and we're not looking right and we're not looking left and that's it.

Or they confuse their preferences with their predictions. And that's dangerous too. Like, no, I know what world I'd like to live in, but that doesn't mean that's the world we're going to, just having the time to have those conversations about let's look at these dynamics. And I get invited a lot with companies to go through this now, which is let's think of what plausibly could be the kind of future you're going to be living in.

Brian Ardinger: So, a lot of our audience is also involved in the startup realm. And how does this book and how does your process differ in a startup environment versus a big corporate environment? Are there things that startups should be looking at differently when it comes to seeing around corners versus bigger corporations? Or how does that play out?

Rita Gunther McGrath: For startups inflection points always represent opportunities. If you look at YouTube, right? That whole media transition that I was talking about, well, YouTube was both an enabler and a huge beneficiary of that. The digitization that we've talked about has created untold entrepreneurial opportunities in all kinds of areas. So, the fact that there is an inflection point by definition means the established order is going to be shifted in some way. And that always opens up entrepreneurial opportunities.

In terms of being prepared to see what's going on, it's easier if you're smaller. There's not as much bureaucracy. There's not as much entrenched. That's not how we do things around here. So, it's easier to be more fluid in your operations. That being said, you know, entrepreneurs are no less vulnerable than the rest of us to falling in love with a given worldview, to settling on a given course of action despite all evidence is not going to work.

And, you know, if they can get backing, and this has been a critique of mine, of the startup phase that we're in sort of late-stage capitalism right now, is there's just no place for all this money to go. And so, it's going into rakes even. I mean, WeWork is a poster child for that, but many others.

And here's the problem that when you're designing and driving a company, to benefit your investors because that's actually the core stakeholder that matters the most to you because you want to keep the wheels turning on the money train. If that's the kind of company you're building, it's very difficult to build a company that really is focused on customers, where it's really focused on a core technology or something.

And so, you end up with these companies that limp their way through an IPO, and then it's kind of like, Oh, now what? So, I think some of what we see in Seeing Around Corners in terms of where you can go wrong. Too much big money, too much here's my preference, not the reality. And that can be very dangerous for startups.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk a little about some of the companies that are doing this well or seem to be ahead of the curve when it comes to positioning themselves for change and disruption?

Rita Gunther McGrath: Sure. I think companies like Aetna CVS in healthcare, really trying to think about what does patient-centered distributed health care look like? Very interesting. Companies like Costco have certainly shown that in part, because they really do release and empower the talent of their employees. They're doing great, you know, through all this pandemic. I see companies like that, setting aside the time and really being thoughtful about what the future holds. So, among companies I'm working with.

Procter & Gamble, looking at what does the next phase of consumer life look like? And after we're through this pandemic, and really asking very thoughtful questions about what would this need to look like if we were to meet the needs of those consumers of the future.

So, companies like that, I think you're taking the time and really thinking about it. And Nestle is another one that I think is really giving a lot of thought. Unilever. Unilever, in fact, just announced that they're going to insist that their suppliers pay living wages to their people.

So, they're trying to get ahead of this humanism curve. I think that is highly likely to mean to follow on the heels of this pandemic, because what it's done, it's just revealed how precarious so many people's lives are, even in what supposedly is the richest country in the world. It's really needed obviously.

Brian Ardinger: What corners are you looking around or what are you exploring? What trends excite you and what are the next things that you're going to be tackling?

Rita Gunther McGrath: Well, personally, I think if I just take the pandemic, we went through this first phase where it was all very exciting and new and catastrophic for some, but for a lot of people, it was a chance to really, yes, we're finally going to digitize. Yes. We're finally going to make remote working possible. Yes, we're probably to do these things. Followed by just exhausting, nonstop around the clock, kind of working.

Then we have this middle phase where it was sort of, well, it's going to be over by Easter and then it's going to be over by July and then it's going to be over by the time school starts. And where we are now, I think is a combination of exhaustion and people sort of saying, I can't do this anymore, but also new possibilities emerging.

And I think that's what's going to be really interesting, because we've learned a lot about how to do things in a very different way. And so, I'm intrigued by what does the future of work hold? How has the pandemic made us rethink careers as an example?

So, it is a lot of people out there and have gotten basically what our battlefield promotions because they alone in their organizations were able to rise to this, make something happen, you know, get the results regardless of external situations. And so, it's brought a lot of different kinds of leaders to the fore who may not have done so in a traditional environment.

On that kind of human side, future of work things, I'm very intrigued looking at that. I'm also intrigued, and I think this is where innovation really comes in, I think we may be on the opening pages of really finally getting innovation right at scale and as a capability, rather than innovation theater.

And I think it all kind of comes together with this major inflection point around competitive advantage and strategy. Which is back in the day, if you had a major innovation that really worked, you could enjoy that for decades, right? DuPont invents Nylon, and 40 years later, you know, they're making money on Nylon, and today that just, you know, things are happening much faster.

And so, your innovation engine needs to be able to produce new advantages, to replace those that have faded away. So, to me, there's a tremendous amount of kind of a feeling of we're on the brink of something really amazing in the innovation community, that all of a sudden people are saying, not that that's not irrelevant anymore, that really is relevant.

That's where we need to be investing some time to build capability now. I think there's a fair amount of cluelessness about how to do that, but at least the awareness that that would be a good thing to do is out there.

Brian Ardinger: And the final question I have is what question do you wish more interviewers would ask you about your work or what insight is most overlooked in what you do?

Rita Gunther McGrath: That's a fascinating question. Well, hopefully the pattern recognition is really core to what I do. I remember once I was teaching, when I first start teaching in the MBA program, on one of my emails that came back the comment, Professor McGrath has an uncanny ability to connect to everything, to everything, in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before.

And I wasn't sure the student meant it as a compliment, but I do think a lot where you get the insights is what does battery power in India have to do with you know, the fate of autonomous vehicles in Europe and they're connected.

And I think seeing those connections is often something people don't see enough, people get very surfacing in these kinds of things, but if you go deeply into how certain people are able to really see these patterns, I think it's that, it's that pattern recognition.

Brian Ardinger: That Butterfly effect. How does it all come together? Well, Rita, I do thank you so much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and being a part of this. I look forward to having you back on and talking in the future as things progress in general but thank you very much for being on the show.

Rita Gunther McGrath: It's a pleasure. Thank you.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Roger, founder of Felix Gray, the e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. David and I talk about the founder's journey of launching a new category of eyewear and the challenges along the way. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with David Roger, Founder of Felix Gray

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have David Roger. He is the founder of Felix Gray, an e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. And he's got quite an interesting story. So welcome to the show, David.

David Roger: [00:00:57] Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:58] Our paths have not crossed until today, but a lot of our common network have in the past. You started your company, Felix Gray in 2016. Let's go back to the beginning and let's talk about how you got involved in becoming an entrepreneur.

David Roger: [00:01:13] In college, I initially thought I wanted to be a lawyer. That's what I went to school for and by sophomore year I realized I did not want to do that. And I kind of loved this idea of starting businesses. And this is the time where TechCrunch was starting to get really popular, and you'd read a lot of different things and different entrepreneurial things. And it was something really exciting.

I ended up starting my first business in college, which was a secondary school newspaper. And I had to sell print advertising to local stores and shops and businesses. And if you want to learn how tough selling is, try doing that.

And then when I left Cornell, I went and joined Venture for America, which is basically Teach for America, but applied to startups and entrepreneurship. Founded by Andrew Yang, who is running for democratic nominee couple of years ago and is now running actually for Mayor in the New York Mayor race. And so that's kind of how I got into entrepreneurship.

Brian Ardinger: [00:02:06] I think you started in Vegas, is that correct? Working with Tony Shay and the Downtown Project. And maybe tell us a little bit about that Vegas Tech Fund and some of the stuff that you've done in there.

David Roger: [00:02:17] Through Venture for America, they are in partnership with Tony's Downtown Project. And so that's how I got connected with them. I interviewed out there, really bought into the mission, really thought it was an amazing thing to fill a walkable livable downtown area, which is, Vegas is not known for that. It's basically all suburbs. And then essentially the strip, which is a transient first population.

And so, I thought that was an amazing mission. I was part of the biggest tech fund, but my primary job was on their operations team. Basically, when I got there, Tony had put in $350 million of his own money into revitalize the area, and we had no idea if projects that we had going on ranging from a million, to twenty-five million dollars, we're going to make money or lose money. It's kind of the wild west.

And they threw me in, and they said, go figure this out. And so, it was really cool. Great job right out of school. I will say it did mean that I was in front of Excel, building financial models, 12 hours a day. That's when my eyes started to absolutely kill me. I was looking around, looking at everyone else, complaining about the same things our eyes being tired at the end of the day, their eyes being dry, headaches, blurry vision.

And kind of looked and said, okay, why is this a thing. Everyone I know at work and half the people I know in my friend group that are in different jobs all around the country, why are we all complaining about the same thing?

That's when I started talking to Optometrists Ophthalmologists. Learned around what screens produced, which is blue light and glare and basically that caused a lot of these issues that get categorized as digital eye strain. So, if you get filtered blue light, you can eliminate glare. You create this more comfortable experience.

Brian Ardinger: [00:03:50] I love the genesis of that. But not every new idea becomes a company. And so how did you make that jump from, hey, I've got an individual problem from the standpoint of, you know, my eyes are getting strained from all the work I'm doing on screens to, hey, I think there's something here that I can create a company around?

David Roger: [00:04:08] So the first thing was really recognizing that problem. Right? So, recognize the problem myself and then recognize that problem in a lot of other people. Whether it was people complaining about it firsthand, or me saying, hey, do your eyes ever get exhausted at the end of the day? You ever deal with a headache?

And everyone's saying, yes. You're like, okay, there's something here. So, then I start to understand, okay, what is going on? So that's when I started talking to eye professionals for a better understanding what could be these root causes. And so when I'm talking to ophthalmologists and optometrists they are saying look, screens are a large driver behind this, and particularly what screens produce, light and glare.

And so like, look, you can filter blue light, and you can eliminate glare. You can create a more comfortable experience. There are these glasses out there, they're yellow or orange lenses, and basically, they're going to help. So, I look, and they're not only yellow and orange lenses, but they look like hunting goggles.

And if you put them on your face you look like one of the X Men. And I'm like, I can't wear that, and we'll show this to plenty of other people like, hey, this will solve your problems. They're like, I'm not wearing that. Right. So basically, the idea was okay, well, how do you create something that is functional, but also can look good.

At the flip side, there were a couple other things in the market at the time, and this is still the case today. But these clear lenses, basically the Optometrist, the Ophthalmologist, the real eyecare professional said this stuff is not really filtering real blue light. It's filtering 2 to 3% of blue light where it actually matters, which produces blue light. It is basically placebo. It's not worth buying. So, what I did then was said, okay, well, how can you marry the fashion function?

How can you create something that has a beautiful frame, but a really functional lens? And that's when I started working through a lot of networking with, with different lens suppliers and ended up developing a proprietary way of filtering blue light that can still have a clear lens. But be highly effective, right?

So, Felix Gray's lens, even today, filters 30% of blue light instead of 2% of blue light at the 455-nanometer range, which is where screens produce blue light. Right. So basically, we filter 15 times more blue light where it's important. And that's why 9 out of 10 people who wear Felix Gray report significant improvement, but that was the genesis.

So, it was okay, let's spend time building a great product off the bat. That's not only going to make your eyes feel great, but make you feel great. You feel confident in what you're wearing. And from there start.

Brian Ardinger: [00:06:34] And obviously there were some signals in the marketplace that e-commerce was taking off. Warby Parker, I think had just been around and being introduced to the concept of cheaper or less expensive frames that you would buy than going to the store and stuff. So, there's some signals in that.

How did you go from, and the concept of there's a problem here. I think I can solve it from technology perspective and then creating an e-commerce company? Those are different things as well. How did you go about building the team and experimenting your way to where you're at now?

David Roger: [00:07:01] Ecomm was definitely growing. I would say that the distinction between the fields where I was doing and a lot of what other direct to consumer was doing was direct to consumers basically saying here's a toothbrush, you've always bought a toothbrush, let's make a prettier looking toothbrush. And let's cut costs through the supply chain and then be able to deliver it to you and use, you know, Facebook advertising, et cetera, in order to get it off the ground.

We were basically creating a new category. We're saying, look, we believe that this is a big problem. After looking at lots of research through companies like the Vision Council, which is an independent group of optometrists and ophthalmologists, you’re learning that 60 to 70% of people are experiencing digital eyestrain. So you're realizing this is a big problem, but the market is really low. So, the awareness is not there.

The problem is obvious. It's just that no one has applied all that's known on that problem. And no one has brought a real great solution to the market. What we said is the best way to do that is to do that through a new age direct consumer model, as opposed to the traditional retail model.

Because especially when something is new, a retailer's not going to say, sure, I'm just going to buy this thing. You know, I’m going to help educate your potential customers. It doesn't work like that. Right? So, we had a lot better direct connections with the customer. If we could go straight to B to C.

Brian Ardinger: [00:08:20] My understanding is you got scrappy early stages when you're trying to start a new category, sometimes there's not investors that are interested in starting a new category and that. So, talk us through how you got off the ground?

David Roger: [00:08:31] I remember, you know, at the time Away Luggage had just raised $2 million pre revenue. My co-founder and I said, okay, look, we're two smart, you know, guys. He came from hedge funds. I came from an entrepreneurial background. And we said, look, we can go raise some money.

And we basically got laughed out of the room because people said, you're not going to start a new market. And especially we are selling specifically non-prescription glasses. So, people with either contacts or 20/20. So, you're not going to get people who don't wear glasses, to wear glasses. And so, we actually said, we believe in this product. We've tested it among friends and it's a really good success.

So, the first thing we did when we really got scrappy is when we launched in January 2016 in a closed beta, we actually did what we called an office trial. We worked with offices all around New York. Spotify, Uber, Barclays, LinkedIn. And we would go in and offer up to 50 pairs of glasses to employees for two-week free trial period.

We took care of everything. So really easy for a Culture HR team to just say, hey, this is a fun little perk. We don't have to do anything. And it's a nice thing to offer. And at the end of that program, people could either return them. We come and pick them up. Or they could use their own credit cards to buy.

And we saw about one in three people without knowing about Felix Gray, without knowing about blue light, bought right off the bat. And then we always get emails like we'd always pick up on a Friday. And then by Monday, Tuesday, we'd always get all these emails saying, actually my eyes are killing me. Can you come back so I can buy those glasses? So, we knew we had something there.

Brian Ardinger: [00:10:02] So you did an Indiegogo campaign as well and raise some money from friends and family and then manufacturing and that's expensive. So how do you get off the ground with just selling individual orders?

David Roger: [00:10:13] That private beta happened after the Indigo campaign. When we did the Indiegogo campaign, we really didn't have a company at all. There's no supply chain in place yet. Basically, it was rough estimates of what we would need in order to place our first order quantities.

And we didn't even know what the suppliers were. We just knew that was roughly what it was going to be. And we would figure that out later. So, I think for us, we were in a position where we use Indiegogo very much as a friends and family way of raising some money.

People could contribute $50 here, $100 dollars there. And then, you know, some people, you know, friends of friends got interested, excited about the idea, but you know, you see some Indigo Campaigns that are really, really polished. They really know their supply chain. They know exactly what's going on.

They've already built prototypes. And now they're racing for, you know, that full kind of, I'd say seed round, right. It goes beyond actually just the production there's marketing expenses that they're looking to raise and things like that. We were very much like, hey, we don't know if this is going to work. Let's raise as little as possible off the bat.

We didn't raise our official seed round until a year after we launched. So again, 2016, right. So, we raised our first seed in March of 2017 once we started to have traction.

Brian Ardinger: [00:11:30] And so flash forward. We're what, five years or so into your journey? What are some of the lessons learned along the way? And then we can talk about where you're at today.

David Roger: [00:11:39] Starting with a really high-quality product, particularly one of ours that is proprietary and just works better than others, does mean a lot, right. Because at the end of the day, you can have best frames, the best marketing. If you don't have a great product, it can win, but it often doesn't, especially if you're trying to be scrappy.

You know, word of mouth is still our largest source of revenue from any individual channel. We do a lot of advertising on a lot of different channels, including podcasts, including, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Google influencers, things like that. So, it's not like we're not marketing. Just word of mouth still continues to be really strong.

Another thing I'd say is, you know, when we launch, we launched as a blue light company. We launched as a blue light product. We were really growing this market. Over time, I think it's important for brands to understand really at the core, what they stand for. For us that is this idea of your digital wellness, right.

So, we fundamentally believe in improving the relationship between people and their technology. We believe that like, if you are able to do that, you can help people live a happier, healthier, more productive life, and change the world, right. You're happier because your eyes aren't killing you at the end of the day.

We've even had the best review I ever got was a person saying that their marriage has gotten better with their spouse because they don't come home grumpy, cause their eyes aren't exhausted. And at the same time, you can also be more productive, right? So, you might have to burn the midnight oil to get a project done. And you're able to do that because your eyes aren’t fatigued. You're not dealing with that headache.

But at the core of what we stand for, it is really this idea of how do we help your digital being. If we care about the food we put into our bodies. We care about that exercise we get. Then we sit in front of our laptops or monitors for 10 plus hours a day, watch TV for a couple hours or on our phones for every minute in between.

We know that's not good for us. So why not have a healthy relationship during that day. And that is ultimately what drives new product development that's in the works. It ultimately drives the conversations that we want to have with customers, the type of partnerships we're looking to do. And so I do think that finding your brand North Star is very important.

Brian Ardinger: [00:13:51] So we've had a challenging year, as everybody has around the world. I always like to ask the founders, what have you learned over this past 18 months in COVID and that. How has that affected your business? How's it affected your ability to manage teams and grow what you're growing. What are your takeaways from where we've been and where we're coming out of?

David Roger: [00:14:09] Yeah, from a business standpoint, I think, you know, particularly in the beginning of the pandemic, everyone’s indoors, everyone's now learning to use Zoom. And, you know, we saw, you know, blue light, the category really exploded. I think now you're seeing kind of the opposite happen, where everyone is just focused on being outside and most people are vaccinated and which is to be expected.

You know, it makes sense, but the awareness overall has risen a great deal. A customer said, you know, 80% of our customers do their research beforehand. So, you know, as the space matures, there's a lot of competition out there from $20 products on Amazon that are honestly pretty crap, to like, you know, $150 products. And people are wondering because that price point is so wide. What are the differences? And a lot of times they'll do their research.

So we're learning a lot about that. In terms of business and managing a team, you know, we've always had a fundamental philosophy of it's more important to get your work done and get your work done well than to just be in the office.

And so, while we had an office first culture, performance was not relying on if you showed up to the office or not. You had a plumber that needed to come, of course you could work from home for the day. If you just weren't feeling like coming in, you can work from home for the day. So, we already had, I'd say an innate level of trust with everyone on the team.

And so, when we switched to work from home, I think it was less of transition for us and less a transition for people that manage teams here, than it was for other companies where that cultural is less so. Now I will say that over time, you obviously miss those interactions with individual people, you miss just being able to get in touch.

And so, you know, we started doing randomized lunches every other week, so that you can kind of have these small group lunches. That was really nice. Also a nice thing is a lot of people are Slacking all the time now. And it was really nice to just Slack call or actually call someone because I liken it to just swiveling your chair around and then talking to the person next to you.

And we weren't able to do that anymore. And you lose so much if you're just texting. If you're just typing on Slack, you lose all that tone. So that was another thing that we learned over time. Like, hey, let's just get on a one-minute phone call. It doesn't have to blow up into this whole thing. It can just be a one-minute phone call to talk through something.

Brian Ardinger: [00:16:27] So coming out of it, are you going back to the office? Are you doing hybrid? Where are you sitting?

David Roger: [00:16:31] We'll end up having a hybrid. So, we're figuring that out right now, but it's clear that most people want some office environment, but they don't want to go back five days a week. We've also started hiring people outside of New York, which I think has been awesome.

It's a great way to expand the talent pool and the way that I see those things going is having a couple of off-sites every year to bring everyone together. And I actually think having multiple off-sites is really helpful anyway, because everyone, especially in a small company, working and being pretty busy.

Everyone is so heads down often. It's really hard to get people up and just kind of have their heads out of the sand. And that's, especially true of people who are, you know, at lower levels in the company. And that's really, really important to get their perspective too. And off-sites are a great way to do that.

Brian Ardinger: [00:17:21] Do you have any kind of go-to resources that you'd recommend for entrepreneurs or innovators out there that you rely on or use to keep you up to date and moving forward?

David Roger: [00:17:29] The best thing is your own network. And as you build that network, then you might become in text groups or Slack groups and different things so that, you know, what's going on. Whether that's marketing or supply chain, or leadership. I think surrounding yourself with a couple of key mentors is also really important to better understand how to build teams in particular.

So, I would say network more than anything. There's a couple of good newsletters and stuff like that. Fore Runner has a really good one. I always liked to read, Not Boring, which is not usually in the D to C space, but I think it's just very, very thoughtful and strategic.

And you can learn a lot about the thought that companies put into their strategy through newsletters like that. But I would say more than anything, it's building your own network because that's where the real value has to come from.

Brian Ardinger: [00:18:15] What's next for Felix Gray? What do you see coming out in the next few months, years? Where do you see the company going? And what's new and exciting in your world.

David Roger: [00:18:22] Yeah. So, we're really focused on the digital wellness space. So, you know, there'll be some things that we're going to launch a Warranty Program pretty soon. We'll launch accessories pretty soon. Really just additional things on the eyewear side. But we do have a couple of products that are not eyewear related that we're looking to launch one of them in actually like late summer, early fall.

It's a product that helps your long-term eye health and also helps your short-term eye comfort. So, it's kind of something that we look to be in addition to Felix Gray. And the way that we're thinking about the business overall is really this idea of we want to own and help facilitate the conversation around new digital wellbeing, and then create products that support that right products that support the fact that we weren't evolved to be in front of screens all day, every day. There are negative effects that are associated with that. And we want products that help mitigate the same effect.

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Brian Ardinger: [00:19:14] Well, David, thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your founder journey and give us some insights into where you see the world going. I really do appreciate it. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the company, what's the best way to do that?

David Roger: [00:19:27] You can follow us at Felix Gray. So, it's the same F E L I X, G R A Y S. Felix Gray was taken when we first started that. You obviously can sign up to our newsletter as well. Those are probably the best, two ways to follow the company.

Brian Ardinger: [00:19:43] Awesome. Well, thanks again for being on the show and looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come and appreciate all your time.

David Roger: [00:19:49] Thanks so much for having me. It was great.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Amos Schwartzfarb, Managing Director of Techstars and Co Author of the new book Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business. Amos and I talk about the framework for going from idea to scalable repeatable company and the challenges startups face in the process. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Amos Swartzfarb. He is the Managing Director of Techstars Austin, Author of the book Sell More, Faster and Coauthor of a new book and the reason we have him on today's a new book called Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business. Welcome Amos.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:01] Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: [00:01:04] I'm excited to have you here too. You've been in this space of spinning up new ideas and helping companies get off the ground. You've got a new book coming out called Levers. And so, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about that and give some insight into what it takes to build a business. So maybe let's start off with what's this new book about, and we can go from there.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:25] What the book is and I should clarify it is, it's a book, but it is more a book that you do versus read. And that gives you a little sense of what it's about and the goal that my coauthors and I had when putting this together was, we're all investors and operators for many, many years.

And as we sort of looked around, and this is the stuff that we teach and profess to the companies we work with, and we realized that there wasn't really a great place, resource to go, accelerators included where the focus is on, what are the fundamental things you need to do to operationalize a business. How do you get it to repeatability? And how do you scale it?

I like to say this is sort of like a recipe book. Like you open it up and follow the instructions and it doesn't guarantee you're going to get there, but it certainly will help you figure out the right ingredients so that you can have the recipe for the cake you're trying to bake.

Brian Ardinger: [00:02:18] What I like about the book is the fact that it really does start at the very beginning. And I think a lot of startup founders take the startup journey. They see the big vision of where they want to go and that and they start 25 paces ahead of where they really are. And the book really starts off with who are you really trying to serve. What are you trying to build? And that, so maybe talk through that initial W Three methodology and your belief around that.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:02:42] So I think maybe just for the listeners to give context here, the book is a five-chapter book. Each chapter is dedicated to a piece of the overall framework. It's very intentional in the order that we have everything and the way that we see it makes most sense to think about building the business.

And I should also clarify that the framework absolutely works when you're sitting in the coffee shop and the writing an idea in the back of a napkin. And really where we focus our energy is working with founders that are a little further along than that. Usually there's some customers or some revenue. There's no repeatability in the business.

And so our thought process is regardless of the business you're building, it all starts with really having a deep understanding of who you're serving. And who you're serving is who your customers ultimately are. And so, the, the W3 framework is a way to answer three fundamental questions, which are, you know, when I say them, everyone's like, yeah, of course these are the questions you need to answer. But getting to the right answer is the hard part.

So, the three questions are who is your customer and what is the very specific and narrow definition of the customer that, you know will say yes, 100% of the time. That doesn't mean that your prospects will, that's not your entire tam. It's just like, what are the attributes of someone who, you know, will say yes, a hundred percent of the time.

That's the first W. The second W is what are they buying from you. Not what are you selling to them? And that's a really important, often subtle nuance. And you know, I think as you know, the reality is your potential customers. They don't care what you do. They only care what you do for them.

And so, we just try to really get at that so that when you're talking to them, you can talk in the language that they understand. And then the final W, the third W is why are they buying it? What's the impact on the business? Have a clear understanding of what that is. And more importantly, or equally as important is how are they going to measure that impact? Because if they don't know, they won't know if there's an impact and they won't be a customer for very long.

In the book, we also get at that there's two different parties that you need to understand the why from. There's the obvious one, which is the business why. But then there's also the individual buyer. What's their motivation and making sure that their motivations are aligned to.

So even if the business looks like the perfect customer for you, they might not be because of the kind of person they have in the role or the exact person they have in the roles. Understanding that deeply as important to getting at, figuring out who your customer is on a deep level.

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:00] Yeah. Specifically, based on the business model too. Oftentimes you have multiple different stakeholders where you have to figure out what that why is for not only the user of the product, for example, but the buyer or the influencer, whatever the case may be.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:12] Yeah, you have to understand why they're going to care. If you're going to get them to understand why, what you're doing matters. Or conversely, to understand why maybe they're not actually the right customer for you right now, even if they look like it from the outside.

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:23] Right. And then we could grow into it. But those early adopters are sometimes a little bit different than the ones that buy longer term. So you mentioned at Techstars, you tend to have companies that have thought through that a little bit more, and maybe they're in the early stages of developing that customer network and stuff. What's the next step? Where do startup founders typically get tripped up? Once they've started that business and have gotten a little bit of traction.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:44] There's sort of two things that I see most often are the operational trip ups. The first is the notion that they have product market fit literally years before they actually have it. And so, this goes around, figuring out who your W3 is, but saying like, okay, we've got a couple of customers, we've got a bunch of people that have said they would buy, we've found product market fit.

That is not a true statement. It's the furthest thing from a true statement. Product market fit is when you have a huge base of customers that are working with you, that can't live without you. That is product market fit. That takes years to get to. So, the first is kidding yourself into thinking you have it long before you have. You might have great product market direction or signal, but that's different than product market fit.

And then the second thing is skipping over finding repeatability and moving right to scale. So maybe you have 10 or 15 or 20 customers and saying like, great, I'm going to hire a sales team and we're going to go from 20 to 200. But the reality is most of the time, you don't understand why it's working the way it's working.

And until you understand why you really can't scale because you don't know what to scale. You might think you do from the outside, right, from a hundred thousand feet away. But when you get into the nuts and bolts, it's often very different than what you think.

Brian Ardinger: [00:06:55] So how do you define repeatability and what are you looking for for that portion of it?

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:06:59] Yeah. Repeatability is when you have proof with data that you understand that by doing a thing, you have a crystal ball to understand what the result of that thing is. And you have enough back data that you can reasonably predict what will happen. You may have good instincts and you may be right often because your instincts are good, but if you don't have the data to back it up, you don't have repeatability yet.

So, the thing that people do is they have good instincts, they see things starting to happen, and so they skip the repeatability step and move right to scale. And then things break down because they didn't realize that, oh, well actually there was these pieces we didn't know existed or mattered or things broke that we didn't think were even there.

Brian Ardinger: [00:07:40] Interesting. Very interesting. So, let's say, you understand your customer, you understand what they're buying. You started to kind of create some value. One of the chapters in your book is really talking about how do you create that revenue model around that? How do you start putting the pieces in place to know how you make money and the quote, unquote levers, I guess that you can pull to make that happen? Talk a little bit more about that.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:08:00] So that's Chapter 2 of the book or the second step of the overall framework, which is we call it, finding your revenue formula. And so, the simplest way to describe it is there is a simple math equation, that is your business. And it's, you know, something times something, times something, times something equals revenue, right? And every business is a little different.

And what's interesting about this is like, if you're a marketplace business, you might assume that all, all marketplace businesses are reasonably the same are all SAAS businesses are reasonably the same. And the reality is that's the furthest thing from the truth. But when you're looking at it from a hundred thousand feet away, it can sometimes feel that way.

So, finding your revenue formula starts with having a theory of what that math equation will be at some point at scale, and then mapping out, and if you can picture the math equation sort of on top, and then under that, a list of things that we call them, drivers that drive the values, the different values in your math equation or your business model.

And then those drivers all have sub drivers. And so, these drivers and the sub drivers are the things you need to do or learn or research or prove in order to know how to move one of the values in your formula. These are your levers. What are the things that actually allow me to, to move that? So, until you, what we say is like, until you understand that the levers of each value of your formula, and you can point to it and you know, you have repeatability.

If I do this thing, this other thing will happen. You don't actually have repeatability in your business, even if you have it in part of your business. And that's often what happens is you get repeatability in one part, you're still learning about the other parts, right? And it's always an evolution. You never have full complete understanding.

Big billion-dollar public companies still only have 90 plus percent understanding of the levers because you know, there's just things that happen. The economy shifts. There's a global pandemic. Or there's a new competitor in the market. Right. These things change. But generally speaking, you have a crystal ball that's relatively clear.

Brian Ardinger: [00:09:49] Yeah. And I like that analogy too, from the standpoint of like a lot of the times you can get one or two levers, right? Like for example, you can get people into your funnel. But then they fall out because of something else. And until you understand across the board, how do you actually get it from that first conversation to dollars in the bank? A lot of things can happen in between.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:10:07] Yeah. And even dollars in the bank, like what happens at renewal time?

Brian Ardinger: [00:10:11] Or what would happen if you turn off a particular part of the funnel. Does that change the dynamics of how they buy or come back to you?

A lot of information is available out there to startups nowadays, you know, 8, 10 years ago when you and I were starting kind of this journey, a lot of it was much more black box and that. You know, what are the biggest changes that you've seen in the regard for access to resources and availability for startups to actually get started?

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:10:36] I think probably one of the biggest changes that I've seen in the last decade is that there is a really true and sincere desire for people that have had some experience to help people that don't have experience. You know, and I've been doing this for 25 years. I wish the level of people that were willing to give first and help was there, and it just wasn't.

So, I think that there's been a huge shift there. And I think there's a lot of really great resources out there and theories and philosophies and thought processes around the way to do things. There's lots of accelerators and incubators, and most of them are really well intentioned. I would say that to me, that's probably the biggest shifts, that, which is that more and more there is access to information to help you figure out what to do.

And I think not to bring it back to the book Levers. What we saw was all of this stuff out there. We felt like there was a gap to tactically what do you do to operationalize a business. Nothing in this book is new. What we've done is we've packaged it in a way that hopefully makes sense. For someone to say, okay, like I said, open it up.

I know the steps I might, they might learn that the thing that I want to build is actually not a real business or not possible, but we'll give you a framework to figure that out too, so you don't waste time and money.

Brian Ardinger: [00:11:52] Well and that's an important part, especially like in the corporate world where I see a lot of corporations kind of spin up new ideas and they keep spinning it up and throwing resources at it rather than saying, okay, this idea is bad or we need to pivot it or let's pick a different one and push it through its paces. You know, that ability to say not right now. And let's try something else, I think is an important piece. Not only for founders, but corporate innovators, things, anytime you're trying to push it.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:12:16] Yeah. Well, I say going back to your question. I think another thing that has happened in the last, on and off for the last 20 years. But I think in the last, you know, five to eight years, which I don't think is a positive thing, is I do think that there's been a notion there's so much available venture capital out there, and a lot of VCs, people that get into VC, they're not necessarily operators first.

And there's a lot of people who think that being an entrepreneur is a career path versus an infliction. And I think you put those two things together. I think one of the negative outcomes of that is a notion that money solves problems when you're building a business.

And actually, it's completely the opposite. I've seen way more businesses raise too much capital and fail because they think they can throw money at solving a problem, versus solving the problem and then using money to scale once it's solved.

Brian Ardinger: [00:13:07] Yeah. If you take that money too early and don't know what to do with it, you can burn through it pretty quickly and not get to where you want to go. You mentioned COVID briefly, but you know, what are you seeing coming out of COVID. What are some of the biggest trends or opportunities that you're seeing?

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:13:19] I get this question a lot and I feel like I'm always giving a really dissatisfying answer. I don't know that like I'm ahead of seeing any trends. I think I'm in the middle of it with everybody else. I mean, there's lots of things around, how do you get people together virtually? How do you bring people together virtually or in person more together?

In my last investment class, there were a lot of community things that have popped up. Candidly, I don't know that I'm ahead of the curve there. I wish I had that crystal ball, but I think I'm using my instincts just as much as anybody.

Brian Ardinger: [00:13:50] Yeah. I think it's going to be an interesting time, especially coming out of COVID. I think that's going to be, actually, folks are going to struggle even more with that transition versus actually going into COVID. I think.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:14:00] So true. I'm even having trouble getting used to like getting back to in-person meetings. It feels weird to say yes or to offer it up.

Brian Ardinger: [00:14:07] Exactly. Yeah. I'm going out this afternoon and to see people in 3D and it's going to be a little bit weird. I guess the next question is like, what's next for you? What's next for Techstars? What's next for the book?

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:14:18] This thing that we do at Techstars is really, really fun. You know, we're in Austin. We're looking to increase the number of times that we're running a year. So, my hope is that, you know, over the course of the next couple of years, we're more frequent, so we can be more impactful on companies that are part of the Techstars or want to be part of the Tech Stars network here in Austin.

I mean, the book is doing great. We're getting tremendously good feedback. Trevor, my co-author and I, we do some work with non Techstars companies on the process. So there is that too, which, you know, it doesn't take a lot of our time, relatively speaking, but it is fun because we get to work with companies that wouldn't necessarily be a fit for Techstars, but we'll get to give them, you know, the same sort of, it's not the same thing at all, but we get to give them this process, which to me is really the most important piece of it.

Brian Ardinger: [00:15:06] Yeah, I found it very in line with a lot of the stuff that I've seen in lots of the, we're doing both again inside corporations, as well as working with startups out there. And I'm excited to see where, where it comes out. And it's always good to have people talk about what it takes to do this, because I think that's where a lot of people struggle.

It's, it's so glamorized out there nowadays. And like I said, there's so much capital and it's never been easier to spin up something. But it's just as hard as ever to scale it and grow it. And it's always nice to see some ways to think through that process and actually make it happen. So, if people want to find out more about the book or more about you, what's the best way to do that.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:15:41] To find out about the book, go to Leversbook.com, L E V E R Sbook.com. One word. Find out about me there too. You can reach out to us through there.

Brian Ardinger: [00:15:52] Excellent. Well, Amos, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation as the world changes. Appreciate your time.

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:15:59] Yeah. Cool. Thank you so much for having me. It's great chatting.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Seth Levine and Elizabeth Macbride, authors of the new book, The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business. We talk about the current and future state of entrepreneurship and hear some stories about new builders making an impact in their local communities. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Seth Levine and Elizabeth Macbride, Authors of The New Builders
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have some amazing guests. Today, we have Seth Levine and Elizabeth Macbride, authors of the new book, The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business. Welcome to the show.

Elizabeth Macbride: Thank you very much.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on. Let me start out with a little background and bios for our audience. Among other things, Seth, you are the co-founder of the venture capital firm Foundry Group and Pledge 1%, which is a global network of companies that have pledged equity and time and product back to local communities.

And Elizabeth, you are an award-winning business journalist, and founder of Times of Entrepreneurship, which is a new publication covering entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley, which is a topic near and dear to our heart. So welcome to the show. The first question I want to start with is what's the current state of entrepreneurship and what led you to write this book?

Elizabeth Macbride: So, the current state of entrepreneurship in the United States is not nearly as good as people think it is. We concluded after our two years of working on the book, that entrepreneurship in the US is in this, in a state of profound decline. It's been declining over the past 40 years for a whole host of reasons. And I know we'll get into that some more.

But I'll just answer the question as well about how we came to write the book, which is that I'm the original, like overlooked, not the original one, but an overlooked founder myself. Right. So I got a divorce seven years ago and had to reinvent my career pretty fast as a business journalist to feed my two kids.

In doing that, I ended up founding this publication times of entrepreneurship. And along that journey met Seth, who has, a side specialty to being a venture capitalist, which is really supporting overlooked entrepreneurs. And so, we bonded over that and decided to write a book two years ago. That's how it came about.

Seth Levine: Brian, I guess I'd add to that. We knew that there were really interesting stories, right? You tell many of them on your podcast of people building businesses that were for starters outside of Silicon Valley, and the big tech hubs. But also, really interesting businesses, but that weren't necessarily these sort of high growth tech focused businesses.

And we wanted to tell their stories. Frankly, we thought it'd be kind of a lighthearted book. Interesting look at some founders that maybe were a little bit different than what people think of when they think of founders. But as we did all the research, we realized for starters, what Elizabeth just described, which is that entrepreneurship in the US is actually dying.

And then we also learned that the types of people that are starting new businesses are very different than those people realize. Specifically, that the majority of new business owners are black, brown, female, and also quite a bit older than most people realize. And that, we realized as we came across these data, that these stories really need to be told.

That it sort of went from a lighthearted, Hey, this will be fun. And we'll tell some interesting stories of people doing things out of the mainstream media eye. To, oh wow, there are some critical stories that we need to be telling here because we have a window here to change the trajectory of entrepreneurship in the us, and we'd act on it.

Brian Ardinger: You know, and I think that's one of the things that we obviously talk about, you know, Tech Crunch and you hear the stories of the unicorns and things along those lines. And obviously that's important and that. But can you define, like, what is entrepreneurship to you? It's not just the tech giants that we're hearing about. How do you define a new builder? And what's the difference that you saw out there?

Elizabeth Macbride: The way entrepreneurship traditionally has been defined is broader than the way it's currently defined. And so, when we looked at it and really, there's no reason why we should think of entrepreneurship as only the tech founders of Silicon Valley. They're part of the universe. They're not really the center of the universe. And definitely not the entire universe right. They're maybe 1% of all businesses in the US get venture capital funding.

So, the fact that we're so consumed by that is sort of crazy. Because the other 99% are in fact, the drivers of a lot of jobs, they're actually drivers of innovation, we would argue as well. And they support and are part of our communities in just a host of important, different ways. And as the economy transitions, I think they're going to be even more important. So we define entrepreneurs as a very fundamental basic thing, right. They're people starting businesses.

Seth Levine: And that's always been the case in the US. And really, if you look back, I mean, certainly the US was founded by entrepreneurs. I mean, in some cases, quite literally, right? The Massachusetts Bay Companies, you know, all of these initial settlers that came over were essentially entrepreneurs, right? Who are in business ventures to go and settle new land and send raw goods and other materials back to Europe?

And still, we have this long history of entrepreneurship and something changed in the last maybe 30 years or so, where the concept of entrepreneurship, use to be very broadly defined a shopkeeper is an entrepreneur, a local business owner was an entrepreneur.

It got eaten up by the tech narrative, right? And this idea that the only entrepreneurs that were worth talking about were technology, business founders, and frankly, the only businesses that were worth talking about in the entrepreneurship context are businesses that are, have this aspiration for growth. Right?

You referenced unicorns. And we think that that's incredibly dangerous to the overall dinosaur and frankly just the health of the US economy, because it really only describes such a small number of businesses. And frankly, and I say this from inside the world of venture capital, I'm not convinced that venture is a very good model for creating.

Certainly, it's not a good model for creating broad-based economic development. Right. I mean, we know it can create some really big companies. And by the way, those companies are incredibly important. And other businesses end up being built on those companies. So Shopify or Google, like those are incredible innovations that help other small businesses, but it's just, it's not the only thing. And I think we've sort of lost sight of that.

So it's, we don't argue in the book that, you know, that big is bad, for example, and small is good. We argue that there should be a balance just like we don't argue that venture capital should go away or anything crazy like that venture is great.

But we talk about needing to create not just unicorns, but camels. So much more party actually real and not mythical, you know, animals that, you know, businesses that are sustainable and, and, you know, really are the drivers of our economy.

Brian Ardinger: So you mentioned in the book, the research and that, around entrepreneurship and that it's going down and there's challenges around that. What is hindering the rise of new builders?

Elizabeth Macbride: There's a lot, that's hindering a rise of new builders. You know, what we focused on in the book is really finance and that's the world that Seth and I both come from. So, we felt like we had a lot to say about it. And it's probably, I think it's deeply woven with the question of networks, but right, businesses need capital to grow. They just do.

Like, we've also gotten consumed by this myth that what you need is grit, or perseverance in that, yes, that's all true. But we found so much grit and so much perseverance in the new builders that we interviewed. What they were missing was access to capital. And that is happening for a whole bunch of reasons.

But maybe the clearest thing to say is that our system of community banking is really broken down. And I think that's the most direct tie. The other kind of pervasive issue is that the new builders reflect the increasing diversity of our country. So, they're women and people of color, immigrants, as they always have been, and older people. And they're really disconnected from the networks that also lead to that access to capital

Brian Ardinger: in the book, you talk about something that really resonated this idea of a ghost startup or these companies that will never be created because of the lack of access to capital and things like that. Can you talk and explain a little bit more about that topic and the impact of that?

Seth Levine: Hard for us to understand sometimes as Americans. Or really it's just humans, the thing that doesn't exist, right. We can look at the company that's true and see it was successful or it failed. Right. But what we struggle with is understanding businesses that just never got off the ground. And there's actually been some research that has studied this.

And it sounds so simplistic. But it's not right. I mean, Elizabeth describes capital is a key asset for starting businesses. And there have been some studies that looked at businesses that had more or less access to capital. And what they found is that there was no real difference in the innate qualities, right? The talent, the grit, those things that, that will make someone successful for people who had access to capital. And who didn't have access to capital in their businesses.

But of course, there was a huge gap in terms of the success of those businesses. Companies that have access to capital, are more likely to be successful. And I think that's something that we really need to address. And then Elizabeth talked about 1% of businesses receiving money from formalized institutional capital, like venture, which surprises most people.

I think most people in our world think that it's a much larger, I mean, it's a big dollar amount, but it's a small number of companies. Which just goes to show you just how many more mainstream companies are actually being started out there. But only about 17% of businesses take money from banks.

And so Elizabeth talked about a community banking system. We clearly need to bolster that system and increase the 17%. But we also need to recognize that a large number of businesses never take any formalized capital. They raise money from friends, family, you know, aunts, uncles, or they use a home equity line.

And what's happening is that unfortunately people who don't have access to capital and don't have wealth built up over generations are struggling to start businesses. And this is diametrically opposed now to the people who are starting businesses, because the wealth gap in the United States, as many listeners may realize is 10 X between, the average white family, the average black family. That's true across every income level. That's true across every educational level as well.

And the wealth gap as well for people from Hispanic origin is not quite as bad, but it's seven to one. So, at the same time that we're really relying on people's own capital sources to get them going, we're also the type of person who starting a business is shifting to the group of people that are less likely to have those personal capital resources.

We need to address that. And we talk about in the book about a number of ways that we might, adapt, change, augment, help, better support our existing systems of finance to do a better job of supporting these new builders.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing particular communities or particular areas of the US doing better when it comes to this fostering, this new builder?

Elizabeth Macbride: That's a good and interesting question, actually. So, we did focus in the book on one particular community. We just ended up telling some woven stories about Stanton, Virginia. Which in a holistic way, I think did a ton to rejuvenate their community by entrepreneurship. So they started a community loan fund. They have an angel network for that is like wealthy people in the community investing small sums in companies aren't necessarily tech businesses, but it could be like a pie company or whatever.

They have both of those things going on. And then there's like, just a bunch of other community support. There's a maker-space there that I went down and visited. And it turned itself around that way. Right. On the foundation of some revitalization efforts that started in the eighties where some visionary business leaders downtown said, Whoa, we are not going to like destroy our historic downtown. Instead, we're going to, push really hard to preserve it. And on that foundation, the community was really able to rebuild itself economically.

And its population is rising, which is kind of like the most basic measure, of community's health. Right. And actually, like super inspiring things during the pandemic. I mean, it ended up, of course it was suffering along with small, with communities everywhere, where small businesses were hurt so badly. And it also had a terrible flood in August that had like a storm cell just park over it and dump like eight inches.

So enormous amount of rain washed out the downtown. You know, there were like cars floating around and as we reported it, we wrote about it for CNBC as well. And it's in the book as well. The community really came together. And there were people like digging out mud from storefronts to get their small businesses back up and running. It's inspiring what is happening in communities across the country that are pulling together.

Seth Levine: So that's a story that sort of a physical, like a geographic community coming together. And it's a really good example of one. They took a long-term view. Lots of people got involved. There was a lot of buy-in.

And, you know, a lot of what, like my partner, Brad Feld wrote the book, Startup Communities, a lot of what Brad and Ian his coauthor talk about in Startup Communities, I think was true in Stanton, but the other types of communities that we talk about a lot in the book are these sort of communities of like-minded people, right? And especially in this day and age, those don't need to be bounded by geography.

Certainly the book is a hopeful book, Brian, and we talk about ways in which we believe that entrepreneurship can be revitalized. But we talk about some of these communities systibiz in Denver or Ohub or digital and divided. EforAll we talk a ton about them. That, you know, these are all various communities of people that come together to help support new builder businesses.

Some of them are place-based E for all works in certain locations. We talk about some of those, cause we, one of the entrepreneurs we highlight went through their program in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Others are a little bit more virtual, right? Where they might help people all over the place or bring people in together.

But Silicon Valley has always been great at that. Right. And you know, there's so many stories of, I mean, how many accelerators are there in the world? Right? The Foundry, my venture firm, my day job, is the biggest investor in Techstars, which is one of the larger ones.

And that's a great model, but how do we bring that. The network and the help that comes from being surrounded by a community of people that want to see you be successful? How do we bring that to new builders? And I think one of the things that we learned that scared us is that many people starting businesses feel like they're out on an Island and they're alone and they don't have resources to help them out.

And that's why the community banking system that Elizabeth alluded to earlier is so important. We, it turned out, we were not seeking out community banking stories, but it turned out a number of the new builders that we talked to, their business trajectories were totally changed by, you know, what's in many cases, seemed like a chance meeting with a community banker who really spent some time to understand the business and then help them figure out how to finance it.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and it comes back to capital is more than just the cash and the actual dollars that you put into it. It's capital of that network. Like you said, the ability to actually even find a, a banker in your backyard that you can form a relationship with and build that trust. And, you know, eventually leads to the, the capital capital you need to build a business.

Seth Levine: Here's a statistic that should scare everyone. 25 years ago, there were 14,000 banks in the United States. Today there are 4,800. Most of that consolidation has happened in the smaller end of the scale, as we've created, essentially these utilities out of banks, by the regulations that we put on top of the banking system.

And so obviously some of those regulations were warranted. There were banks that were, you know, engaging in predatory lending behavior or behaviors and you know, needed to be curbed. But, it perhaps went a little bit too far. And the result of that is what we're seeing in terms of the consolidation of banking, which is not good for anyone.

Brian Ardinger: So, you mentioned the pandemic and obviously that's had an effect, but some of those trends were happening before the pandemic. How do you see the pandemic affecting entrepreneurship, both good and bad?

Elizabeth Macbride: Well, traditionally, there's a surge in entrepreneurship after a big economic downturn, right. Because people lose their jobs. And so, they like to start businesses because they're trying to pay the bills. And we've seen evidence that that's happening right. There was a huge surge in new business applications in the fall. So September, October.

I think, you know, that's on one hand, a hopeful sign. On the other hand, we think those people will have a harder time starting businesses than say they would have 20 or 30 years ago, because of all the changes that we described in the book.

There's a huge number of people that are entrepreneurial in the United States and want to be entrepreneurial as evidenced by the participation in the gig economy, which is 60 million people in 2019. But making the leap from that to becoming a business owner and a small business owner, and there are so many benefits to making that leap.

That's what's become much more difficult, right? Is formalizing yourself into a business. And I just want to add here, because I think your listeners might be really interested to think about exactly how that word entrepreneurship was co-opted because when we looked into the research and of course I'm a wordsmith and Seth is a word lover, too.

We discovered that it was Ronald Reagan. Right. Who figured out that he could sort of marry the ideas that were coming out of Silicon Valley, this vision of the aggressive sort of free thinking, innovative entrepreneur from the tech world. And he used the word entrepreneur to describe only those people and use that as sort of like a push for global democracy and capitalism.

You know, he just synthesized all these ideas into that word. Silicon Valley, the marketing genius's took it and ran with it. And an important thread in that was this libertarian idea. That I think is really holding back some of the things that we could do to support the broader world of entrepreneurship.

Because if you buy into that myth, that entrepreneurs grew up, that they're libertarians. That it is a concept. It's the free market. Then you don't invest in some of the social safety net programs or the government support. You don't pay that much attention to government regulation. I mean, so many CEOs in Silicon Valley have said to me, government's always behind, right? We don't need to worry about it. Like we'll just succeed despite them. And that is really not reflecting the true history of Silicon Valley at all.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's quite ironic because a lot of obviously Silicon Valley came from the rise of government dollars going into defense and other things that were, that provided that R and D and original push to start some of this amazing stuff.

Elizabeth Macbride: Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's just disturbing the extent to which that piece of the story is left out. Right. And it looks like a very convenient retelling of the history.

Seth Levine: And I think it's also important to note that, you know, the government, we've talked about this a little bit, not a lot in the book. But government spending is not bad right on research and development. And in fact, there's some quite a bit of evidence that companies are not always great at spending on R and D, especially as they get larger, right. A lot of innovation comes smaller companies, but then when companies get larger than they don't necessarily invest in R and D.

And a great example of just that inaction was the, the tax cuts that were enacted a couple of years ago, where, you know, the deal was that we were going to give companies a trillion-dollar tax cut, and they would then invest in their businesses. Right in R and D. And the exact opposite happened. They didn't. And they instead really bought their stock back. Which for any individual business that was looking to increase its share value, that might've been the right thing to do.

But it suggests that the people running those businesses certainly felt like investing in buying their stock back was a better bet than invest in R & D because they just simply didn't know where to put it.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a bit about some of your favorite stories in the book. Who are some of the entrepreneurs you met and what are some of the positive, hopeful things that you found through the journey?

Seth Levine: There are amazing stories in the book, and I certainly hope that your, that the listeners will go and pick up a copy and really read it. Because I think we really tried to write a book that was balanced in terms of storytelling, but also facts. And hopefully that's coming through on this podcast as well.

You know, punctuating the facts with real stories. So, you can get a sense for those facts and action. You know, we think is a really good way for people to understand what's really going on the ground. So one thing that I would probably point out is Isaac Collin, who owns series of Yogurtini businesses in Kansas City.

And he's just an incredibly compelling guy. And it’s a story of someone who really, you know, with both, persevered and had a lot of grit, but also was helped by others. So he got into business because he won a business plan competition. And by winning that business plan competition, he actually won both the monetary help as well as business helped by this very successful relatively well-known in that area, businessman.

And he got to start a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory with this guy. And, and ultimately that was a successful business because he's just a good business person. And he was able to sell that business, use the money, the proceeds from that sale, then to buy his first Yogurtini business.

What I really love about Isaac and this is true of really all the new builders we talked to is his connection to community. And just how important it was for him. He now has three, I think the fourth was not quite open, he's about to open a fourth location of his Yogurtini businesses around the KC area.

And, you know, community for him, isn't even just KC, it's like the individual neighborhoods where those businesses are located. And he has that deep sense of community. And, and it comes through in his business in the way that, you know, people who work at the businesses, open the door for their customers. So, they welcome them in and kids are welcomed to come in and do their book club and, and earn free yogurt.

And he's just a great example of a quintessential new builder who is hardworking and has reached out and figured out how to build a network around himself. And has other things going on. He and, and two other women started a yoga series that goes into inner city schools and helps teach kids how to calm and center themselves through yoga. Just as one example, I mean, he's just someone who's constantly giving back. So he really stands out for me as just the quintessential rebuilder.

Elizabeth Macbride: I'm so glad you talked about Isaac, because we haven't, we haven't actually talked about him in our interviews so far. I would highlight the entrepreneur who is sort of the center of the book. Her story is woven throughout and that's Danaris Mazara who started her bakery in Lawrence, Massachusetts, literally with $37 in food stamps.

You know, she just has this amazing story of lying on her couch. Her husband had lost a job. This was in the great recession. She had a newborn baby. She was like, I don't have enough money to feed my family here. With that $37 in food stamps, she bought the ingredients to make blond sold it at the break table at the Samsung factory where she was working.

And it went from there and she was lucky enough in the process of developing her company. So she did those early couple of years with, by herself and with the help of her friends in the community, and then happened on EforAll which Seth referenced earlier.

And I love the EforAll story. And we tell Danaris's story in the context of the founder of EforAll which is Desh Deshpande who was a telecom entrepreneur in the 1990s and made loads and loads of money and gives it back to the world in many different ways. But one of the things he did was found EforAll and he really has some interesting insights that we report in the book about the differences between encouraging entrepreneurs in the main street world and encouraging them in like an MIT or Stanford.

Because at MIT or Stanford, there's all these smart people in search of a problem to solve. On the main streets of America and elsewhere, there are million problems in search of a solver. And he really talks in a compelling way about how you encourage both of those communities. And we end the book with Dinaris's as well, and her optimism looking toward the recovery post pandemic. And so, she's incredibly inspiring.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's definitely exciting to hear those stories and it'll be exciting to see how this plays out as the world changes in front of us. Elizabeth and Seth, if people want to find out more about the book and more about yourselves, what's the best way to do that?

Seth Levine: We set up a book website. We'll put it in the show notes, but it's www.thenewbuilders.com. And that's a great place to find out a little bit more about the book. You can read a little bit about us, and most importantly, you can buy the book there. We have links to a number of local booksellers. We're certainly encourage people to consider buying from local independent bookstores, whether it's the handful that we have listed on the site or their own independent bookstore.

We do have links to Amazon, to Barnes & Noble of course they’re bigger platforms. And those are also great ways to buy the book. There's a Kindle version that will be released. It'll be out by the time this show airs and there will also be an audio book that should be out right around the same time that the show airs as well.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Elizabeth and Seth, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, sharing these stories very much like to continue the conversation and have you back on in the years to come as, as the world evolves. So, appreciate your time.

Seth Levine: Thank you, Brian.

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The New Builders: Face to Face With the True Future of Business

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, co-authors of the upcoming book Just Evil Enough. We talk about the changing role of marketing and how companies can subvert systems, undermine industry norms, and get platforms to behave in unexpected ways that tilt the scales to generate attention and demand. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil Enough

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Alistair Croll and Emily Ross authors of the new book, Just Evil Enough, which is a book about getting noticed in this noisy environment and subversive go-to market strategies. Welcome to the show guys.

Alistair Croll: Thanks for having us.

Emily Ross: Thanks a million.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm super excited to have you on this call to give our audience a little bit of a sneak preview of the upcoming book. But first let me give a little bit of background. So, Emily Ross, you are a founder of a tech marketing consultancy company called Ink Vine based in Ireland. So we appreciate you coming across the pond to give us some insights on what's going on.

And Alistair and I go back a long time back in the days of Lean Startup. And he's the coauthor of Lean Analytics. We brought him back to Nebraska about six or seven years ago, I guess it was, when I was working with Nmotion to help with our startup teams in that. So thank you for both being on the show. The title of the book, Just Evil Enough. How'd you come up with that and what's it all about?

Alistair Croll: So I'll tell you a quick story. We ran an accelerator in Montreal called Year One Labs. And one of the companies in Year One Labs was a company called Local Mind. And Local Mind was a platform for asking people questions, asking strangers questions about an area.

It was later acquired by Airbnb and Lenny Rachitsky, the CEO ran supply-side growth there. And he's now the author of one of the most prominent newsletters for startup growth marketing, Lenny's Newsletter. And in the early days they were doing what every startup does, which is building lots of stuff. But because we were very Lean Startup focused, we have them ask what the biggest risk was.

And it turns out the biggest risk was that whether people would answer questions from strangers. So they ran a very quick study, which we talk about in Lean Analytics. And they found that 94% of people on Twitter would answer a question from a stranger. But this happened because I had been asking Lenny, are you being evil enough?

And they were like, we're not evil. And I said, yeah, but just a little evil, because it turns out that people answer questions, but people on the platform won't ask questions. The real risk is the supply of questions. And so they actually built a system that would ask fake questions of new users. So they get in the habit of asking questions.

Now you can debate the means versus the end, but what we have found ever since that time is that almost every startup that's successful has some little dirty secret in their background, where they were able to take advantage of an emerging technology or subvert the way a platform is supposed to work and turn it to their advantage.

And so the basic idea behind Just Evil Enough is that almost all the time, the problem isn't whether or not you can build something it's whether anyone will care. So your job should be creating attention you can turn into profitable demand.

Emily Ross: I think the subversive word is really, really important because we want to clearly differentiate between nefarious, which is downright evil and subversive, which allows you to think a little bit differently.

And it's very hard for people who've been conditioned to think a certain way, to try and think differently. So the book is about trying to teach people how to think subversively, and to show examples and frameworks in order to do that. And I remember working at a platform years ago and one of the engineers said, right, I'm going to put this button on the website to test if people will click it.

And my instant reaction was, but it doesn't go anywhere. That's a terrible idea. They're going to have an awful experience and that's bad for them. And he's like, no, but I don't want to build something unless I know they're going to need it. So I'm just going to put that button there and yeah, I'm going to burn a few thousand clicks and they're gonna have a terrible experience. I don't care. I'll learn something.

And he was prepared to be disagreeable in order to learn something different and to save an awful lot of time and money. And it was funny. It was like, okay. I need to think a little bit differently about how we're treating users sometimes.

Alistair Croll: Yeah, we did a similar thing at Gradient. We had a reporting feature. Gradient was a startup that I launched in 2001. Eventually got acquired by BMC, their TrueSight product line. And we were about to launch reports in the product. And so we created our reports tab, and the reports tab went to a survey page. It says, we're going to do reports soon, what would you like to see?

And people put in their email address and the report they'd like to see. And of course we were building a generic reporting tool. So what we did is we then generated like the top 20 requested reports. Made them defaults and then mailed those people saying we loved your feedback. Thank you so much. We've built the report you're looking for.

Forget about the fact that 40 other people ask for the same report. Every one of them felt like they were a unique and special snowflake. And so we were exploiting the asymmetry between what we knew, which was 20 people asked for it and what they knew, which was, Hey, look at this, I'm special. You listened to me. And the customers loved it. Right? Is that evil? Well, it meant that we were able to build the default reports people wanted, which made the product better, but it's a little subversive.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think part of that learning is the fact that I think a lot of people think that they need to build the entire thing, because that's what shows the value. But, you know, again, you have to incrementally de-risk some of these new startup ideas. And so how do you do that with building just enough to get the learning that you need so that you can move it to the next level and build it out if you need to?

Alistair Croll: Well, I would say that the problem's not minimum viable product, it's minimum viable attention.

Emily Ross: Yeah. And actually, if you think about, and this is the one thing that the book, I suppose, hammers home, is that getting your go-to market strategy right, is as important, if not more important than getting your product right. Because if you can't capture attention and turn it into profitable demand, then no one's going to know about your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover.

Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?

Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli, all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one.

Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held.

And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right.

And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily?

Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from...

Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?

Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing in.

I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative.

So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.

And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives.

And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively.

Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.

So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.

They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.

Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.

Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system.

The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.

Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King. Can you give examples from that?

Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.

They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things.

One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.

He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws.

But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.

So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.

So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start.

Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known. Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.

So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily?

Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky.

Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.

So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand.

And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.

There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits.

Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it?

Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.

But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013.

So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.

And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness.

So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil, of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites.

But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.

So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time.

Brian Ardinger: You have to have a continuous funnel yourself of new things that you need to explore it.

Emily Ross: Exactly. Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing.

Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food.

And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right?

That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends.

Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?

Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.

So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.

And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao. Fapiao are receipts. And they use Fapiao as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.

So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.

So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.

And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.

Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage.

That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's a good example, right?

It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do 360 stuff. And so on.

But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.

So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results.

And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack.

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?

Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.

And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably. Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively.

Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical.

You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies. And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them.

For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?

When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.

So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.

So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health.

One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?

Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.

Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed.

So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.

And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.

And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.

I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much.

Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted.

Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right?

The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.

So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology?

Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable.

Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.

But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere.

Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity. The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book.

Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book.

And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far.

Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up. Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that.

So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of Alt MBA and UDemy, set up this new, online cohort based course program.

But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?

So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.

So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics.

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Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that.

Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.

And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...

Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account.

Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out.

Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.

Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us.

Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Atholl Duncan, author of Leaders in Lockdown: Inside Stories of COVID-19 and the New World of Business. We talk about his interviews with senior executives from around the world during the first 100 days of lockdown and what he learned about crisis management, leadership development, and what's next in the post COVID hybrid world. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Atholl Duncan, Author of Leaders in Lockdown

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Atholl Duncan. He is author of Leaders in Lockdown: Inside Stories of COVID-19 and the New World of Business. Welcome to the show.

Atholl Duncan: Thank you. It's great to be here and great to be a guest of yours. I'm looking forward to chatting about innovation and how we lead out of lock down Brian. Cause that's the question that everyone's trying to get their heads around there.

Brian Ardinger: We have gone through disruption and I think people understand a little bit what that means. You have written this book. You spoke to 28 senior executives around the world in the United States, Europe, Asia, during the first hundred days of lockdown, to understand and get their feedback on what we were going through when it comes to disruption. So maybe we'll start with the book, give us a little hint and insights into what it's all about and what did you learn from it?

Atholl Duncan: The way the book came about was in March of 2020, I sit on the boards of various businesses. And all of these businesses were in some state of jeopardy and certainly in a state of crisis. And I was pretty stressed by the whole situation. I think as most people were. And I decided that there was what I thought was a crossroads and history. Certainly, a crossroads, probably the defining moments of this century.

And I wanted to capture them. So, I followed 28 business leaders, people who, whose businesses were spread from Asia to Europe, to UK, and many leaders in the US. And really to answer a couple of questions from them. How were they leading through the pandemic? And how did they think the world would change because of what we've all been through.

Brian Ardinger: When you reached out to these leaders, what was the initial kind of feedback that you got? Was it nervousness? Was it excitement? What kind of what were the emotions that people were going through and specifically, how did they adapt to that sudden disruption?

Atholl Duncan: I got remarkable access because these people were locked down in their kitchens. And it was like they'd witnessed some predictably dramatic accident because they just wanted to share with someone. They wanted to talk to someone about what was happening to their businesses, which were getting pretty smashed up at the time.

So, they opened their Zooms to me. And they talked to me. They talked from the heart and they talked about how they hoped the world would change. And that the remarkable thing was that many of these people whose businesses, which they had built themselves over many years, lying, smashed round about them.

They remained remarkably humble and remarkably steady in their thoughts. But yeah, they knew this was a major moment. So, you know, even a year ago we knew this was a pretty significant moment. And the general message was that even back then, was this is a time to reset. Is a time to reset how we run our businesses and is a time to reset how we run society.

Brian Ardinger: So, in the book and through the conversations you defined, I think seven core themes that came out through that. Can you walk the audience through a little bit about what are those core themes that you uncovered? And let's talk a little bit about each one of them.

Atholl Duncan: Yeah. So, seven major themes. The first theme was the new age of purpose. And the feeling as one business leader said to me, that purpose was on steroids at the peak of the crisis. And that purpose now was no longer just words that you emblazoned on a website. It was now something that your employees, your customers and your investors would demand was delivered through action. And not just words.

The second theme was the new world of work. Because we saw this remarkable thing that, you know, most people talk about, regarding Covid, which was the move to homeworking. And you know, one of the business leaders that I've talked to is a very senior executive at Tata, which is based in India. They moved 600,000 people to homeworking. Even 6,000 is big Brian, but this is 600,000 people. And you know, many, many major corporations were doing the same thing all around the world.

As a crisis went on, people have realized that the new world of work was not just about home or remote or hybrid or flexible. We were really seeing defined probably a new, psychological relationship between the employer and the employee.

Third theme was widening inequality. Because the virus widened inequality in so many ways. Obviously, it raised the Black Lives Matter, raised diversity and inclusion in a way that we hadn't seen before, but also homeschooling raised equality. The people who had access to digital.

Homeworking raised in equality in terms of it was very comfortable for some people to be working from their homes. But those who had dysfunctional homes are in multi person homes, difficult for them.

And then the vaccine. You know, we already see that there's 130 countries around the world, which haven't delivered one jab of the vaccine. 95% of the vaccines have been delivered in the richest countries in the world. So, there's this really quite a defining moment. Roundabout, the widening inequality gap.

Fourth theme was about global cooperation, because at that moment when we hope that our politicians would be cooperating across global boundaries, they were doing, they were falling out. And I think generally, wherever you are in the world, we were pretty well let down by our politicians. Whether you were in Asia, Europe, or the U S it was a pretty, sorry ceiling.

You actually saw large corporations, doing far better at global cooperation. If you look at the pharmas that developed the vaccines. If you look at the big tech companies who came together to try and work out track and trace.

Next thing was resilience. Not just personal resilience, but you know, when the crisis comes, cash is king financial resilience is everything. And the resilience of the operations of these large corporations.

Sixth theme was all about resetting the supply chain. Particularly if we're in manufacturing, we couldn't get stuff anymore. Borders were closed and we still see, you know, big shortages and computer chips, big shortage use in raw materials, and the prices of raw materials going up.

So, this really brought the global supply chain to a shuttering halt. And I think a major cause to rethink 40 years of decisions that were made on productivity and costs and they all fly out the window, when our pandemic shuts the borders.

And then the last theme probably dearest to my own heart is maximizing potential. So, maximizing the potential of your employees. We saw physical welfare and mental welfare, really going up the agenda. And a big debate round about, what kind of leaders do we need now. What kind of leaders were successful in the pandemic? And what kind of leaders do we need to lead us out of lock down?

Brian Ardinger: So, what was some of the most surprising or unexpected findings after these conversations that you had?

Atholl Duncan: I think an unexpected finding was actually that there were no new trends. What you actually saw here was a massive acceleration of trends that were already out there. Right. Right. And, and I think you would particularly see that in the world of digital. People have talked about 10 years of digital disruption squeezed into 10 months.

I think that was a surprise, because I thought we would maybe see some new trends coming up. I think one of the anecdotes that kind of sums up for me is I spoke to Mark Thompson who was at the time Chief Executive of the New York Times. And he had to go into the Time's offices to do his earnings call.

Mark Blake says Brompton fold-up bicycle. And when he got into the office, he's I think that was probably about 5,000 people normally in these offices. And when he got in there, there were only about 20 people, security guards, you know, keeping the place safe. And he decided to go for a cycle, round the office on his Brompton bicycle.

And as he went around, and he saw the empty savannas of the New York Times offices. He thought it looked like an empty milking parlor. And he had this vision of all these people that went in there to the Times, and they hooked themselves up to their desks for the day. You know, milking out their ideas before removing their headphones and making the painful journey home.

And he thought at that moment, maybe I should sell my skyscraper. But he decided I'm not going to sell it, but we have to completely rethink what the relationship is between the worker and the office. You know, and I think that's going to be huge. You know, we see that in cities, all around the world, what's going to happen to the central business districts and, you know, a lot of huge change being seen in Manhattan at the moment.

Brian Ardinger: I'd love to get your insight into the emotional feedback that the leaders had. Did you sense a lot of fear or optimism or at that early stage? How did they react to the disruption?

Atholl Duncan: The true entrepreneurs, their attitude is utterly staggering. Because as they are a billion pounds and it's mainly a billion pounds of their own money. As their billion pound plus businesses are lying in tatters, they are thinking about what the opportunity is and what the next thing is, and how they can build back out of the crisis. And they're remarkably calm.

And a number of them who repeated to me that the most important thing was health safety of your employees. I worked with a chief executive of a large asset management company in Hong Kong who runs many of the shops and offices in Hong Kong and China. And his view was that things could be worse. You know, we had our health. And he stuck the way as mantra of the three Cs. And the three Cs for him were cooperation, communication, and care.

Now cooperation was about working together. Communicating we say was communicating more than you'd ever done before. Communicating what you didn't know, as well as what you did know. And care, care for your people care for your customers and care for all your stakeholders. There was a remarkable humanity and almost the bigger the corporate crisis and the greater humanity that I saw from the leaders.

Brian Ardinger: Did you see from a tactical perspective, the leaders that you interviewed, doing similar things, or were there some that stood out that approached the disruption differently and tactically did things. Or did they, you see kind of similarities between what the different leaders did?

Atholl Duncan: I think there were a number of similarities. I mean, I think agility was, you know, agility and speed of movement was probably top of their agenda. And if you weren't reacting. Moving quickly then you were tossed. I think focus was very important and the number who repeated to me, but focusing on the right thing. Not falling into the trap of making yourself busy, you know, making yourself busy, I think in that situation as a way of dealing with your anxiety.

So, it wasn't about making yourself busy. It was about focusing on the small number of items. That would make the difference between life and death for your business. I think empathy and compassion and leadership was very strong as well. And I think seeing the opportunity, seeing the opportunity again, what was a big thing.

And I think these themes will continue as we come out of the crisis. I don't think there will no longer be steady as she goes in many if any businesses. We are into this kind of supersonic age of change. If you're not fast, Brian, you're going to be last.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. And it's interesting that the themes that you identified and and wrote about, obviously came out of the pandemic itself, but there's similar to what we're hearing today. Like they're not changing much. You know, the idea that you have to have purpose. The world of work is changing. Inequality and resilience, all these things that you've mentioned as the core themes as being identified early on in that we are still wrestling with that and they are evolving.

So that leads us to the next, I guess, set of questions around, we are coming out of this "coming out of this pandemic," but what does that mean? And how do you see leaders and companies approaching this reverse culture shock, so to speak, coming out of lockdown?

Atholl Duncan: Well, I think one of the things that unlocked then and the pandemic has proven, is that the command and control type of leadership is dead. You know, I think you are going to see an era of more compassionate and more empathetic leadership. Cause I think that was the more successful leadership through the crisis.

I think you're going to see people here who will want to hold on to the things that worked well at the peak of the crisis and try and recreate them. So, I mean, I’ve had a number of clients who said to me, how do we recreate the mindset that we had that did remarkable things at the peak here? And how do we recreate the pace of change?

The problem with that is it sustainable, the pace of change that we had at the peak of the crisis. You know, you're going to kill or blow up your people. But definitely the mindset is fascinating. You know, how did we manage to do the vaccines in such a short space of time?

How did we manage to build the field hospitals in weeks rather than what it would have taken years? And how did we manage to make these huge pivots. So, I don't like that word, but it was a word of the crisis. Yeah. How do we manage to make these huge pivots in so many businesses? And, you know, some people are going to want to get back. They don't like it in this space.

You know, change is uncomfortable. And some people are going to want to get back the way we were. But I think that's a false idea, because all your competitors are going to a different place. If you're going back the way, then you're heading back towards an inevitable decline. I would see.

Brian Ardinger: Did any of the leaders admit to any kind of failures or things they wish they would have done differently or, you know, things they stubbed their toes on?

Atholl Duncan: I think they were all pretty open about mistakes they've made. About not being prepared enough. About underestimating, I mean, we all are underestimated how long it was going to take, didn't we? You know, when we started doing this, Brian, the biggest fear people told me was the book will be out of date by the time it comes out. You know, nobody will be interested in that.

How are you going to manage to get this current and keep it relevant? Well, you know, the book first published in the UK in the autumn of 2020. Published in the US now. One criticism of the book could be that the story is still unfolding. You know, are we in the middle of it? Are we in the last quarter? Where are we in this story?

And some of the clients I'm working with at the moment, and my executive coaching were saying, well, you know, maybe the difficult bit is still to come, because we're going to get going a game, we're going to get out there. What is hybrid working? What is the new world of work?

In many parts of the world, we've been in a steady state. We've got into a routine, sadly over the last weeks and months. Well, that routine is about to change as we try to get back to something resembling the corporate life that we had before.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think that hybrid environment is going to be even more difficult to manage. You know, it's, it's one thing when you have to move everybody to remote or, you know, everybody is going through the exact same thing and understands that disruption and, and will, has to take place because of it.

But now as we come out, the variables and opportunities that different companies are having and different communities are having, is going to make it that much harder to navigate the hybrid nature of it. That's what I'm seeing and hearing.

Atholl Duncan: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Brian Ardinger: Are there any other great stories or interesting stories from the book that would shine some light on people now trying to adapt with this and how they can make this transition even better.

Atholl Duncan: If I was to give you two or three quotes from some of these business leaders, you know. One of them was a guy Christian Lang, who's Chief Exec of a tech business, a digital procurement business in San Francisco, called Trade Shift.

It's an interesting business because it was formed by three Danes, in a garage in Denmark. And then they moved across to San Francisco. And then he simply said with COVID 19, every single long held belief has been thrown out of the window. Every single long held belief has been thrown out the window.

I did a bit of interviews with Will Hammad, who has a business called Whoop up in Boston. And Whoop is a wearable tech. I've got my Whoop around my wrist. And his view was that he fundamentally believed that this moment in time will shift the way humanity thinks about health. And that's another revolution in this.

If you look at the home health and the virtual health world, right. You know, that's a shift that, you know, we've, wow, we've gone 10 years or 15 years and they are in, maybe the breakthroughs that we'll see in this next digital revolution will be about of solving some of the big problems in health and our, and our healthcare systems.

I think diplomacy for the next generation. If not, several generations are going to be redrawn. There really is just so much change that's coming about it. And we've not really talked much about the diversity and inclusion agenda, but my favorite quote is from a woman called Alison Martin, who’s the Chief Executive of Zurich Insurance Group, in Europe. And she said, why don't we create a world that is fit for our children to live in rather than the one that we were destroying before COVID.

Brian Ardinger: You obviously interviewed a lot of business leaders and that. What can the average, middle management or person within a company take from the book to make themselves feel better or understand how to, again, navigate this new world.

Atholl Duncan: This is not a complex Harvard academic analysis. This is storytelling in this book. It is telling great stories of people who find themselves in remarkable positions during this crisis. It tries to give you a window seat in their boardroom. And I think there's so much that everyone can take, about leadership. It is not the size of the business. It's the behaviors. It's the Innovation. It's the agility. It’s that mindset of opportunity.

When the crisis hits, do you fear? Or do you look for opportunity? And while I think many of these people had a bit of fear, their instinctive reaction is to look for where is the opportunity in the crisis? And that sounds a bit like carpet bagging, but is there true entrepreneurial spirit coming through?

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Brian Ardinger: Everybody's going to have to learn these skillsets. And the world is like you said, moving faster. And I think we saw that before COVID, but COVID just put a, a stake in the ground for everybody to rally around. So, I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your thoughts and share what you learned through this particular process. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Atholl Duncan: The book is on Amazon.com. One of the companies that clearly did very well, during the pandemic. And I'm doing a lot of executive coaching cause I'm in the U S and you can find me on Atholl Duncan.com. And that's Atholl with two L's, Atholl Duncan.com.

And really for me, now Brian, it's not about selling a book. I've become an evangelist for change. And really what I want to do is to inspire as many leaders to not let us go back to where we were. Because people in some of the workshops that have been doing, are looking for, who's going to reset the world. Who's going to change business. Who's going to change the style of leadership.

And I say, guys, it's us. There is nobody else. We are the leaders. If we don't do it, it isn’t going to happen. So come on. Come on the journey. And then let's reset the world.

Brian Ardinger: Let's reset the world. Indeed. Atholl, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation and looking forward to continuing the conversation like you said, this is an ongoing thing. So, we would love to have you back at some point to continue the conversation and see where the world takes us.

Atholl Duncan: It's a pleasure. I'd love to come back at any time because I think the next bit is potentially from a leadership point of view, is as interesting as the last bit

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, authors of the new book, Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning. We sit down and talk about some of the biggest misperceptions about AI, as well as some practical advice on how to tackle creating, building, and maintaining AI projects. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we're bringing the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, Authors of Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing set of guests. Today we have Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, authors of the new book called Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning. Welcome to the show.

Wilson Pang: Thank you, Brian. Really excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: We are excited to have you both here. This is an exciting world of technology and new trends that are happening. AI is obviously on the forefront of a lot of people's minds. And I'd love to get your input on what do you really mean when you say real-world AI and how does that differ than people's perceptions out there?

Alyssa Simpson: I think one of the things that we wanted to address with this book is sort of the in-between space between, you know, the hype and maybe what you read about AI and the headlines, or what you see AI or very smart futuristic systems depicted in the movies. And then, you know, also a very academic or technical approach to machine learning that you may have come across a textbook or learned in school.

And this is kind of the middle reality, right? Is, you know, what are real companies who are using machine learning based technology? How are they using it? You know, what struggles are they having? What successes are they having? And then how does it work in the real world. In the reality that we all live in and share and products that you probably use frequently in your everyday life?

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what AI even is. Maybe Wilson, can you tell us a little bit about some of the myths or misconceptions about AI that people commonly struggle or fumble over?

Wilson Pang: There's a few major common misconceptions. Number one, it's really, a lot of people think AI, they think is the kind of a machine can do whatever human can do, right? This is called Artificial General Intelligence. Basically, AI can repeat human. So that's happening in those small ways but it's far away from the reality. In reality, what AI, all the real-life AI, is really the application, which can be taught or learn to carry a specific task without being programmed to do so

So, the machine can learn from data. And then performing some tasks. So that's kind of a like what real world AI is. So that's number one misconception. Number two misconception is that people are thinking to build an AI, the team needs to spend a lot of their time to tune the model, work on the model, and get the best performance. It is more related to the signs or the model tuning.

In reality, science is a big part of AI, for sure. But for the AI team, they spend a majority of their time, on data. Need to collect the right data, clean up the data, make sure the data has all of the representatives and also make sure that data has quality. And then the data complete the magical part is to really improve the AI performance. So those are the two major misconceptions. I hope everyone can really learn and understand that.

Brian Ardinger: You know, you often see two sides coming out, when you talk about AI. You have one side of the spectrum where everybody talks about AI as a panacea of opportunity. And it's going to change the world for the better. On the other side, you have the folks that think AI is a massive danger and a menace and a lot of unknown repercussions. Where do you guys fall on that spectrum?

Alyssa Simpson: I'll argue all sides of that one. I think both are true and neither are true. As with anything, machine learning and AI technology is disruptive. It already has changed the world as we know it and will continue to be an incredibly powerful and disruptive technology in almost every industry. On the other side, it's just technology, right? And there's a lot of things that are powerful and it's only as powerful as what you put it towards and how you shape it.

And in other ways, it's incredibly brittle and really narrow as Wilson was referring to, this is not a magic eight ball. It's not generalized. AI often is very narrow and specific, and only is able to accomplish a fairly narrow and specific tasks that you train it for, if you have all the data available to train it really successfully to perform that task.

And so, you know, what we see in reality is companies having a lot of success. If they are able to find a use case that this technology can perform really well and do things that previously were undoable before and open up new streams of opportunity.

Brian Ardinger: Where are some of the industries that are getting the most out of AI right now. And where do you see the trends moving, when it comes to folks capturing the benefits of AI?

Wilson Pang: AI only become a buzzword in recent years. But in reality, AI has been there for a long time and high-tech industry who has big company like Google, Facebook, all those tech giants. They have been using AI for a long time. And AI has been used to optimize their price sprints, to help you find the right product, to give you a better recommendation. To show you a better content.

So those have been there for a while. The usage of those AI technologies is pretty mature, and that's also almost embedded in every part of their product. So, for high-tech industry, very mature. Meanwhile, in recent years, it's also a lot of other industries, they are catching up. Like the finance industry. The medical industry. All kinds of industries are catching up.

So, you can see the train of AI is already, the adoption of AI has become much broader. And also, the speed to adopt AI is also a leverage spot. Meanwhile, as you mentioned earlier, AI can really bring on a lot of benefits. Can also create a lot of harm. So, with this even wider adoption, we really need to make sure people understand how to use AI in the responsible way. So that way we can get the benefit part, but meanwhile not really doing a lot of damage to the society.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, you definitely hear that. And you hear the use case scenarios when it goes bad and that's oftentimes hyped up. I actually just read this morning. I think it was a fast company article talking about how the New York City Council is considering new rules meant to curb bias in hiring when it comes to AI and putting AI in hiring practices and that. What's your take on some of those challenges that you're seeing in that particular space.

Alyssa Simpson: Yeah, I know Wilson and I both feel really passionate and strongly about the importance of responsible and ethical applications of AI. You know, one of the places where I see challenges is that people don't think about the potential harms or bias from the beginning.

And don't look at their data and training set really critically, with a critical eye to inform whether or not that training set is appropriate for the use case that that model will be applied to in the future. So, in take your hiring example, you know, there was a famous case a couple of years ago, where Amazon tried to use machine learning to look at resumes and figure out which ones are going to be the strongest candidates and put those forward.

And, you know, they found it was really biased from a gender perspective. That's because the training data set that they were using was mostly men because Amazon mostly had men working there. And so, the system wasn't trained to be biased against women. The training data had more examples of men having more success at Amazon. And so, the model ended up amplifying the biases that were there already.

So often, that's sort of a classic case of what's happening, Is that the model is supercharging, right, any existing biases in our society. And so, as we all know, are at least in the United States, right? There's a lot of biases against women. There are racial biases, you know, there's all sorts of different challenges that exist in hiring practices.

And if you are not careful, or if you are not actively sort of proactively correcting for some of these challenges in the data, you can end up with a model that reflects those back to you. And at that times makes it worse.

Brian Ardinger: With that, are there particular ways or opportunities for folks to do better job at that particular training. Is it just coming to light now? We're getting better at this, and so we're, we're learning from these mistakes. And so, they're being amplified, but we're getting better at it or walk me through the state of AI and specifically around the bias of the training of the system.

Alyssa Simpson: Yeah. I mean, I have to think, unfortunately, most people who are training models are not thinking about this at the beginning. You know, perhaps more and more, but I think it's often really overlooked at the data stuff. And they only realize it later once deployed some big into production, like, Oh woops. You know, but if you think about it from the beginning, it's a lot easier to correct for.

So, I'll take a, perhaps a different example. If you're building like a voice assistant, like a Siri or an Alexa or something. And you want it to work for people in the United States? Well, that means you need to capture voices from people in the United States, right? Not just white men. You need to also capture voices from people who speak English as a second language or from children or from elderly people or from people in the South who may have a Southern drawl.

So, you need your training data to be reflective of the population that is going to be served or be interacting with the system. So, in say New York's hiring case, if they're building an AI model and they don't want it to be biased, well, you know, look at the candidate pool, right. But you know, everyone who lives in New York state, do you have a representative sample in your training data of everyone who lives in New York state or is your training data biased already you know.

And there's a lot of different types of biases. This is like, you know, sort of a sample bias or collection bias. There's a lot of different ones, you know, but is it bias towards a particular demographic that you could look at it more critically and then include a much broader set of examples that are more reflective? That's probably the easiest thing that most people can do, but certainly not the only thing.

Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. So, let's dig into the book a little bit. Wilson in the book you outlined some of the key characteristics and the things that people should be looking at and working on when deploying a new AI system. What are the key insights in the book that people should take from it?

Wilson Pang: Our book actually walks through the whole journey, from identify the problem, to problem of the team, from defining strategy to how to get data. And also talking about a buy a model or build a model, right. There's a lot of details around how to really develop the AI journey.

If we can make a quick summary there's a few super important points there. Number one is really to identify the right problem to solve. And you always also want to start from small instead of wanting to boil the ocean, in the beginning. So, the right problem, which should be a, really small problem or a specific, and also, you know, what a success looks like if you are successful, and you knew how to measure that.

And that will give you a good start. And then after you have that right problem, then you need to assemble a right team. On the right team, you need to also have multiple different roles. Besides everybody can think of I need a data scientist. I need a machine learning engineer, right?

You also need the people who really need to know the business, either product manager or business eminence to help you to understand the problem. And then a data scientist can connect the department to a science problem. I also needed engineers to have you deploy this tool production.

And after you deploy to production, you also need to monitor and the operation, all of those AI model, right? So, assemble a right team is super important. So that's number two. After that, I think another super important part comes is really to get the data. Get the right data.

So, the right data also has a lot for meanings on there, that can mean you need to have the data quality, right. You need to have the data to be representative of different categories or groups, right? Alyssa mentioned earlier, if you don't have the right data to represent the different group of users, you can create a lot of bias. So, data cleanup, data quality. That's another big piece. After that, you probably get the right data to run properly. You will have a successful pilot and they get some good results.

Or the company will help you to celebrate the success. And they'll also want to what's next. So that comes with data. You need to scale from a pilot to production, where you also need to invest a lot more to consider how you come to the production. How you can access the data regularly. You need to refresh the model. You need to refresh the data. And also, you probably also need to define some common process to help you manage the data, manage the model.

And that you also need to continue there, like at a production scale. Now we are not really running a pilot that you, maybe your model is serving meetings or hundreds of meetings for people. You have to make sure the model is available. And you can deploy the increase the demand. So, there's a lot of things to consider, once it comes to the production.

And also, once you start to have more and more productive use case, you know, AI is impacting the business in a huge way. So that is the part, consideration like a lot of ethical consideration or responsive governing, a lot of those kicks in. So you need to define not just the product, but a program, also a product to make sure you can get the benefit of from AI across the whole organization instead of just the one product.

So those are the key points to consider when you really want to deploy successful AI. I know that's a lot. And I think I only covered a small piece of it. And if you might want to learn more check out our book.

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point because I think a lot of companies want to dip their toes into AI and get better at it. But there's so many different moving parts. So, what recommendations would you have for ordinary folks, ordinary companies trying to get up to speed on this topic and prepare.

How should they look to find an expert on the outside to lead them through this process? Should they start building a team? What are some steps that people can do if they want to get more into this AI world?

Alyssa Simpson: Well, there's a book that we wrote, that might provide step one. Step one, read the book. You know, but in all honesty, you know, I think that's part of the reason we wrote the book is because we got asked this all the time, and this was a way for us to kind of brain dump on paper in a little bit more scalable way of like, Hey, here's a quick guide of how to get started.

There is no one size fits all approach. It depends on your company size. It depends on your budget. It depends on your risk appetite and a lot of other things. But I think generally speaking, my guidance would be, find a problem that is well-suited for AI. We talk about this in our Goldilocks chapter, which is pick the right problem that you want to solve. Is really important to solve for your business.

It's not a good approach to say, Hey, I want to do AI. Let me like sprinkle this AI magic on top of my company. And that's not how it works. It's Hey, I have a really hard problem to solve. And, you know, I think it's really well suited to be solved by machine learning technology. And that's a much better way to approach it, right.

It needs to be a problem that is really important to your business. That's critical to get done, right. That has high value that you have a lot of data in order to solve that problem, that you can train a model to help you solve.

Brian Ardinger: You've been around in the AI space for quite a long time and seen a lot of changes. What are you most looking forward to in the years ahead?

Wilson Pang: I think there's a lot of evolvement in this AI data field. There are a few areas, particularly I'm super excited about. Really the kind of this big language model are, you probably are really seeing like what kind of a magic AI can help you to play. It is those kind of big language models, they leverage almost every piece of information on the internet, seeing all like terabytes of data and also almost capture all the knowledge from all over the word and with all of those data, they can perform a lot of amazing tasks, like write an article for you, and also maybe even write a program for you. Right.

I know it's still early. They're, the people, they discover ability, but they don't really know how to really use this. And also, there's still a lot of use cases that even the big model cannot really handle. Right. But I do think they are missing. So now it’s you GPT-3. When it comes to GPT-14, GPT-15, there might be a lot of magic it can do to this society.

So that's the one part I'm super excited. On the other hand, also say AI now is not only a research problem, or a problem where only a high-tech company can tackle. Now I see a lot of different tools, to have a developer to build AI. Or maybe have a data scientist to deploy AI in production.

So, with all of those tools, I feel the adoption for AI will be much broader. And the speed to adopt AI will be much faster. So, obviously a lot of different use case from any kinds of industry can be supported by AI. Some of those use cases, maybe we can, we cannot even imagine today. So those are the two areas I feel super excited

Alyssa Simpson: For me. It's more personal. I'm excited to like, not have to repeat myself to Alexa. Or you can turn the lights off. Or I'm excited that, for new drug discoveries. You know, I suffer from migraines and, you know, neurology and the best medicine in the Bay Area, which the fanciest doctors have not been able to, you know, help me that much.

And you know, I'm excited for new drug discoveries and things that are going to impact my everyday life for myself and those that I love. Whether or not it's a customer experience improvement or real big medical breakthrough.

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Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. It's going to be an amazing world. We're, we're looking forward to it as well. We'd love to have you back on the show in the future to continue this conversation. But in the meantime, if people want to find out more about you Alyssa or Wilson or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Alyssa Simpson: You can find me on LinkedIn or AlyssaSimpsonRochwerger.com. Our book is available on Amazon. We'd look forward to hearing your feedback and thanks so much for having us, Brian.

Wilson Pang: Yeah. And you can always find me through LinkedIn. And Brian thanks again for having us here.

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you both for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I'm very excited to see where this world is going, and I appreciate you all sharing your insights.

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Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Responsible Machine Learning

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable. Lauren and I talk about the future of voice and other wearables and the challenges of designing for new technologies and applications. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lauren Golembeski. She is CEO and co-founder of Voxable which is an agency that designs and develops chatbots and voice interfaces based in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So welcome Lauren.

Lauren Golembiewski: Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Hey I am excited to have you on the show. You and I connected pre pandemic. I had been reading some of your work in Harvard Business Review. You wrote a couple articles, one entitled How wearable AI will amplify human intelligence. And another one more recently called, Are you ready for tech that connects to your brain?

And I thought those articles were so insightful. I want to get some insight into some of the things that you're seeing in some of the new technologies when it comes to wearables and voice and, and things like that. So maybe to kick it off, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this field and tell us more about what Voxable is.

Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. So Voxable is a design platform for teams that want to build better voice and chat apps. We had been consulting in the voice and chat app design and development space, helping companies, large enterprise teams build their voice and chat experiences.

And then we pivoted to creating this product because we realized that every team, no matter how much they invested in creating a great conversational experience, they still had no tool that was available to them to efficiently build that experience and define it in a way that created a great user experience for their end customers. So that's what we're currently doing today.

And we got into the voice space just by tinkering in our own homes. I was mentioning to you before we started the show that I started the business with my husband who's a software engineer and my background is in product design. And we basically, as soon as, you know, early voice technology had become available to us, we started playing around with integrating it into our smart home devices.

And we realized that in creating our own voice experiences, that this was really going to be the next paradigm shift in human computer interaction. So, we quit our jobs and started Voxable, the consulting business, or what became the consulting business.

And then, like I said, through those five years, recognizing that the significant problem in the industry is that there's no good design tools. That's kind of our current mission is seeking to change that and to help teams create a better UX in the process.

Brian Ardinger: That's pretty amazing. My career started back in internet 1.0 in the UX UI design research field and designing for new technologies back then when it was a screen-based kind of thing, it's obviously evolved in that. And you mentioned this term conversational design. Tell us a little bit about what does that mean? What does it entail?

Lauren Golembiewski: Conversation Design is a new term and conversation designers is a new role that has come about on the market. And these are people who focus on creating that voice or chat experience and defining what that looks like for the end user.

And so just like today, you might have a product designer or a user interface designer. The way that we talked about that role in a voice application or a chat application is just by calling them a conversation designer because they're focusing on the actual substance of the conversation, writing the words that will be said, be spoken by, for example, an Alexa skill or sent through a chat bot in a chat application. They're dealing with those substances as opposed to, you know, HTML CSS that a web designer would be considering or iOS framework that a mobile designer would be considering. And so, a conversation designers are focused on affordances of conversational experiences, which includes synthesized speech.

It includes new conversational AI. So that would include something like natural language understanding, that can now take the natural words that a user says and translates that into something a machine or an application can actually do something with and can perform actions based on a more natural interaction.

And so, these types of affordances are what conversation designers become experts in, and then can craft these experiences that help fulfill the end user's goal, whether it be getting help, they have a support issue in, you know, your product. And that's one big place that people are automating these types of interactions is on customer support chat.

As well as, you know, people want to be able to speak to their mobile device and they want to be able to play music and perform actions without having to use their hands. So, whether that's on a mobile device or on one of these smart speakers. And I think the other really big sector that this is exploding on is in the wearable markets because now not only do we have like a smart speaker that's sitting in a room or a personal mobile device, but we now have a kind of always on piece of personal accessorizing that people are wearing almost throughout the entire day.

And it's like a whole other channel through which conversational interaction can happen. And it can be both very personal and on consumer level interactions where I'm playing music or tracking my fitness. Or can be on a very enterprise level where I'm trying to automate certain parts of my job and do my job more intelligently by having an assistant that can kind of help me do that on the go, either hands-free or site free.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that the whole field is still fairly new and it's fairly new, even for the user to understand, you know, obviously a lot of people use the Alexa to ask, you know, what the weather's going to be. What are the core applications that you are seeing that are really having an impact in this new field?

Lauren Golembiewski: So, very similar to the early days of the mobile market, when mobile apps became really popular gaming has established itself as a very early craze. And I think a lot of people are gravitating towards voice only games. And then there is the whole media consumption landscape.

Podcasting is a very big interest of a lot of enterprises and consumers alike. It's a channel that a lot of people are starting to recognize the value of. And so, creating voice experiences in new places where audio and voice interaction can happen.

Brian Ardinger: Like, what do you see with things like a Clubhouse or the new Twitter spaces you see that is just a place to consume audio? Or do you see this interaction element coming into play?

Lauren Golembiewski: I think that if those particular companies aren't already thinking about how the interaction can come into play, there are definitely other companies and startups I know of that are thinking of that. And so, regardless of whether that is Clubhouse, who creates kind of like a two-way type of interaction or even just, you know, one of the big use cases of people who are interacting with Clubhouses is they're out taking walks and they're using their wearables as an interface to the Clubhouse world.

And could that browsing experience be easier if there was a better voice integration into it? Or better ways of interacting. Actually, one of the early Clubhouse rooms that I was in was with a lot of voice industry folks who were thinking about how Clubhouse could incorporate voice into its strategy. Regardless of whether that's right for clubhouse, I do think that audio interaction essentially reinventing telephone calls is, is something that we're constantly trying to do.

And I do think that there will be a new way, that people start to interact with a combination of not only just like my being able to interact with my voice, but also being able to interact with like my virtual assistant that embodies me as Lauren, that can automate some of my responses to people at work, friends and family, kind of like the autoresponder. That's just much more intelligent and personalized for any individual worker or consumer.

And can I have a synthesized voice that is modeled after my own, that I've trained, that can then step in and speak my words for me in certain situations. And so that seems really futuristic, but I do think that we're getting closer and closer to places where that is relevant. And there's voice channels like Discord, the chat, the gaming chat application, where gaming has a whole other culture around it, where people start to think of modifications.

So, like what if I could buy a voice model occasion that then changes my voice when I'm speaking through to my fans or to my fellow gamers. Because I'm playing a character and that's part of my, you know, gaming interaction and lifestyle. And so, I think there's a lot of places where voice is relevant and can change the way interaction happens beyond just incorporating it in the current app that we're kind of thinking about today.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned gaming. Are there other industries that are kind of ahead of the curve when it comes to utilizing some of these technologies?

Lauren Golembiewski: I think the financial industry is definitely ahead of the curve. There's a ton of financial virtual assistance. You see it in a lot of the industries where information and search are fairly complex and there's a lot of data and just information that a consumer has to wade through. And you can either pay someone to do that for you, but there's a whole host of people who don't have that type of budget, who aren't paying a financial advisor.

And so, there's starting to be offerings by these larger companies. Capital One has a virtual assistant Bank of America. I think her name is actually Erica, their virtual assistant. The Charles Schwab, there's a lot of businesses that are starting to, or a lot of financial institutions that are starting to look at how they can help their customers through some of these more automated interactions. But, you know, delivering information in a way that's more natural and consumable and timely, and kind of responding to contextually the situation that the user's in.

Brian Ardinger: Are those companies using the voice technologies, I guess, integrated with existing telephone types of systems and that, or are they including them on the websites? How's the use case scenario actually playing out?

Lauren Golembiewski: I think most companies are incorporating them into their custom mobile apps. So, if they have like a mobile banking experience, it's like a layer that is part of that mobile banking experience. Whether it's a message center, or an actual voice like touch to speak type of interaction. I haven't yet seen or tried any experiences that exist via a conversational channel like Alexa or Google assistant. I think some of those businesses are hesitant to deploy to those platforms, both for a couple of reasons.

Both because it's validating to these larger enterprise businesses, Amazon and Google that may be seen as competitors or in some way competition to a lot of enterprises out there. On the other hand, while Amazon and Google, and Samsung is also a player in this realm of creating a voice channel because they have Bixby. While they've created a really great ecosystem that does a lot of things, they still haven't really nailed the end user experience in the same way that I think iPhone did when it kind of established the mobile application market.

And so, I think we're still kind of waiting for these big players to create that really killer user experience that makes these secondary applications really see value in deploying to these secondary channels. So, I think that's why we're not seeing as much like a banking experience on Alexa for those two reasons.

Brian Ardinger: It definitely makes sense. I'm curious to understand, like, is it because the consumer, the behavioral changes the consumer has to make is too much to overcome, or is it because the application developers so to speak are having a tough time creating something that's usable? Because like you said, it's a different format. It's a different way of thinking about how to have an interaction with a customer. It seems like the technology itself is there, but that behavioral hurdle is difficult to overcome.

Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah. I definitely think it's more the behavioral hurdle. I for sure am confident that the technology can support. To some extent can support a good user experience. I will say that in a lot of ways, just like, you know, the way that iPhone competed in the mobile market when it was like Blackberry and Palm Pilot, and those were the big players and iPhone came in and it was not competing on features, it was competing on experience.

And then when the App Store came out, similarly, it said, we're restricting the amount of applications that can be deployed on the store, and we're going to make it harder for you developer to create that. But, Hey, we're going to create this whole developer program.

We'll create all these standards for how we think applications should be built and for better or for worse, like people could disagree with their, you know, interaction paradigms and the way that they set things up, but for better, or for worse, that represented some of the best UX design that was available, and guidance that was available.

And so, I think the way that we're seeing that happen on the voice side is that like, we're not seeing that kind of leadership play out in the same way, where we have someone that's saying, Hey, we're going to restrict the amount of skills or, you know, actions that can be deployed to these systems.

We're going to make them, make sure that they're really good. And then we're going to make sure that third party developers have all of the resources that they need to get those experiences to be as good as they need to be.

And I think, like not to say that those companies aren't going in the right direction, but I just think that in kind of instantiating that behavior shift that does need to take place with consumers, I don't think it's a difficult behavior shift. And I think it's actually an easier one than perhaps learning how to work a touch screen.

So, I think that that shift isn't necessarily like totally a blocker in making the market proliferate in the way that it can. But I do think that there does need to be a big enough push to satisfying that end user experience to ensure that that behavior change is simple and seamless. And that not only am I interacting on these devices, but that I'm also interacting with the businesses that are deploying experiences through these devices.

Brian Ardinger: You kind of have to have both. And I think that's one potential tipping point is where we're getting to the ubiquity of these particular devices. Everybody has an Air Pod in their head almost all times, or, you know, they're carrying around their phone that can quickly tap on it and access Siri or whatever. And so again, the technology is ubiquitous enough now. Now I think is the next step is trying to figure out what are those applications to make somebody actually want to turn it on and interact with it.

Some of the things that I've seen when it comes to voice and that is I love your opinion and insight and curious how the area of, because you have to speak, and it's public when you're talking to a microphone in front of other folks, is that a behavioral challenge to overcome? Or what do you think are some of the behavioral issues that are holding people back from trying these things or using these things more regularly?

Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think that there are social changes that we are both experiencing and are yet to come, that will affect how people interact with voice interfaces. And so, I'm reminded of when those Bluetooth headsets became popular and to the phenomenon of the person alone on the street talking out loud, right.

Us all like grappling with that. And you know, and now I think, we're used to seeing that, or we're used to looking for the headphones to ensure that that person is speaking, not to us and not directing the conversation towards us. So, I think that's a certain social change that we're getting more used to.

And I do think that the public nature of speaking out loud is a limiting factor to voice interaction. It for sure reduces the amount of contexts around which you would be willing to talk. Because either I want to be in my home to talk about this sensitive matter out loud. I don't want to be just like in a public place speaking about maybe like my personal financial matters.

Or I want to be able to interact in a different mode of interaction. So, I want to have a voice available to me when it matters when I do need to, I feel like talking or I'm out and I'm hands-free and I have like a low stakes voice interaction that I don't care is public. But a higher stakes interaction. Maybe I want to text that interaction.

And then there's also a lot of cases, not just the private public major voice, but the synchronous, asynchronous nature of it, where to have a voice interaction, both parties need to be like active and consuming that information in real time, basically. So, if I'm listening to an interaction or I'm listening to instructions from a voice interface, it's kind of streaming out at me. And if I don't catch it in that moment, then it's kind of cumbersome to like recall it, you know, repeat et cetera.

So, there are situations when audio information along with a visual aid. Or a visual element to go along with the interaction is really helpful. We're seeing people start to think not just about like voice only or graphic only, or screen-based only, but think of really like the multimodal interaction. Because beyond just voice and, you know, tapping on a screen or chatting in a, you know, text field, we also have all these gestures and other sensors that we're wearing, like heart rate monitors and there's gyro scopes in all of our devices and location information that's constantly being grabbed.

And so, all of these data points, sensors, and gestural types of interactions are now inputs into any type of device that we're interacting with. And so that really, I think, breaks us beyond like this thinking about one particular mode of interaction at a time, and thinking about what does the user actually need and what are they going to, like, what are they using?

What is available to them and what makes the most sense to them. And they could really switch between voice to text, to gesture. For any given interaction, pretty seamlessly. And that's probably what they want to do, but that experience, that's what I see in the future is that seamlessly moving between pretty much any input that I, as the user want.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Being able to capture and use all your senses whenever you need them.

Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. And then, I mean, all those devices and sensors are getting so much smarter and more interesting. And that's what I wrote about in Harvard Business Review was, so instead of having a speech recognition is we're starting to see research being done on sub vocal recognition, which is the brainwaves that you send to your mouth right before you're thinking about what you're going to say, that can be read and translate that into data that represents the words that you were thinking to say. And that's a vocal recognition.

Alter ego is a device that's using sensors attached to the face to perform that sub vocal recognition. So, then you can have a feedback loop that's actually silent, but it's still based on a voice interaction paradigm. And that kind of gets around some of that public private notion where maybe I can have a voice interaction that's actually happening all through like a closed loop system. That's like a sensor attached to my face and like a bone conductor. Headphone that's speaking it into my brain then.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: It's definitely a fascinating world. If someone wants to find out more about how to explore these new opportunities or are there particular go-to resources or things that you would recommend people take a look at?

Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. So you can certainly search for those articles on Harvard Business Review. I read a lot over at Voxable's blog at voxable.io. You'll be able to find our blog and on my Twitter account @LaurenGolem is a place that I often muse about the future of technology.

And then one person who I do follow quite, quite regularly from seeing her speak at South by Southwest pretty regularly is Amy Webb, who's a futurist. And she releases the tech trend report every year, usually at South by Southwest. I mean, I think she did it virtually this year, but she walks through a lot of the individual trends happening in wearables, in healthcare, in artificial intelligence and in the confluence of all of these things. And really goes deep on a lot of the fascinating things happening in the future of technology.

And so, I recommend a lot of people seek her out. Amy Webb at Future Institute Today. And you can find her reports, which is all like open sourced and free for people, which is another amazing aspect of what she does.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely all good stuff. Lauren, I really do appreciate you coming on and kind of sharing your insights on where the world's going. And, I'd love to have you back on the show at some point and continue the conversation as we move forward. If people want to connect with you directly, or what's the best way to do that,

Lauren Golembiewski: You can email me lauren@voxabale.io.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Lauren, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to the, the world ahead and appreciate you spending some time with us.

Lauren Golembiewski: Thanks so much, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Cactus Raazi, Author of the new book, Price: Maximizing Customer Loyalty Through Personal Pricing. We talk about the important, but often overlooked topic of price innovation, and how companies can use technology and experimentation to move from the traditional model of revenue maximization towards that of loyalty maximization. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Cactus Raazi. He is the founder and former CEO of Elephant. Now part of EXOS Financial, and author of the new book, Price: Maximizing Customer Loyalty Through Personal Pricing. Welcome Cactus.

Cactus Raazi: Thank you very much. Appreciate you having me.

Brian Ardinger: Cactus, I'm excited to have you on the show because this is a pretty important topic that doesn't often get talked about in the innovation front. You know, if you think about pricing, a lot of the pricing models have probably been around for 50 years. And yet when I'm working with startups or people introducing new products, they're always talking about how do I set my price and that. So, I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on that.

To get started, in the book you talk a lot about, and you encourage companies to look at price differently. So, we'll dig into the details, but how did you get involved at researching and writing about the topic of price?

Cactus Raazi: You know, it's interesting. My day job is in financial markets. And what we, myself, and the team have been working on for years are various algorithms to be able to automatically price different bonds at different times of the day for different customers under a wide variety of different conditions.

And we started thinking about on the one hand data analytics and I had done a masters program at NYU in business analytics recently. And then on the other hand, I started thinking about the challenges of running a business in today, particularly in the B2C world. But a lot of what I had thinking about also has applications in B2B and really thinking about internet price transparency, and the destructive effects on pricing power for companies, large and small.

And so, I kind of put everything together and started really thinking about why do we think so simplistically around pricing? Why has my professional experience, as you mentioned, generally been a table of old wise men and women sort of guesstimating a price or using a sort of rudimentary cost-plus approach.

And most importantly, I think with everything that's going on around us, so many of the pricing approaches fail to take into account the individual customer, or they made it an unspoken assumption of homogeneity of the customer base. Or sort of an indifference. I don't care really who buys this good or service so long as they pay a certain price.

And I don't think that that's going to be a useful way of thinking about the world going forward. There's a whole host of tools at our disposal. Referred to generally as data analytics. And there's a whole host of new threats that one needs to be thoughtful about, particularly around internet-based price comparison. Browser-based automated discounting. And we could go on and on, we talk about it in the book.

Put these two things together and you think to yourself, look, am I in the business of maximizing the revenue of any potential transaction in the moment, or am I actually in the business of cultivating an increasingly loyal customer base. Such that my enterprise value starts to gravitate towards sort of that have recurring revenue streams.

And this conversation is applicable for businesses, large and small. And we use a lot of examples in the book, anything from a sole proprietorship, maybe a hairstylist, all the way up to multinational corporations, airlines, things like that.

Brian Ardinger: And I love that thought of moving from revenue, maximization to loyalty maximization. And a lot of that probably again, hasn't been really dealt with because of technology. And now we have some tools and data and that, that we didn't have at our fingertips to make some of those leaps that we can now. What do you think is holding people back from taking advantage of some of these technologies and actually going towards a more loyalty maximization model?

Cactus Raazi: You know, in my survey of the landscape, I'm not necessarily aware of an impediment to use data in increasingly sophisticated ways. As we all know, there's so many off the shelf products. There are so many courses, everything from sort of how to use Excel on Coursera, all the way to, you know, a PhD in artificial intelligence or something along those lines at the other extreme. I feel that, particularly when it comes to pricing, just to not give you too general and answer, when it comes to pricing, I feel the fundamental question has yet to be asked, are we doing this correctly?

And have we really unpacked the assumptions of our approach to be thoughtful around whether this is the right approach and whether we should be using a different set of tools. You know, even industries that are renowned for their ability to differentiate with price something. We could use airlines as an example.

And I'm sure at maybe at one point in your career, you were probably some form of a frequent flyer. And I'm sure you would probably agree that while you were perfectly happy to pay different prices, based on various profiles and times of day. That that was not a price for you personally, it was a price meaning that if you were to log into a website, as a loyal customer and I were to log in to the same website you and I were to try and book the same thing, we wouldn't see a difference in price.

We would see a difference in price on different days or, or, you know, you name it. There's a variety of obviously supply and demand techniques. And so right there you say, well, that's a sophisticated industry, but it hasn't really moved forward with thinking about the customer, rather than thinking about any customer who's willing to sit in the seat.

And that's really at the core of the suggestions in the book is to say that step one, start collecting data about your customers. Obviously in an appropriate fashion and in a transparent fashion, such that you can start to identify behaviors, objectives, or any other elements of the customer, which you can then correlate to the types of behaviors you'd like to see from your customer base.

And the book really exists at the level of strategy. And frankly, this conversation exists at the level of strategy. How should we be thinking about some of these questions and are there a new set of tools to be able to answer some really interesting questions around what the right price is, and right is defined as in my case, as maximizing loyalty.

And also at the same time, there's this elephant in the room, which is the internet, and mobile commerce, and browser extensions, and couponification. And how are we going to react to the impact of these sort of margin destroying developments?

Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've seen examples where there have been companies that have been a little bit more in the forefront of changing algorithms and that, to look at pricing. Uber comes to mind with their surge pricing, and obviously that's trying to maximize supply and demand and things along those lines, but then you have examples when the models go wrong, such that, you know, there's something that occurs the price to scoot up and, and it caused a PR backlash, for example.

What are you seeing when it comes to companies and how they react to experimenting in this particular realm and the both the good in the bad around that?

Cactus Raazi: Yeah. So, we've seen a lot of experimentation with personalization in what I would refer to as the general marketing realm, such as sending people emails or potentially coupons, identifying products that you may or may not be more or less interested in.

And I think that that process is in relatively early stages that traditionally has not really dealt with price with one potential exception. Sometimes you send a premium or a coupon of some sort to say, you know, for you specifically it's 20% off.

But I may say in my personal experience, this use specifically thing tends to be extremely wide net. So, everyone who has bought a pair of jeans from us in the last five years gets an email that says, great news, our jeans are 20% off. Although that's a start, I don't think that that's nothing to be particularly proud of.

I think, you know, you're implying a second question, which is if you provide a better experience to your better customer, does that imply you're potentially providing a degraded experience to your not better customer? And the answer to that I think almost necessarily should be, yes.

At the core of thinking about generating loyalty, almost certainly must be this idea that we have to define who our customer really is or who do we want our customer to be. And we have to ensure that we're treating that group appropriately. And it may come at the expense of people who have not demonstrated any loyalty.

When we think about loyalty, we don't necessarily need to define it as someone who has patronized our business for a good or a service, for example, on a very regular basis for a very long time. In fact, I'd argue even a second visit is the beginnings of an attempt at loyalty. This is now a recurring customer is different than a first visit customer.

It's easy to go from there to really thinking about, well, maybe we don't define loyalty at second, but at the third visit or at the third purchase of a good or a service, we should start to really think of this customer in a differentiated manner. This person's trying to do business with us, and we should be rewarding them.

I think, you know, also it's interesting that you didn't ask, but I'll just bring up. There's been so much time and energy put into recapturing customers whom you have lost. This is generally referred to as churn management in the industry. And so much time and energy into predicting and avoiding churn, which tends to be, you know, a small number is definitely single digit percentage of your customer base in any given time period. If you have numbers greater than that, you actually have a product problem.

But I would argue that the amount of time and energy you put into that portion of your customer base could potentially actually be better, spent ensuring the loyalty of your customers who have already demonstrated such loyalty. If this is the 72nd month in a row, you've simply paid your T-Mobile bill. Why are you not receiving some form of an indication that the company values you? And I believe that rather than giving me a coupon that tells me I'll get $10 off at Chipotle, I would rather just receive a discounted bill.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely. What are your thoughts from the perspective of how do you set pricing in the early days when you don't have those first customers or the early data is, is a little looser or less relevant or available. And specifically like on the startup side versus existing business side.

Cactus Raazi: Yeah. You know, it's interesting, you say that startup pricing is very challenging, and it is a topic that many VCs or I would say professional startup investors try to give startups help with. Sort of the heuristic approach, but obviously you need to contemplate what are the costs of various substitutes or alternative paths to solve, whatever problem it is that you're solving.

Another perspective would be of course, to think about how much value you're creating for the purchaser of your good or service. What is the value creation and how much of that do you think you can capture, particularly if you're creating an entirely new category, then the pricing question is one that needs to be approached with a degree of sensitivity?

One of the things I would say, so I don't know that there's a one size fits all answer, but I'm trying to give you a few parameters of the conversation. I oftentimes get the implication that pricing is a obviously a sensitive or touchy topic. And I like to suggest to startups, the companies or the customers that you choose to do business with initially, you should feel comfortable in your pricing conversations, because if they're not interested in being a, let's just say for lack of a more descriptive word, a good customer. Initially, they might not be your best place to start your commercial journey.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that I think a lot of startups are afraid to experiment early on for fear of losing that first customer when it comes to price and that. But. At the early days, you don't know what you don't know. And I've heard Eric Reese tell a story of going in and working with a company, and he basically just said, double the price, let's run an experiment. And it turns out more people bought it and let's double it again. And it turns out more people bought it. But without that experimentation, your assumptions really can't be played out.

Cactus Raazi: So interesting. You asked the question I was asked about a week ago. What is your one piece of advice to companies that are starting out? It was a more of a sales conversation, than specifically sort of startup, but I said, don't be afraid to ask for more in terms of prices. That you know, again as salespeople, we all tend to be a little bit more focused on getting to yes, then perhaps we need to be. And I think there's a lot that you can learn from a customer saying no, so long as they described the know or want to be your partner in getting to S, starting from a place of no is not a problem.

It's very difficult to propose a price, have the customer say yes, you can say, well, in that case, maybe I should raise it. Right. That's a very awkward conversation. But to propose a price that you'd be really thrilled with, and that would really put your business on a very sound footing, and to have your potential for first customer push back, and to understand why there's pushback, I think can be obviously very illuminating as to what you should do on a going forward basis.

And you'll always have the option of saying, look for a first customer or for the following reasons, or since you've been so transparent, alternatively, as well, you can say, we'll go with your lower price, but let's create some conditions for success that allow us to raise prices, you know, so long as we meet certain conditions. You can kind of create a structure to get you to where you want to be, but in a manner that the customer feels is aligned with their interests.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, in the book you give a lot of great examples. Well, actually good and bad examples of how companies have taken on this topic of price. Talk about Apple and Nordstrom's and the airlines. What are some companies that are doing it better than others?

Cactus Raazi: I haven't seen particularly great examples specifically around price, but I have seen some companies do a great job of customer engagement with their digital platforms. I think a pretty good example of that most people would agree with is Starbucks.

They have a really user-friendly app. Funny enough when you get this thing to recharge automatically, I've noticed that instead of recharging the app at about a dollar, it recharges it about 20 bucks. And if you multiply that by billions of people, if interest rates weren't at zero, that would be a lucrative business unto itself. That's a side note.

They do a great job of encouraging the use of the app. My criticism of course, is rather than giving me stars, which I can eventually cash in for one of your goods. It would be actually an even bigger thrill, if when I zapped my app, I just get a different price, as a basis of my behavior with Starbucks, sort of how I'm engaging your organization.

That would be my assertion. So, I think they do a great job of collecting the information. I think they provide an excellent experience. They've had widespread adoption of this platform of theirs, and I believe that the next step would be to try to further increase their customization down to the customer level.

Brian Ardinger: You've mentioned some examples in the B2C realm, and that. Are there particular industries that are more ripe for some of these pricing innovations?

Cactus Raazi: So long as you define your businesses, one where you encourage repeat customer type activity. If you're in the business of building nuclear reactors, I don't think I have a lot to offer because that's such a, one-off kind of a thing.

On the other hand, there are a lot of businesses that have repeat customers in some way, shape or form. And I think those are the businesses for whom this approach is most applicable. And I think in the context of startups, so often we think about SaaS businesses or sort of subscription style businesses.

I mean, that's all the rage with many, not all startups, but many startups obviously. And some of these ideas also apply. I believe even when you have a subscription business and you propose that there is a price, it's not necessarily the case that that needs to be offered to all customers at all times under all conditions.

So even there, I would think, you know, look, we can always advertise an initial price and then start to really think about our customer base. Why are they using their product? How are they using our product? What can we be doing to improve the channel and increase the loyalty to every one of our customers?

It could be anything along the lines of, we came out with Product A. It seems to have been achieving some success. We're now launching Product B with regards to pricing. What could we do on Product B to take advantage of the loyalty we have already generated with Product A? That's the question that very few companies would ask themselves.

They would say we come out with a second product and it's priced at X with no differentiation between a customer, who's never done business with them before, and this large base of customers that they have on Product A.

Brian Ardinger: Or thinking more broadly about what does price mean? It doesn't, it's not necessarily just the actual price that you pay for that good or service, but it's the services wrapped around that that can augment or change the value creation or the loyalty around it.

Cactus Raazi: 100%. That's exactly correct. And I think that the statement you just made is something that so often slips through the cracks in our fundamental approach to coming up with a price. You know, you think a lot about what your input costs may have been or various other elements, and you forget to think about well if a customer has done a lot of business with us in the past, shouldn't we treat them differently.

And the other thing I would say by the way as part and parcel of this conversation is also the broader customer experience. I argue that price is a really important sort of a fulcrum of the customer experience. But in today's day and age, the scarcity is all the rage and limited additions and one-offs, and all of these things are also, you know, very much becoming fashionable.

So, it's not always the case that you need to necessarily discount. We're really saying price to the customer, but it may be something along the lines of, we have a limited-edition item and you're getting access to it, even though it's actually at a premium.

Brian Ardinger: So, what else in the book have we maybe not covered that you want to make sure our audience understands they can get some value out of it.

Cactus Raazi: We've covered a lot of the approaches. We haven't spent a lot of time on the threats, and we talk a little bit about in the book about not only is e-commerce sort of gravitating towards generally towards price displayed user interfaces.

And of course, with mobile, that starts to be happening in real time, even in the brick-and-mortar environment. But really, we talk also about, it's not likely that we'll be doing traditional website based commerce, forever voice assistance, and other further automation is creeping slowly but surely into our lives.

And if you think about that, it becomes even scarier because it's not likely that these paradigms with the voice assistance and with other additional levels of automation would offer anything other than the lowest price. Why would your voice assistant tell you that the same good are services available at three different prices?

Right. That's sort of annoying. And you'd say, just give me the cheapest one, right? That we all gravitate to that. So, we mentioned that only because even if you feel that you can handle the current levels of competition and price transparency that are being generated by the internet and by the browser extensions, and by the coupon crawlers and all the things that already exist.

It's important to recognize that there are additional levels of threat that are only going to further erode your pricing power, unless you're starting to price to the customer, which is no longer widely available. We are seeing very early signs of such a thing, such as you go to a website and you need to input your email address prior to being allowed access to the experience. So, we're seeing early signs and I think that thinking a lot about the threats of technology and the deflationary impact of technologies is another important part of what we bring up in the book

Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is COVID-19 and how that may have affected and made the changing landscape of pricing and that. What kind of examples are things have you seen from this acceleration of this disrupted world?

Cactus Raazi: It's funny, I'm glad you used the word acceleration because that's exactly the word that I think is the appropriate word. They call it the great accelerant and I've seen all of that. So yeah. What we've seen, I'm sure as you've seen is we've seen significant changes in behavior.

And I think that we've seen as so much more of our activity has gone from analog to digital, we've seen a lot more opportunities to capture information about with whom we're doing business and various elements of our customer base and start to use those things. I have not necessarily seen tangible impact of such, but clearly, most companies at this point have gotten the wakeup call that the shift to electronic commerce, which was always obviously underway, has now only accelerated.

And I think what you're going to start to see in my humble opinion Is providers of platforms such as Shopify or big commerce, really start to think about how can we give our users additional tools to help them do more business and do better business with their customers. And I think so between the CRMs and the sort of e-commerce platforms, I think we will likely see a fair amount of innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Cactus, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit more about this. It's a fascinating topic. And like I said, so important and often overlooked topic when it comes to innovation and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Cactus Raazi: Probably LinkedIn I'm on LinkedIn Cactus, like the plant, Razi is R A A Z I. Easy to find me and I love to hear from people and I'm happy to be helpful. I'm not in the business of consulting. I have no agenda. I'm just trying to be helpful for its own sake.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, we appreciate you sharing your knowledge here today, and thanks very much for coming on the show. Look forward to continuing the conversation as the world evolves.

Cactus Raazi: Absolute pleasure. Good luck.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alla Weinberg, Author of the new book, A Culture of Safety: Building a Work Environment Where People Can Think Collaborate and Innovate. Alla and I talk about how companies can increase their efficiencies, their collaboration, and their velocity of output, simply by focusing on developing physical, emotional, and psychological safety in the workplace.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript of Alla Weinberg, Author of A Culture of Safety

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Alla Weinberg. She is Author of A Culture of Safety: Building a Work Environment Where People Can Think, Collaborate, and Innovate. Welcome to the show.

Alla Weinberg: Thanks, Brian. So happy to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I am excited to have you here. One of the things I was doing in preparation for this particular call, was I was looking at your website. You're a founder of a company called Spoke and Wheel where you help companies build cultures, where people feel safe and respected and able to do their best work. And you have a quote on your website that 82% of employees don't trust their boss to tell the truth. Clearly that's a problem.

Alla Weinberg: So that's the problem

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to start there. What's the state of today's workplace?

Alla Weinberg: I think especially with COVID and, the very sudden move to remote work, it's even harder to build trust with coworkers, with employees, because we don't even see each other in person anymore.

And if you want to have those social interactions, that has to be very intentional. So, you have to create a meeting and set that on the calendar. And a lot of times trust is built over time in those very small moments. That I remembered, you know, that you had an anniversary and I wished you a happy anniversary because we had a conversation about that, where I asked about how, you know, the health of your dog is doing. Small life things that just get built up in the very small moments, that get built up over time. And we're definitely missing that right now in our work environments, especially virtually.

Brian Ardinger: It has definitely changed the workspace, but that this was affecting before COVID. There was a lot of issues around trust and safety and things like, let's go back a little bit in time and tell us how you got involved in writing and focused on this particular subject.

Alla Weinberg: So, I got inspired to write this book based on my own experience. I spent two years working in a global multinational enterprise level company, where I felt unsafe for two years. And it started to really affect my health, my mental health, my physical health, my emotional health. And it got to the point where I didn't want to physically, when we still are doing that, go to the office, go to work anymore.

And I eventually ended up leaving that experience. And from that, I've really decided, Hey, you know, the way that we're working together now isn't working. I want to help people like myself create work environments where they feel safe, where you want to go to work, where you can do your best work. And you're really excited to do the work together.

And the other thing is that I realized is especially in a corporate world, it's very, still very much focused on the individual. You know, we have individual performance reviews. We have individual bonuses as bonus structures, promotions, et cetera. But very little of the work that we do is really at the individual level. We have to do work in teams together with other people. And that's where things tend to fall apart. That's where there's a lot of room for improvement, I think.

Brian Ardinger: So, what does a culture of safety look like? You mentioned a couple different things in your experience where not only psychological safety, emotional safety, physical safety, what does a culture of safety look like?

Alla Weinberg: Culture of safety and as you mentioned, looks like three different and three different levels. So physical safety, meaning I feel safe in my body. Like it feels like I fit in. It feels that I belong regardless of size, of color, of gender, of age, of the number of art that I have on my body. You know, my body can fit in and I feel safe in my body.

And this is biologically how we're wired. Because, you know, tens of thousands of years ago, we used to live in tribes, and we relied on that group to survive. So, people in the tribe looked out for us, literally for our physical safety. So, if a lion was coming or a different member from a different tribe was coming to attack us, we would be protected by other people.

And so, it's still to this day, how our brain is wired. So, when we're at work, we want to still feel that other people will value our physical bodies and that we're safe with them. And safety in itself just means I'm internally relaxed. My nervous system is relaxed. I'm not anxious, worried on alert, ready to fight or flight.

I feel open. I feel open to connection. I feel open to new ideas. This is where innovation comes in. There's a sense of relaxation around that. And I'm not worried about, Hey, how do I say something to this person? Should I say anything? What do I say? If I say anything at all. There's no like strategizing or calculating that's happening in the background.

And part of that is being able to share your feelings with someone and that's a very vulnerable thing to do, but it's very much missing from the workplace. Trust comes from sharing vulnerably. So, if I say to you, Hey, you know, it really hurts my feelings when you don't reply to my Slack messages, I'm being vulnerable and I'm sharing my feelings.

But I'm also saying to you in a lot of ways, I want to connect with you. I want to have a good working relationship with you. This is what's going on. And if I can say that and feel like you can receive it, you know, well, and you're like, Oh wow. You know, I really didn't know that you were feeling that way. We can have a conversation about it.

Then next time, when I have an idea, I'll feel much safer to say too. It's like, Oh, I have this idea about this direction we should go in. What do you think? I won't think twice. I won't hesitate. I won't to calculate when sharing that idea.

Brian Ardinger: Can you give me some examples of where these particular types of safety come into play. Where can companies actually start redefining or looking, or even evaluating where they stand when it comes to these types of safety?

Alla Weinberg: Yeah. I've actually been thinking a lot about that this morning. Funnily enough, I wanted to write a series of posts about where do you begin. Where does a company start to evaluate this. You have to start at physical safety. You have to have physical safety first before you can have emotional safety. And before you can have psychological safety. I know a lot of folks have heard about psychological safety from Google's work. Google Aristotle project from Amy Edmondson's work, Fearless Organization.

And a lot of companies are like, Oh, we want psychological safety, but you can't have that without physical safety first. And that's just the way our brain is wired. That's just kind of human in that respect. And so, the place to start is, a lot of it is having to do in the diversity equity, inclusion, and belonging space.

So really thinking about how are we making it safe for different people's bodies. So, if your body is a different color than the majority of the executive team or the management team, how are we actually creating safety for people that look different than leadership? Do we have spaces? What I recommend is looking at do we have spaces such as meetings, specific meetings set up where people of color can come and talk to each other and support each other.

And this is not an ERG group. This is specifically a group where people that are alike each other can come together and support each other. But also look at your promotion practices or how was that working? Why are there not people of color in your executive team, in your leadership, amongst your leadership levels?

A lot of times what companies do is they'll promote people based on experience in a similar role. But if you can't get that experience because of the way your body looks, then you're never going to be promoted today. Are we taking any chances on people, even though they don't have example X number of years of experience on it, because we believe in these people because they're capable and not just because they were at a disadvantage?

Brian Ardinger: It almost requires you taking a different set of filters to look at how you apply towards what you're trying to accomplish.

Alla Weinberg: Yeah, and I think that's right. Like, I think it's actually questioning the filters that you have built in, in the first place. What are those filters in the first place? Let's question them. But even at a more fundamental level, the conversation that no company is currently having that I'm aware of, unless I'm facilitating that conversation, is around physical boundaries that people have and about their bodies.

Do people need to be on camera all the time? What kind of choices do people have around that? What kind of choices do people have around when they work, the time that they work? Does it matter that they're working nine to five on a specific time zone, or does it just matter that the output, like that they're giving you the work that you're wanting?

All of that has to do with being able to have time and space, to really take care of our bodies as human beings. But we need to have those conversations because for every team that's different, that kind of rhythm is different. And so even just having the conversation, like, what do I need to take care of my body? What does this team need or want agree to so that we can still work together? And yet honor everybody's bodily needs. Those are not conversations that are being had, but definitely need to be.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point. It seems like a lot of this conversation around cultural safety and that it starts, or is being driven by HR, or that's where it kind of resides. But it seems to me that, from what you're saying, and the experience that you've had, is it's got to be driven beyond an HR type of initiative.

So, what are some things that the teams can do or an individual within a company that may not necessarily have the power to make these kinds of changes? What can they do to move the needle in the right direction?

Alla Weinberg: Well, my recommendation is always if you're in an individual, for example, to just start closing. So, start with your team. Start with the smallest area that you can affect and start to create safety there. So, I would recommend having these types of conversations. You can schedule them as an individual person, having these conversations with your team.

Let's talk about our boundaries. Let's talk about how we're feeling, especially about, you know, the latest current event that might be happening and how that's affecting you. Let's have a brainstorm ideation session. You know, people can still start to create spaces for safety to get built. It's not like safety is something you can say, Oh, check, we have that.

Or you should just feel safe. It's safe here. Nobody's going to feel that anyway. It's something that emerges over time. It builds over time, that when people can say, Hey, we can have these conversations and there was no retaliation, and I didn't get fired and I didn't lose a promotion. Right. Like I was able to have this kind of conversation and be honest and open with my teammates.

And I was able to share an idea and we debated it and it was great. And some part of it made it through to the next round. Or I was able to really tell my team, I was struggling with my health. And they let me know that I can take some time off and they would pick up some of the slack. Right. Just being able to have some of these conversations with your team, just start with your team is enough, is enough to start to create that bubble of safety for everyone.

And then the next question that most people ask is, well, I feel safe with my team, but I don't with my manager. Right. Kind of go into the statistics that you mentioned, that's on my website. What do I do? So, if you do feel safe with your team, then you, as a team can come together and talk about what's the conversation to have with your leader.

This isn't about blaming your leader or like this is all the leader’s fault, but actually coming up with what do we as a team need from our leader that we're not getting. What do we need to ask for from our leader? And then having that conversation with the leader as a team. Like in a very kind way. I would say in a very caring way to say, hey, you know, we're really struggling here.

This is what we need. Let's work together to figure out how to meet your needs as a leader, because I'm sure the leader has their own pressures. And as a team. What doesn't work is if one individual from the team goes to the leader and tries to affect change, because it's just one person, then the leader is just going to try to work with that one individual.

But if it's really a team issue, then it can be a team conversation. And again, it's much safer to have this conversation as a group, as a team, that supports each other that has each other's back than just one person having this conversation.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into the book a little bit more. A culture of safety is, is the name of the book. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that people can expect to get out of it from a tactical perspective?

Alla Weinberg: What I offer in the book are very practical exercises and meeting practices that can help team leaders mostly like this is who I wrote it for because it's really for a team leader to bring to their team. And then when I say at a team leader, I mean, it can be a team leader of individual contributors, manager of managers, or even at the C level suite, a leadership team. To bring to their team to create safety within their team.

Kind of the first set of practices in the book is just for the leader individually, to be able to regulate your own nervous system. So that, you can create that environment, that space for people to come together and talk honestly, and candidly and vulnerably with each other. But if you're coming to the conversation as a leader with a lot of fear, because the opposite of safety isn't danger, it's fear. That's what I propose in my book.

If you're coming to these conversations with a lot of fear, it’s not gonna, you're not going to create an environment where it's safe. And so, the first job of a leader is to be able to regulate your own nervous system so that you feel calm. You feel centered. I almost think of it as like a pillar, like a column, you know, a Greek column that holds up a building where you're solid, strong and steady, regardless of the hurricane that may be going on around you.

Right. And the way our human bodies work, when someone feels solid. Someone feels safe. Someone feels calm in their body. Our bodies, our nervous systems will regulate to that. And so, the team will then feel more relaxed, more solid, and be able to have some of the conversations then that need to be had. So, conversations around our boundaries, conversations around our emotions, conversations around our ideas.

Brian Ardinger: Is there a timing issue with these types of conversations? Is it better to bring it up in relation to current events and things like that? Where there's something that's tangible and, and there's a specific reason driving that conversation. Or is it better to integrate it into everyday conversations and things along those lines?

Alla Weinberg: My thought is that it's better to integrate it into the day-to-day because this would be an unfamiliar conversation to have for many people in the workplace. In a lot of respects, our nervous systems need to get used to that it's safe to have these conversations and over time it will like the first conversation is going to feel awkward and uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

But over time, if you continue regularly having these types of conversations, then the, you know, everybody's nervous system will be like, yeah, this is normal. This is how we talk to each other. This is part of our culture. And then when events happen, like recent events with the shootings of Asian-American women, then there's already a space to discuss that.

People will already feel safe to talk about that. And so, then people can share their experience, their feelings around these kinds of events, because that's part of the everyday culture of what we talk about as a team.

Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples of companies where you can see the results of this? Like what can people expect to have as an outcome of creating a culture of safety within their organization?

Alla Weinberg: I mean, the biggest outcome I think is definitely a lot more of a collaborative culture. I know a lot of organizations want and say that collaboration is of value for them. But it doesn't really happen in practice. When their safety, when I can collaborate with someone naturally, what comes out of collaboration is conflict.

It's kind of the conflict rides shotgun next to collaboration. Right? Always right. Because you have a different idea and I have a different idea and that's a great, because from conflict comes Innovation. That's where innovation really happens. So, what you'll see is actually cross functional, cross departmental collaboration.

And then, I mean, true collaboration where people get in a meeting and they have productive conflict with each other and say, and they really wrestle with concepts together and it's not like, Oh, I'm going to follow my process. Let's say that the design process. And then I'm going to hand it over to development and they'll follow the Agile process to develop it. That's not collaboration. That's just waterfall. Right?

But when I see stakeholders from lots of different departments coming together, thinking through things together, having productive conflict, having that collaboration of truly working together. And again, it's more than just a shared doc, you know, then I know that people are feeling safe to do that, but I also will, you know, also I would see again, conversations within the company about how are people feeling again about recent events?

Like you actually have those conversations, not an announcement that's made by the CEO or the HR department, but it's a space. There's a space for people to talk about that and how that impacts them and what that means for them. So, we're having those types of like, there's very different types of the conversations that are being had.

And I'm going to say something edgy, something else that I would see in an organization, is I would see leadership within that organization. And I've seen that with some startups, where leadership in the organization says, hey, because of recent events and because of everything that's happening in the world, we took a really hard look at our practices and our processes and how we're running our organization. And here's where we're failing.

Where leadership says, this is where things are going wrong and this is where we're not, you know, living up to what we want or the kind of company you want to be. And that we admit that. And we're going to work towards fixing that. Rather than just, I guess, aspirational statements, right. Or that don't actually bear out.

Brian Ardinger: That, I think that's a very important point that the whole idea of conflict, is okay. And that's not something that if you have conflict, you don't have a safe environment. It's, it's more from the standpoint of you have conflict and you have a safe place to experience that conflict and resolve that conflict without fear of repercussion of that.

Alla Weinberg: Yes. I actually would say, if you don't have conflict, then you don't have a safe environment because you don't feel safe enough to disagree, to, to get into it with someone to have that conflict. Right. In essence, conflict to me shows that there is safety in the environment.

Brian Ardinger: And then obviously you have all sorts of other benefits that come from that as far as increasing morale and efficiency and that. What other things are you seeing from the companies that you work with? Where have they moved from and where are they going now? And what benefits are they really having?

Alla Weinberg: Like the biggest thing that I'm seeing is actually increase in velocity of how fast people can work. That's almost unintended, but a really wonderful benefit. I think a lot of companies certainly want that. They want faster better work. Right.

But a lot of times what gets in the way of that is people not feeling safe enough to express how they're feeling their emotions. And they kind of just hold onto it and develop grudges. And now politics starts to get in the game, and everything slows down. The work actually slows down because people are avoiding having those conversations about feelings.

And so, when they're finally able to be and I just finished working with a team where they're finally able, and we're able to say, you know, this is what I've been upset about for a year, an entire year. Suddenly a lot of intractable problems that the team was facing are no longer such a problem anymore.

They were able to come together as a team and come up with solutions and actually start to move. Actually, starts to take action. And that's the biggest benefit that I see. And Berne Brown has this quote. She says, you can spend a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or an unreasonable amount of time attending to unproductive behavior. And so, when we've been able to create safety in these teams, we've been able to increase velocity a heck of a lot more well.

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Brian Ardinger: And I think that fits very well within the whole Innovation space. You know, you mentioned velocity and then the ability to actually collaborate and think through new ideas. I think it's so important to a culture of innovation as well. So I very much appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to talk about these particular subjects and why it's important in this particular space. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Alla Weinberg: Ah the best way to do that is just to go to my website, which is Spokeandwheel.co not com.

Brian Ardinger: Well Alla thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come and appreciate your time.

Alla Weinberg: Thank you so much, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Adriana Cisneros Basulto, Founder of Maxwell. Maxwell was the winner of the IO 2020 Get Started Showcase competition and maker of the employee benefit and work-life management software platform. Adriana and I talk about the changing world of work from flexible benefit options, to diversity and inclusion, as well as the impact COVID has had on accelerating these changes.

Interview Transcript with Adriana Cisneros Basulto, Founder of Maxwell

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Adriana Cisneros Basulto, founder of Maxwell. Welcome to the show.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Adriana I'm excited to have you. Maxwell, you were the winner of the IO2020 Get Started Showcase competition that we had back in October. It seems like a lifetime ago, but we've been trying to figure out a time to get you on the show, to talk about what you're doing, what you're building, and really have a heart to heart with some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to the future of work. So, let's start by telling the Maxwell story. How did you conceive of this company and how did it get started?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah, well, first and foremost, I'm still pinching myself from the win and yeah, I cannot believe that that was October, but I suppose in COVID time, everything just kind of flows at its own rate. I'm not going to say it was, you know, like a Eureka moment or something that all of a sudden just came to mind that this is what's going to be. It's really been an evolution.

And it has taken several years from sort of an idea into actually becoming what it is today. And it's probably going to continue to market. A lot of it was just, many founders, personal experience. As my life got just more complex, on the personal side, and by complex, I mean, just a very traditional path and the personal side, you know, like you, you get married, you decide to get a dog, you have a mortgage, that sort of thing. In terms of complexity, kids. At the same time, my career, and that of my spouse was also progressing and getting more complex and had more accountabilities.

And then we happened to both be very similar in terms of wanting to do a really good job in both fronts. So, we were always feeling spread thinly. So that was one aspect. And then the other aspect was the type of work that I did. So, my last corporate job was leading the efforts of inclusion and diversity for the largest private bank in the U S.

And one of the things that I remember vividly sitting down and listening to the results of Gallup, on one of their studies about women at work. And I mean, this is years ago, but the trend was that women were leaving the workplace. And one of the number one competitors was this aspect of how hard it was to manage work and life and keep it all together.

And that, that was the biggest competitor. And I was just like, oh my goodness, we're not coming up with better solutions is the same solutions that we had five years ago or before, like lots of things go through my mind. That was one moment there was like, there's got to be something better. So that was sort of the genesis of it, both from the personal side. And then also from a professional standpoint, me wanting to see more women stay in leadership positions because that's the work that I was doing.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about what Maxwell is and how are you tackling that problem?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yes. What I'd like to say is we make it easy for employers to support their teams. And to support them with benefits it's slash, support services that make it easy to manage work and life. Sometimes it's easier to understand when using an example. So, I'll try to do that.

Let's say it's company, ABC company, ABC. They choose which of the services that we have on Maxwell already embedded in our mobile app to offer their employees and to fund. And then we do also something that we're testing right now. I'm curious to see how that evolves, but one of the things we're testing is the ability for employers to also integrate into Maxwell, other things that they're offering today, that don't require an additional subsidy from them.

So maybe they already paid for an EPA program from an employee assistance program, so they can also show it on Maxwell. And then the employee now decides how much money they want to provide their employees to use on the services of Maxwell.

Brian Ardinger: Got it.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: So then fast forward to now, you know, employees are onboarding into Maxwell. They can use their funds on those benefits, those support services that are going to be the most valuable for them. Maybe Tom, really what he struggles with is spending his weekends doing laundry. Yeah. He could use his, you know, the money that he got from his employer, on tackling laundry. So, he doesn't have to be doing that over the weekends.

And maybe, you know, you have Kate, which laundry's not really an issue for her, or maybe that's, you know, she doesn't care for other people touching her laundry. She can use her funds on things that matter to her, like maybe healthy meals and getting support that way. So that's in a nutshell how it works.

Brian Ardinger: I like the idea, and this and this movement that we're seeing towards how do you make things very customized for the employee. You know, it used to be where employee benefits, were you get your health care and, and maybe you get a couple of things else, but for the most part, it was here's your cookie cutter things that were available. But by services like Maxwell that allow the employer and the employee to find that right balance. What are you seeing when it comes to that?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yes. No, you're absolutely right. It's been, it's been, talked about for a long time on the HR space. How to really put the employee at the center of that. So providing employee centric experiences. But it really hadn't taken off. And I think we are at a moment in which this is actually going to happen, because now, well, a multitude of things are happening, but one of them is as HR teams are honestly trying to help their employees. One of the barriers that they're facing to do that, is that there is so much variety of needs.

Like the example I gave was simple. Right. But like, how do you provide enough variety of support that is really going to meet the need of all of your employees? And actually, that is sometimes paralyzing them because they're like, well, you know, I could get this particular solution in house and use it here, but that's going to serve only my, you know, my working parents.

And that's going to inevitably cost these feeling of the haves and have nots because the ones that are not parents of course, are happy for their fellow working parents, and, but at the same time, it's a little bit of like, what about us? I need help too. That's happening there.

The other thing that I believe is accelerating us in that direction is we become just a little bit more aware of providing things that don't, that in an effort to become more equitable, don't actually create more inequality or a feeling of inequality. Right. In providing that. So that's also happening. And the third one is just this whole concept around virtual first work, or really having that mix of being able to be at home sometimes, sometimes to the office.

So, a hybrid model potentially. And how do you support all of those employees? The ones that came in the office, the ones that work from the home office, and the ones that are doing any, both places.

Brian Ardinger: So, yeah, it strikes me like the employer would get a big benefit if they didn't have to manage multiple different platforms and people and different types of benefits out there for their employees. But by going to a sole source, like a Maxwell and you kind of do that on their behalf, and it's also a win for the employee because they get more options to choose from. From that perspective, what's the biggest challenge of building out that kind of marketplace model?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah, I think the biggest challenge is that, you know, Maxwell is not the provider of services. All of our services are provided by our partners. So, in that sense, we're having to grow both sides at the same time. We're having to grow our partnerships, which it's a little bit of a catch 20 money in the sense that employers that are, you know, they have national or global operations, they're looking for services that can be offered on a national or global level.

Well, the partners that offer their services on a national global level, they're looking for Maxwell to have employers that are the same. So, it's a little bit of that. It just takes a lot of calls, a lot of meetings, a lot of finding those people that are willing to partner and that see the vision and that they're like, you know what? It's okay, that you're not in a, if it's a partner that they're like, it's okay. If you don't have all the national employers that we would like to see, we're willing to give it a go. And the other way around to. Finding those employer partners that are willing to be a partner that are willing to be there on the early stages.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about maybe some of the early adopters or some of the success or case studies that you've had and how it's working.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: You know, where we have found some success is on the professional services side. It's a little bit counteractive in the sense that my professional services, I mean, your attorneys, accountants, they're not typically known for being the most progressive industries and certainly not the most progressive, I mean, in terms of benefits and offering perks. That's not where you typically hear you get snacks or things of that sort. But they are the ones that are very familiar with the pain of having to manage high loads of work. And it's very much in many ways out of their control.

I'll give you an example. Let's use attorney. So, they are famous for working really long hours. And there's been lots of efforts to try to reduce that to how do you change the model? Well, the problem is that the industry as a whole is like that. So, if you are the law firm that changes, and that starts feeling less, and that your attorneys only work eight to five. And you're not meeting your customer's needs immediately, your customers are probably not going to stay with you. They're going to go with your competitor. There needs to be a change at a massive scale for that to happen.

So, this is another way to provide a better ability for attorneys to focus while they're in the office or where they're working and to recharge and on rest and be ready to crush it the next day, when they're not.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned that there's a number of different services that are available. Are there particular ones that are standing out as far as ones that seem to be resonating in the marketplace? You mentioned childcare or laundry or, or food services. What are you seeing as far as what employees are actually asking for?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah. You know, what? It gets very much down to the basics. Meals is one where, you know, especially those that we're already providing to a certain degree, the snacks, or in some cases, events where they would provide meals.

That's something that it's brought up. Things that save your time in the car. That's another one. Even with people that are working more from home. I'll tell you one of our partners is Leash, which is a local startup here in Omaha. And you know, there's a ton of people that got puppy. There's a lot more dogs than there used to be in families.

So now I mean all those dogs required to go to the vet and to go, to get groomed. All those times that you're spending in the car, taking them and then bringing them back. That's another one that it's a really good time saver, saving time on in traffic.

Brian Ardinger: So, then you go out and find those startups, like a Leash that can provide that particular service and you onboard them onto the platform. And then that becomes a benefit that's all automatically available. So, as you add new partners and that employees have different ways to spend their money on the platform. Is that the way it works?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah, absolutely. That's how it works, Brian. And it actually, there's a little bit more flexibility than that. So, the employers are the ones that decide what is it that they want to fund. If for some reason I do not want to fund. I don't want my employees to be using their money on laundry. They can choose that. This service, the benefits still going to show for Tom and Tom is still able to use it, by using his personal funds.

And all the other ones that the employer has said, yes, use the money. He can either use that money or he can do a mixer and mix and match. So, if for some reason he's running out of funds, And there's still something that he wants to use, he can use a combination of funds.

Brian Ardinger: It's an interesting angle too, because again, you're giving the power to the employee to use their capital in other ways, maybe it's partially funded by the employer or not, but it gives them the peace of mind and the ease being able to go to one place to have those other services kind of fulfilled to help, help them be better employees and more productive.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Oh, absolutely. And then it has, you know, one of the things I didn't talk about, because there's just so many angles to it is, we provide the employer with an HR dashboard where they can see aggregate data. So, when the aggregate data that they can see its usage. They can see, okay, these are the benefits that you're funding. These are the benefits that you're not funding, but this is how much they're getting used.

So, they can see, wow, those laundry services, they're getting used a ton by our employees, even though we're not funding them. Maybe that is something that we should be funding because it would make a difference in their lives. So again, you're giving the power to the employee, the employee, just by using it, just by using their personal funds they're actually providing the business case to the employer as to why it would be valuable for them to fund them.

Brian Ardinger: The other topic I want to talk about, obviously it's, it's, it's everywhere in the headlines. It's COVID, it's the pandemic. It's the, how that has changed not only startups slides, but you know, the world of work in general. What are you seeing when it comes to the impacts of COVID and maybe what do you see more importantly, what do you see over the next 12 to 18 months of how that's going to affect things like going back to work and things like that?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah, no, it's a super interesting question. I think we're all waiting to see what's going to take place. I mean, having lots of you might imagine given what Maxwell does, I've had a lot of conversations with folks in HR and the number one thing I'm hearing from them that that's how they're spending their time is return to work. And this is audio, so otherwise you would see me as doing return to work with quotation marks because it's not like people haven't been working.

So, it's more like, you know, how is it going to look after this? Are people going to be back in the office or not? And what stays with us? What changes on the other is this big concern around maintaining productivity? Which is super interesting to me because on the one hand you have the way that I usually phrase that question to HR leaders is what is the primary concern of your leaders? And that is the one that rises to the top maintaining productivity.

And then I also asked them about what is one of their primary concerns with employees and what we're seeing on the employee side is that they're really tired. So, it's so interesting to have that duality of, you know, if leadership in companies being really worried, are we being productive enough? And then the employees being. Worry that they don't have time to rest. Like they're tired. So,

Brian Ardinger: I think we're getting a really interesting, going back into this hybrid is going to be actually, I think, more difficult than going into the original lockdown state or, or remote state, because at least then everybody kind of had a singular focal point of what was going to happen and maybe didn't know how long it was going to happen and that, but everybody was kind of resolved around that particular move to remote and what that meant.

But now going back into a hybrid model, I imagine each company is going to be slightly different and how that's going to play out will be almost more of a reverse culture shock than going into the pandemic in the first place.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Oh, my goodness. So, so true. That's one of my concerns I think I might have shared with you in the past. One of my concerns is what this is going to produce from a quality perspective, because right now, well, maybe I'm coming from a personal standpoint. So really all of my career I have worked from home or events abroad, at least a couple of days of the week. And so many times I was the only one that was working from home.

And I definitely felt like I would sometimes miss out on conversations or I was on, you know, I was on the phone and, you know, I knew that there had been a meeting before the meeting and a meeting after the meeting. So, I wasn't getting that face time. This whole situation, like a lockdown has put every one of the same, at the same level in the vast majority of terms, there's still a few of inequalities there, but at least no one is like having as much face time.

But yeah, going forward, if you're going to have people that are going to be in the office and people that are not, we are human and we like better than people that we see and we interact with in-person. So, yeah, that'll be really interesting to see how that plays out. And what sort of solutions do employers use, in order to, you know, make sure that doesn't take place, that doesn't create more inequality. And then also, how do they maintain company culture? That's the other one that I'm super interested in company culture and collaboration when you have that mix.

Brian Ardinger: And another reason why I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about you've formed a community to talk about some of these things, whether it's future of work, or remote working or, or whatever the case may be. You've got a new group called the forward collective. I don't know if you want to tell us a little bit more about that and what that is all about.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: That has been such an amazing group and it continues to grow. And we're trying to tackle the future of work from many angles. But really one of the things that we saw is that, I mean, this was a really a big opportunity.

Well, it has been really hard 12 months that have brought lots of hardship. Certainly, lots of sadness to many. It's also an opportunity to move forward into better workplaces. And that's why it’s called forward, forward work. You can find us at forwardwork.co. Because the intention is let's take this moment to not go back to work just the way it was, but to really create places that are like I talk about that are more equitable that take into consideration the whole employee that really challenged the status quo of how things have always been.

And so, we talked about companies that are piloting new spaces that they're like, okay, we don't think we're going to be using all this space. How can we use it now? Startups that are creating new platforms to tackle some of the things we just chatted about what you say, how do you continue to create collaboration in a virtual world. At the same time, experts that talk about how do you prepare your managers to really deliver the employee experience that you need in to the future? So really, all over the place and it's been fun to see a new idea.

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Brian Ardinger: They've been great conversations. I've enjoyed going in and being a part of a couple of those and look forward to the ones that are coming in the future as well. Adrian, if people want to find out more about Maxwell or about yourself, what's the best way to do that?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah. The best way to do that is feel free to connect with me via LinkedIn. I might be one of the few Adriana Cisneros Basulto on LinkedIn at least that long. And obviously, yeah, feel free to visit Maxwell.app. You can find us there too.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I'm excited to see where you guys go and looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come. So, thanks again for being part of this.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Thank you so much for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Susan Lindner, cultural anthropologist, founder of Emerging Media, and author of the upcoming book, Innovation Storytellers. Susan, and I talk about the importance of storytelling to the new innovator and what companies can do to have their stories resonate and spread in today's changing media landscape. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Susan Lindner, Cultural Anthropologist, Founder of Emerging Media, and Author of Innovation Storytellers

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. We have Susan Lindner. She is a cultural anthropologist, disruptor and founder of Emerging Media, which is a brand marketing and PR agency. And we're very excited to have Susan on the show. Welcome.

Susan Lindner: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on the show. I want to get you on because a lot of your work is really focused around this concept of storytelling. And it's so important. And so maybe we'll start off with why is storytelling so important to innovators and entrepreneurs?

Susan Lindner: It's so critical. And 20 years of working in tech and innovation has taught me this as the golden rule. Stanford has been very helpful to us. They have shown that a story and statistics together are 22 times more memorable than just statistics alone. And that is because the human brain is wired to receive story, not Excel spreadsheets. Not even bullet points.

So, it's critical. If you want someone to remember that fantastic innovation that you're pitching, that you actually wrap it in a story with a hero, with a plot, with a conclusion. That if you want funders, investors, stakeholders, to remember it, you had better wrap that incredible data, in a story that people can take with them and actually act on it.

Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. And obviously we've seen a lot of companies that have done good at that. Telling stories that work. And others that have flamed out because they couldn't really communicate effectively with what they're doing. What's the process of developing a story? Especially at that early stage, when you're trying to get somebody to notice your new creation?

Susan Lindner: For Innovation storytelling, which is different than every other kind of storytelling, right? We're not talking about soap. Or maybe you're innovating soap, fantastic, give me a call, happy to help with a new, the next thing that will be soap. Great. But Innovation storytelling takes a different look. And so, I'm an anthropologist by training, but I was also a religion major in college. And I was fascinated by how the profits moved the word around the world.

How did they get the word to move? How did they get all the early adopters? How did they get people to convert in the midst of great danger and peril? Right? Every considerable, social, racial, economic, lions eating you alive. Who got these people to adopt an idea that was not even provable right, in the empirical sense?

And yet people did it. How did they do it? And so, I looked at the prophets, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, and tried to create the framework to understand how do you move a message around the world? How did the prophets do it? And it turns out there's five clear steps that all of the profits employ. So, step number one is history.

You'll notice that Jesus didn't say that Judaism was wrong. Right. He certainly saw himself as a Jew called himself a rabbi. He was referred to as a rabbi, as a teacher. So, you take, what is historical about what came before us and say, this is the foundation of what the story is built upon. We all come from a common shared history.

That makes us a group, right. That makes us a try step one. It is the same reason why we employ the term email to describe transatlantic electronic correspondence that goes through a tube under an ocean and arrives in my computer. Right? It's why we call it an inbox. Cause there used to be one sitting on your desk.

It's why we use the save icon. Or it used to be a floppy disk. My kids have never seen a floppy desk. They don't even know what it is. I was cleaning out my house actually, found a floppy disk and showed it to my son. Twentytwo years old, goes to the Rochester Institute of Technology and looks at me and said, why did you 3d print a copy of the save icon from work? Because that's what I'm doing in my spare time, Brian. I'm printing a copy of the save icon.

Brian Ardinger: You can bring those back along with the AOL CDs.

Susan Lindner: Which, you know, some archeologist is going to have to explain one day. So, step one is the history, right? It makes it really easy to understand where we all came from. Cause that's how we transitioned into change.

Step two, what are our values and our purpose? So, the prophets were really good about describing the shared values, not just the place we come from, but the value surrounding that Innovation and our purpose. What is it that's really driving us today? That may be a little bit different than what was driving us historically.

So, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Could be one of those, like it's always been done that way. That's one of those things. So, as we shift out from what was to what could be, what are the values and the purpose. Can we get that really clear for the listener? Step three is the message, right? This is when we burn all boats.

This is when we say we're taking what works and we're leaving what doesn't. So, we're going from an eye for an eye to turn the other cheek. That's the shift we're making. And the next is finding those early adopters. So, we know that we only need about 13.3% of the market, right? Our innovators and our early adopters who are going to go forward and go, I'm going to take a risk.

I'm going to take a chance on this Innovation. So, who are those people who now that we have the message, will carry it forward? And it's not always the cheerleader in the room. In fact, better when it's the biggest skeptic. I said, gosh, I never thought that could be, but now I'm standing outside of the Apple store for three days before the iPhone comes out.

And the last is viral language. Step five is using viral language. So, we really want to look at the things that you learned in English class. Alliteration, tagline designer. We want to think about rhetoric that actually moves people. And does it incorporate emotion? We know that the way a story sticks is actually by activating brain chemicals, adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, fear, anger, lust. Name all of the seven deadly sins. Right?

If we can actually generate emotion, the story now has a biological marker, a physiological marker that says it's in my body and I can take it with me. And that's how stories are powerful. I was just giving a talk and I was asking people to remember the first time they saw Bambi. And you realize that in the very first scene Bambi's mom dies it's because Walt Disney was so fricking brilliant that virtually every one of the heroes in a Disney story is an orphan or lost their mom. Because that is the biggest fear of a child period.

And when you engage them in the beginning of that story, with fear, a giant rush of adrenaline. And then you introduce them to Thumper and frolicking in the forest. And everything's fine again. Now you get the Serotonin hit in the body and all of these things allow us to not just tell the story, but to take it with us. And that's what makes a story go viral. That's what makes a story successful.

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting. I work with startups. You work with startups and helping startups understand how to tell that story. And focusing, like you said, on that pain point that can get the audience to resonate with that. And then the startup solution becomes the hero to that story and moving it forward.

The question I have is so working with startups, oftentimes the story changes or the narrative changes because they're trying to figure things out. They don't know exactly where they're going to go. And unlike an existing corporation that can tell their story based on the fact that this has already happened. And here's how we're going to tell the story to, to make it fit the narrative. How do you work with startups and in that early-stage process, when they're trying to figure out what stories to tell and how to tell them, what are some suggestions or advice that you'd have for that?

Susan Lindner: Recognize that from the beginning. Right. And, you know, I think the biggest myth around storytelling in business is that there's only one. So just like your product roadmap and just like your product development, guess what, your stories are in a lab too. Storytellers need to have a great deal of flexibility about how we tell that story.

So, here's a story that doesn't really change that often. And that's the founder story. It gets richer over time, but it has to be one. And I think every person in the company must be able to tell the founder's story. And so how is it that I started here? I had this great idea, or this idea came to me or other people came to me with an idea, and I grew it.

That entrepreneur story is one that we start off with first because it provides inspiration for so many other stories. Step two is a customer or what some storytellers call the value story. So, the question you want to ask to tell a customer story is by asking the customer, how is my life better now that the product or service is in it?

How has my life changed? And you'll notice I use the word not how is my company changed, but how has my life changed? So, number one. I want to know if you save time, save money became more productive. But that is the baseline of any B2B product in the world. Right. I hire an accountant, so I don't have to become a CPA. That has just now saved me time, save me money and made me more effective, more efficient.

Right? So that's a baseline. Ask yourself tougher questions. Like what are they doing with all of the time, money, and productivity they've obtained through you? Ask them the questions now that you've saved all this money, what are you investing it in? Is art, have you helped your customer to increase their product roadmap?

Have you helped them to expand into Europe or Asia as a result of not doing redundant tests? Maybe you've reduced head count, maybe you've increased head count. Right? All of those things that are a consequence of this save time, save money, make you more productive. And then the last is, you know, don't forget that private side, right?

Do I get to use my vacation without being called 30 times a day? Because the system broke. So, I would ask all those questions about how is my life made better now that your product or service is in it. And one other thing I want to add to this, because this is where all my lovely startups go wrong. And Brian probably yours do, but all the Star Wars fans out there, the hero of the story is what you must first identify.

And I will tell you unequivocally that the hero of your story is never the technology. So, the fire extinguisher doesn't save the day, the firefighter, the homeowner does, the neighbor does. So, if you are thinking about Star Wars, the hero is not the lightsaber, it's Luke Skywalker. Don't ever forget that it's a human with human emotions and human frailties and failure.

Even the entrepreneur story, we failed a million times, then we built it. It finally worked and then it failed again. So, never make the technology, the product or service, the hero of the story. It is always the user, the recipient, the end user whomever.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's say you've crafted your story. You kind of have a good narrative and that. We're now living in an age where proliferation of new media fragmented attention spans. How should a company be evaluating and prioritizing how, when, and where to tell those stories?

Susan Lindner: So, we know that a user generated story is 50% more effective than one told by the corporation itself. The first thing I'll ask you to do is have you created a space where customers can share, do you have a customer advisory board?

Do you have a Slack channel? Is there an intranet or a place even publicly, perhaps a LinkedIn group, a Facebook group, et cetera, where people can share their experiences with you? Why is that? Because as an anthropologist, I can tell you it's one of the most ancient mechanisms in the human brain to want to tell the rest of your tribe members don't eat that, eat this. That mushroom will make you crazy. This mushroom will kill you. Right?

We have a natural human instinct to want to report back to the group about whether or not something works or doesn't work. So, step one is setting up a space where people can communicate back to you. And if you want to do that privately at first, that might also make your customers feel good.

And then think about how you can translate that into marketing messages. So, you asked about the timing and the place. I would ask you to think about, we set up for all of our clients, a News Bureau. So, we look at the next six months of what's going to be happening in the startup's life. Don't even bother planning for longer than that from a marketing standpoint, because everything will change. As you said, Brian.

What are the six most exciting things that are going to be happening between this month and six months from now? Right? And then say, what do I need to plan? How can I extract information from the customer that might participate in that press release that announcement? Where can I place it? So, it'll have maximum impact.

Do I want to talk to a reporter? Do I want to be an event or a conference where it can get shared virally? Do I want to set up social media mechanisms or maybe even a contest? Next time you're launching a new product. Did you even think about asking your community to name it for you? Right.

I think Boaty McBoatface was the one that wound up working in England at one point. Might want to put some Innovation with constraints often works better than Innovation without constraints. Just a reminder. Yeah. So, think about how you can engage your customers to have a more potent impact on your marketing.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and just even asking your customers to amplify that message, it goes a long way. You know, that call to action. Sometimes your customers don't necessarily know that you want to have them amplify it. And having those conversations with the customer segment often goes a long way as well.

Susan Lindner: Yeah, because there's a big difference between sharing something and liking something, right?

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely.

Susan Lindner: The customer is investing of themselves and their own personal brand. Every time they get shared.

Brian Ardinger: So, the last core topic I want to talk about is how do you think that pandemic has affected storytelling? What are you seeing out there as far as trends or changes and how do you see that impacting storytelling moving forward?

Susan Lindner: : Brene Brown said that maybe stories are just data with assault. And so, I'd love to remind your listeners to remember that empathy comes first when you're doing great storytelling. The first rule of great storytelling is listening. So, before you decide to put on another story, think about what your listeners truly need first.

And I would argue that empathy is a huge part of that. There's not one person who hasn't been impacted by this pandemic. And even if you're one of the 0.3% of the world's wealthiest people, who watch their portfolios increase exponentially. Chances are there are other people in their lives who've been dramatically impacted.

So, listen, first. Approach anyone that you're telling the story to with empathy, by asking them what their experience has been. And then being vulnerable. So, sharing what's been challenging. And then even though it's been rough, here's what we've been able to do. Because humans connect at vulnerability. Humans don't connect necessarily a triumph. Right.

We still think about the miracle hockey team because of how grueling and how challenging it was and the opposition that they faced. The story isn't Hey, they won. It's all of the things that led up to them winning and what they overcame to get there that make us appreciate the triumph so much more.

And so, without the vulnerability, without the failure, without the exhaustion and frankly, even people close to us passing, that we don't appreciate the victory and where we are now and the possibilities that exist for us without acknowledging the pain.

Brian Ardinger: Who's out there doing this well. Do you have any case studies or examples of companies that are kind of embracing the storytelling format and are doing really well around this?

Susan Lindner: There are so many companies that I admire around great storytelling. You know, I think of one that comes to mind quickly is Wrigley's Spearmint Gum. I don't know if you've seen the tinfoil drawings on the wrappers Inside. It's of a young couple. And It kind of tells their story of their entire relationship, their romance based on the foil inside of the gum.

And how that relationship evolved and fell apart and came back together. Like it's a whole love story told on gum wrappers. I also think there's some really great B2B stories. I think that RSA the security company, that actually used Christian Slater to talk about, he was the villain in the story. And he talked about, or I think it was RSA in combination with HP, the printer, the copier company and printing company.

And was talking about how easy it is to steal information, if it's not properly locked down and if you don't have the right equipment. And so, it's a seven-minute commercial. You can watch it, almost a short film. And Christian Slater is the villain and stealing all of your critical data off copiers and printers. And it's phenomenal.

And the last one I love is Chanel. So, Chanel tells the entrepreneur story of the hardworking woman who worked her way up from seamstress all the way up to haute couture and how she got there. And why she never took no for an answer when it came to great design. And there are I think 23 chapters, although chapter number five is my favorite. If you only want to look at one, look at Chanel storytelling chapter five, and you will see the entire story of the House of Chanel told in black and white beauty. That's phenomenal.

Brian Ardinger: I just interviewed somebody from Innovation Norway, and they were talking about how they were leveraging the Will Ferrell Super Bowl ad from GM that talked about how Will Ferrell was going to go take on Norway for their electric vehicles and such.

And so, the University of Norway and Innovation Norway, and a couple of others have kind of taken that message and spun it to amplify what's going on in Norway, when it comes to the Innovation front.

Susan Lindner: She's a client of mine.

Brian Ardinger: It was interesting to hear what they're doing, taking a story and then playing it off against another story that was resonating within the public and that, and so.

Susan Lindner: Yes, we call that story jacking. So just like there's news jacking, right? You see a news story breaking. You're like, I'm going to call a reporter about why our story is even better than the guy who just came out with a story, right? It's how competitors leap on each other.

But story jacking is actually doing the same thing as taking that story and saying here's why it matters. And that works perfectly to Innovation Norway's point. That's great. Yeah. So thanks for the awesome story. If you don't have a story of your own, right.

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Brian Ardinger: Well, Susan, thank you for sharing your story and all the insights here on Inside Outside Innovation today. I appreciate you coming on the show and looking forward to continued stories in the years to come and thank you very much for being here.

Susan Lindner: Well, thank you. It's an honor. This is one of my top 10 favorite podcasts of all times. I'm grateful to be a guest. Grateful, grateful.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Hege Barnes, Director of Americas at Innovation Norway. Hege and I talk about the new innovations in green tech, clean tech and electric vehicles, as well as how Norway is working with startups to help grow and support innovation, both inside Norway and around the world.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

For the past six years, Inside Outside has been helping innovators and entrepreneurs around the world launch, grow, and thrive. Today we want to celebrate the community and their commitment to innovation. At a time of accelerated disruption and uncertainty, it's never been more important. Thanks for listening, engaging, and being a positive force for innovators everywhere.
Interview Transcript with Hege Barnes, Director of Americas at Innovation Norway

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Hege Barnes. She's the Regional Director for Americas at Innovation Norway. Welcome Hege.

Hege Barnes: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, we're excited to have you as well. We got connected after the Will Ferrell Superbowl ad for GM, where Will declared that he was coming after Norway. And so, we wanted to set the record straight and go straight to the source and see what's actually happening when it comes to the world of Innovation in Norway. So, what is Innovation Norway?

Hege Barnes: Yeah, the whole EV campaign with Will Ferrell was sort of funny though. And we were very, very happy to tag along in that and sort of play along and have some fun. But it is actually true the way that we develop the country and the green innovations, our slogan is Powered by Nature. You that's how we live and that's how we develop our destination.

But Innovation Norway. Yeah. It's the government entity for trade and industry. So, we are sort of the trade council Invest in Norway. We are the tourist boards and the development agency for Norway. We help companies from birth to success, the growth, the global success. So, we have offices all over Norway and in 30 countries I think, all over the world. We work very efficiently within the unique sort of competence areas that we have in Norway, where we see that we are stronger than have competitive advantages.

And then we matched that with the opportunity areas in the markets we are in. So, I'm representing America. Ee look at what's happening in the US, Canada, and Brazil in particular. Looking at all the developments and matching that with what companies and where we can compete and use our resources efficiently.

Brian Ardinger: That makes a lot of sense. And obviously, probably a lot of us aren't familiar with everything that's going on within Norway, where you hear of, you know, green tech and clean tech and a lot around the electric vehicles. I think you're the largest market share of electric vehicles in the world. And I believe you're also expanding into other areas like the first, fully electric autonomous container ship. So, what's happening in Norway that makes it this destination or a testination for some of the new technologies when it comes to green and cleantech.

Hege Barnes: Based on again, what I said, it it's like this powered by nature sort of mentality that we have after we discovered oil and became this big offshore industry. We are now saying that we need to move beyond that. We need to transition from an industry heavily dependent on fossil fuel into new green technologies, into new greener solutions. So, in addition to the whole offshore industry sort of technology and deep insights that we have, we also always been a seafaring nation and shipbuilding nation.

So, the whole Maritime’s there, the whole Innovation above the water and underwater has been aquaculture has been sort of core of who Norway is and our industry and the development that we've had. We live in a big country with a lot of space, but we had to innovate to sort of survive.

And we built up the industry and we built our communities, basically the whole destination development over the last few years with this, the sort of as a fundament and we are a destination or a country that's full of smart engineers, you know. Engineers that are used to working in even harsh conditions, you know, half the country's above the Arctic circle.

We're working out deep into the ocean areas and underwater and cold-water temperatures. And we have the four, really four distinct seasons. We're used to working in tough conditions. And with this sort of engineering mentality, we have now shifted from sort of traditional industries into new technologies. New green technologies and solutions, smart solutions across sectors and industry as well.

And this has been driven a lot by the government. A lot of this is mandated by the government, by people themselves. People want a greener development. They want a sustainable development of our economy, our society, and our industries. So when they met, so this whole, the government policies meeting the locals demands and what has led to the Innovation in certain areas that has actually been very successful for us.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk a little bit about some of the programs that have helped businesses or help entrepreneurs set up and, or get moving when it comes to this? What are some of the things that the Innovation Norway actually does?

Hege Barnes: We can help companies. We have offices in all the different regions in Norway. So, we can help companies fund and launch their programs. But we also build communities. We build ecosystems so we can fund clusters and networks and sort of smart Innovation groups, and from a research stage to actual commercialization stage. And these sort of clusters, they learn from each other. They learn and grow together. And we can fund this environment and help sort of support this environment.

We can also add competencies. You know, we have a qualified staff that can help companies scale and grow together with the industry. And this is probably the, the success of the model is to trust that we have in society. So, we work a lot with government and private industry. And private industry and government together actually makes things happen. And it makes it happen in a speedier fashion than a lot of other countries like here in the U S.

Brian Ardinger: So, are most of your programs focused on helping Norwegian companies get off the ground and move to the United States and get market share and that? Or are you working with companies like in other countries that want to work and build things in Norway?

Hege Barnes: So, both, you know, we want this to help our smart sort of, the companies that comes from a green shipping cluster, you know, we see that they can win big contracts abroad. We work with the offshore wind development on the East coast here, you know, and we know the lot of these companies, smaller, larger companies have an opportunity in the value chains of the development. So how can we actually get those companies and how can we help them get a better and more efficient access to the market here?

But at the same time, we are leading in this field. You know, we have the expertise, we've done this many times over. And we have competencies from several sectors that worked into the offshore wind or the, this smart transport, smart mobility industries. So we can help that also match their companies and bring American companies to Norway, to learn and scale and grow their businesses there.

We work both with sort of that investor angle and FTI angle, and particularly maybe in that testination you know, to test their products and services. Yeah.

Brian Ardinger: And you mentioned obviously that a lot of it’s government driven, but this idea of public private partnerships and that. Can you talk how that kind of comes together? Talk a little bit more about how that actually works.

Hege Barnes: In many cases it works so that the government, either through us or any of the other sort of entities, in order from research to development, they get funds that are earmarked to watch certain things. Either of phase to help companies scale and grow, or to build out their products, to test and grow and scale their innovative products.

And they can do that again in a cluster or a network. And then we are coming in with funding. We put requirements, we put in, you know, you need to do this and that or that to qualify. And then the private industry applies for that fund. And they need to follow these certain rules and guidelines. We also have investment arms to help give investment to, to promising startups.

And we can give that also to private or semi-private entities or organizations in the different regions that can apply for funds, that they then allocate to companies or it's through an accelerator program. We also work, which is important that we will work in, in the Nordic fashion. And among other end, there's sort of this whole energy, the smart transportation on the ocean.

We have a sterile emission energy distribution at sea program that Nordic Innovation, which is the Innovation arm of the Nordic Council of Ministers has setup. Then that's bringing Nordic technologies together. You know, we are a small country, but together with all the other Nordic countries we're suddenly 25 million people.

And then just starting to have a little more of a scale that you can work with. So, they bring different entities, different experiences to the table, and then sort of, they can fund it as well. Again, with certain requirements, and then the industry can apply. Logic companies or a port authority can apply for funds or one private company that will also sort of build up an infrastructure or a supply chain can apply for funds from that.

A lot of these are also set up in an accelerated way, so we can actually add competence to them. You know, a lot of companies know the product part, and this is sort of a Nordic phenomena. We're really good engineers, we’re good on the technology. But we're not so good at marketing and selling it. You know, so actually telling our story. So, we're helping them in that sort of commercialization phase of marketing and selling their technologies and finding the right product market fit, finding the right market and scaling opportunities.

Brian Ardinger: That makes a ton of sense. And obviously we hear a lot also about like Sweden and you mentioned the other Nordic countries, you know, there's a number of unicorn companies, startups that have come out of Sweden. And it's interesting to see all that Innovation coming out from the Nordic countries out there.

Can you talk a little bit more about the startup ecosystem there and what's it like to be a startup in Norway? What's the state of venture capital? What are the, some of the things that you're seeing good, bad or indifferent that are happening there?

Hege Barnes: Sweden has been the big brother and big in consumer goods in particularly in you know. We are the sort of the B2B kind of guys, you know, the tech nerds, the engineers, that building the whole sort of back-office system of things.

So that's sort of the main difference. We have a lot of smart technology and software solutions that are more on the B2B market. But the ecosystem in Norway is growing tremendously fast and we've seen now there was actually a story in the major business paper today and how during COVID and Corona, how many has just jumped on this trend of starting their own companies and building their own companies.

Yeah. The support system, I think is the most important for that. The awareness of being an implementer. How the ecosystem together, and when you put investors smart, smart money behind a company and support me and putting it into a system where you learn from each other. The peer-to-peer learning is important, you know, coming in through these environments to help them grow.

We also see that we have benefits of locating a lot of these sort of clusters and startup communities and building an ecosystem in the district, not the district, but not in Oslo. So, there's a maritime cluster in Bergen, because that's sort of the biggest port on the West coast. There's a lot of companies that are already there.

There are some bigger capital funds there that are actually used to working with the maritime industry. You match the right competencies with the companies that are there. And the same thing, that's where the shipyards are. You know, now we're building all this, I think there's 60 new electric ferries in the works. This whole Steams program I told you about there's autonomous ferries that went, Ammonia ship, you know what I mean? All these things. So, the competency is actually not fitting in Oslo, but it's actually sitting in the, the port city, but then we're trying to sort of shift the environment also to spread the development, economic development throughout the country.

Brian Ardinger: Are you having similar issues when it comes to like brain drain where Norwegian startups want to move to America or other parts of Europe or Asia, and you're losing some of your talent or have you been very effective at kind of keeping that talent in Norway?

Hege Barnes: So, we stole a big brainer and over the last 10 years or something, where everybody wants to go to the US. Everybody wants to go to Silicon Valley to New York or the things that are happening. But now we're seeing a shift there as well. There are more staying at home. They're gaining their access to, their said competence to the environment and ecosystem to the support system at home. And then coming abroad.

It sort of goes cyclical a little bit, but now, as there's more of these bigger accelerator funds establishing in Oslo in particular or in Norway, then we see that they stay there first. So, we also have the mind that a lot of our smart entrepreneurs, the founders, they should go abroad.

You know, they should gain that experience. They should get a different mindset and learn that. And we know a lot of them that goes abroad and start a company. They come back. And then they change, you know, they they'd start another company, they bring their knowledge and competence back to Norway and that's hugely valuable. So yes, there's a brain drain, but a lot of that brain drain is actually returning.

Brian Ardinger: My wife is actually Norwegian. Her Great-grandfather came from Norway to settle here in Nebraska and that, so I'm personally excited about the brain drain. And we get back to Norway. I have a question on the pandemic and how has that affected Norway's Innovation efforts?

Hege Barnes: So, it has been tough, definitely. And a lot of companies in particularly companies that have industrial projects abroad or something where they actually need to travel and meet companies. We've seen though a lot of our companies are shifting and selling online or digital using digital distribution channels are much more effective.

So that's actually where we have used a lot of resources and it’s shifting the mindset and working with them on the competencies. Okay. So, you can't be there in person, but how can you actually sell using a digital platform, even if it's the B2B or direct to consumers, can you change your sort of whole business model or pivot and change your messaging a little bit and all that?

So, we've seen the business stagnant during the first phase of it. And then now it's actually picking up again, as I said, there's a lot more companies starting up and they think they're getting smarter on getting it around it. But they're supposed to be aware that in Norway, it was not a lot in the beginning when we noticed it here in the U S the case numbers were very low in Norway, the same sort of over the summer.

Now it's very intense over there. So now they actually have a higher level of cases than they had before then we've had, and all of Europe, except for UK and a few other countries are slower. in the vaccine distribution, you know, so there is a little bit of concern that this is stretching out a little bit longer.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely.

Hege Barnes: I think the pandemic has affected everybody equally across the world. The thing that normally is that we have a good support system, you know, they are taking care of all of this. A lot of funds being put into they've got a lot of crisis package. Nothing is perfect. But there's been a new package coming for a new pack and help support that. So that, I, I guess there's a lot of opinions there, whether it's been good or bad, but it's been in effect, the government is on the case.

Brian Ardinger: Then the good thing about disruption, however bad it is, it forces folks to be more innovative and think differently about the problems that they're facing, and forces action a lot of times. So, it'll be interesting to see how everybody comes out of this. I guess the last question I want to talk about is how can companies in the U S learn from, or work with things that are going on well in Norway, when it comes to innovation?

Hege Barnes: Yeah, that's a good question. As with anything, I think a dialogue, that's the best thing, finding a meeting place. Joining in on some of these chat forums or whatever that is. And meeting up, teaming up with some of these organizations and there's interest for us, you know, for whether are you into smart mobility or whether it's software B2B for whatever it is.

So, there's different for us and you can join in and have that personal dialogue, I think is key. And that's what we think goes through the pandemic is as sure. But we are also using a lot of tools in this one, TheExplorer.no , where we share all the smart solutions out of Norway. I mean, you can actually reach the companies and the people in Norway.

We are trying to share what we know is to share. It's of course, a sales channel as well, but it's also an open sort of Innovation portal that you can see what is happening. You can look at the different solutions and you can start a dialogue with a potential partner and customer.

We see a lot of what we are doing is also this whole sustainable. So we’re trying to get, why is this, this whole, EV campaign or why is Norway? So why this 50% of the Norwegian population, or why this 50% of new cars being sold, being electric, you know? Yes. There are incentives from the government, you know, that's helped that drive that along for sure. But it's also this whole awareness of sustainability on the government of the private, of industry, sort of facilitating all this. And that information is widely available, and we are happy to share any.

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Brian Ardinger: I've just been impressed with, you know, things that are coming out of Norway. I saw the University of Norway had a brilliant ad campaign in response to the GM commercial as well, talking about the country and embracing this innovation mindset and that. So, I'm super glad that you had a chance to come on Inside Outside Innovation and share what's going on in a little bit different place in the world and help us understand what's going on over there and, and vice versa. If people want to find out more about yourself or about Innovation Norway, what's the best way to do that?

Hege Barnes: So, Innovation Norway that I know, that you can find all of us. I'm also on LinkedIn, Hege Barnes, theExplorer.no. That's actually all green solutions to the world from Norway. So that's why we shared all that. So, but you can find us openly on InnovationNorway.no, all my colleagues or myself. I'm happy to continue this conversation.

Brian Ardinger: I'm sure we will look you up. Hege, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Hege Barnes: Thank you. Thank you. So excited to be here.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kathy Hannun, co-founder of Dandelion Energy, a Google X spin out and largest geothermal home energy company. Kathleen and I talk about the trends in the clean energy space and her experiences of launching a successful startup out of Alphabet's Google X Lab. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Kathy Hannun, Co-founder of Dandelion Energy

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Kathy Hannun. She is the co-founder of Dandelion, a Google X spin-out and the largest geothermal home energy company. Welcome.

Kathy Hannun: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Kathy, I'm excited to have you on. As a lot of our listeners know, we try to bring on the people that can give us insight into new trends and new perspectives on innovation, but also people who can bring us insights and perspectives on the process of innovation. And I thought you could do a great job of both. So, what is Dandelion?

Kathy Hannun: So, Dandelion is a home geothermal company. What that means is we take a homeowner's furnace or boiler out of their home. And we replace it with a geothermal heating and cooling system. So, this is a heat pump that goes where the furnace or boiler used to be, connected to what are called ground loops, which are plastic pipes buried under the homeowner's yard.

And these ground loops are exchanging heat with the yard. So, in the winter they're drawing heat into the house, that's then processed through the heat pump to boost the temperature. And then in the summer, the whole thing works in reverse. We're actually taking heat out of the house, much like an air conditioner does and putting it into the ground.

Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things about this company, you've just raised a $30 million funding round with Breakthrough Energy Ventures. And you're taking what used to be very much a niche luxury and trying to bring it into the mainstream technology. So how did Dandelion get started? How did it come to be?

Kathy Hannun: You're exactly right. Dandelion is really trying to take what has traditionally been a very expensive niche product, geothermal heating and cooling and making it mainstream. So, to be clear, like we did not invent geothermal heating and cooling. This has existed for decades. It's very popular in Sweden, but what we're trying to do is just make it really common. You know, much more common in this country.

And the way we got started was I was actually working as a rap evaluator at Google's X Lab. So, this is the part of Google that comes up with like the self-driving car balloon internet, or, you know, a lot of the futuristic moonshot technologies. And I was looking for a great opportunity to do something impactful in energy. Specifically, I wanted to find an opportunity to really grow clean energy and heating and cooling buildings really stood out to me because unlike a lot of other consumer energy sectors like cars or even electricity, there really isn't nearly as much activity in trying to figure out how to make buildings that use more clean energy. Right?

When we looked at the different solutions that you could bring to the problem heat pumps stood out so clearly. Like here's this technology that already exists. It's proven to work. It's like geothermal heat pumps are the most efficient possible way to heat and cool your home. So of course, then the next question is, well, if they're so good, why is no one using them? Right. And that was because they were too expensive.

And so, as we studied what made them expensive, we realized a lot of the reasons they were super expensive weren't fundamental reasons. They were all just either a function of the way the industry was set up or the technologies that were being used at that time. And we thought, you know, we could really make a difference here.

Brian Ardinger: So, what do you see as the path to mass adoption compared to other cleantech types of technologies like solar out there?

Kathy Hannun: I think what we'll see with heat pumps is going to be very similar to what we've seen with solar over the past 15 to 20 years. We're just in the early innings with heat pumps and solar as well, along the way. But I think in the same way that, you know, maybe 15 years ago, solar was a very niche technology where either the very wealthy or the very committed, like hobbyist could get it.

But for the typical homeowner, it wasn't something they have necessarily heard of or would know anyone who had. And then today you literally cannot go to a neighborhood and not see solar on somebody's house. I think, I think that is what is going to happen over the next decade with heat pumps.

Brian Ardinger: So, from a business perspective, how are you seeing the geothermal space playing out? What makes it different? What makes it exciting? And, and what are some of the challenges that you're seeing?

Kathy Hannun: I think one of the things that certainly differentiates geothermal is you have to put those ground loops under the yard. So, one of the big obstacles we identified at the very beginning was that there isn't really like drilling equipment that's purpose built for the suburban home, right? There's like no other thing you have to do in a suburban yard that involves drilling hundreds of feet into the earth. And so that was one of the first problems that we really explored at X. And then we've continued to develop as an independent startup.

We've created a set of drilling equipment, that's purpose-built for this exact industry. So, you know, we thought about what would your drilling equipment look like if it was designed to install ground loops in suburban yards? So, we wanted to make sure it could fit in small yards. We wanted to make sure it was very clean because homeowners don't like a lot of disturbances in their yard. We wanted to make sure it was cost effective so we could offer a good price to customers.

So that's been one sort of major pillar of what we've been doing, but there have been others as well. We had to look into really mainstreaming the heat pump and creating a product that was scalable. We had to look into how do we provide the right financing tools to customers like the solar industry has done, so that you don't have to pay for everything upfront, but you can actually pay over time as you're saving money.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's go back to the Google X experience. A lot of corporate accelerators out there, they oftentimes take on that Horizon One or Horizon Two types of innovations, you know, things that are closer to the core or slightly adjacent to the core. Google X is known for taking, like you said, moonshots. Can you talk a little bit about the Google X experience? What's it like, how do you go about evaluating ideas and launching something like Dandelion?

Kathy Hannun: Yeah, it was an incredible opportunity to get to work there, especially just because it's so rare to have the license to think of ideas that are so different than what's been done. And at such a large scale as Alphabet is willing to tackle.

And I think a lot of what I really loved about Alphabet overall, including X is that the culture is very bottoms up. So, there's like a lot of the employees drive initiatives. That then get, you know, the successful ones get adopted by the company overall, like Gmail is a successful example of this famously.

The process was, you know, we have a lot of freedom that those of us who are on the team looking for these new ideas. Our only criteria were we needed to be looking for technology businesses. So, there are a lot of big problems in the world that are truly big problems and solving them would make a huge difference, but they're not technology problems, they're policy problems or economic problems, or, you know, any sort of thing.

But Alphabet was very committed to, you know, we're a technology company, we want to do technology problems. So that was one thing. The other was we had to look for opportunities that were of a big enough scale. So, the business needed to be able to grow, to be a massive business, just to make it worth the while of investing all the resources that Alphabet was willing to invest and to make it meaningful to Alphabet if it were successful.

And then we were asked to look for problems that would truly make the world a better place, which sounds so, maybe Pollyanna and it's very subjective. Right. And no one was pretending it wasn't, but I think there truly was an authentic desire to really try to do something useful for humanity, you know? So, what a privilege to get, to try to work on problems that could be huge and impactful to the world and to have the freedom to really look in whatever domain we thought would get us there.

And I would say like one advantage of focusing on clean energy is that it's very easy to make the case that it's useful and that it would make a big difference if you figured it out.

Brian Ardinger: So, did you go through the process of finding your own ideas? Was the idea of that hire smart, intelligent folks and have them experiment and pick things that they want to work on and then iterate through that. And then hopefully one or two would get to a point where it could spin out as a business or walk me through that process.

Kathy Hannun: The Rapid Evaluators, so the team I was on, we had freedom to either, some people on the team were PhD chemists, or like very senior software engineers, you know, lots of different backgrounds. So, we could either come up with ideas ourselves or look outward, right? Like just survey the landscape of what was going on in the world and bring sort of those ideas in house. It was our responsibility to construct sort of the case, right? Like what is given a technology or an idea that we found. Build the case. Like why should X be interested in this?

And then we would pitch essentially that case or that idea to the management team of X. So. This included X's leader, Astro Teller, but also its head of finance and it's head of operations and it's head of product. And then if we made a strong enough compelling enough case, we would be, we would get a certain amount of funding to pursue the initial stages of the idea.

And it was almost at that time a process that mimicked the process of funding, a startup, right? Like the first pitch. It was mostly about the idea and like the promise of the idea and the funding amount wasn't super large. It was just enough to sort of prove out, de-risk the initial phases. And then once we had done that, we would come back to that same group, report back on our progress, and then ask for additional funding.

But the burden of proof would be higher. Right. It ratchets up every time, sort of in relation to the amount of funding we were asking for. Right. And that was the process. I should say that it might have evolved. Right. I haven't been there since 2017. So that was the process circa 2017, but I'm sure it's evolved a little bit since then.

Brian Ardinger: Well, the idea of iterative bets based on evidence, like you said, it came from the startup world, but it seems to apply to, corporates should be looking at that as an option as well, because I think oftentimes, they take the approach, well, here's your $10 million R & D budget. Come back and tell me in a year, if it worked. Versus much more of an iterative approach to taking ideas that you don't know if they're going to work and moving them through a particular process. When an idea like Dandelion came to be, you pitched your initial thesis and that. At what point, does it spin out into a startup?

Kathy Hannun: So, at one of those check-ins, it was clear to all of us, right. It was clear to me as the leader of that project. It was clear to the management of X. There was a lot going for Dandelion in the sense that it looked like there was a big market, it looked like it could be a big impact. And it was certainly a technology idea.

However, despite that, it wasn't necessarily the best fit for Alphabet. You know, like what we do is install heating and cooling systems in homeowners’ yards starting in the Northeast of the US. There's really almost nothing in common to what we do as a business, to what Alphabet tends to do. And it just wasn't a very good fit as an Alphabet company.

And so rather than force fit it, I pitched the idea that we could spin it out and have it be a standalone startup. And I think I was able to do that with this idea because it's not the type of idea that requires a huge amount of capital upfront before you can commercialize.

So, for example, the self-driving car does, right. It really requires like a decade and billions of dollars and you really have to invest to create a car that can drive itself. For geothermal heating and cooling, we did not. We could just be a startup. Commercialize, learn from our customers iterate quickly, and then use those proof points to raise more money and sort of fuel our growth.

And I think that that was a better structure for us because it really forced us to focus on the right things sooner. So, we all agreed this would be a good path for Dandelion. And then it was just a matter of figuring out how do you spin a startup out of X? So, we all worked together on that project for a few months, but then we were successful, and it officially spun out in the spring of 2017.

Brian Ardinger: And so now you're going concern, you raise additional capital, what's next in Dandelion's path, and what are you looking forward to?

Kathy Hannun: I'm really looking forward to expanding our geographical footprint. So, we started the company in New York. And we've been primarily a New York company in our early years. We recently last year expanded into Connecticut and we'll continue that expansion and accelerate it this year. I'm also really looking forward to continuing our R & D and our technology development, when it comes to heat pump products.

Our heat pump is much less expensive than what was available before. And it has made geothermal accessible to so many homeowners that could have never gotten it before Dandelion, which is like very rewarding and something that I really love about the opportunity to do Dandelion.

But I think there's a lot more work to do, right? We're still in the very early phases of the technology and there's more product development we have in store that will make different types of heat pumps that are a good fit for different types of homes that we can't serve today.

And another example is the solar industry has done a great job of investing in finance products. So, there's PPAs and leases and loans, and like just lots of choice for the customer. None of that existed in geothermal. We do have a loan today that we offer that about half of our customers take advantage of, but we think there's a lot of opportunity to extend the products that we offer to include some of those other ones that might make this financially feasible for customers that can't do it today. So, there's still so much to do. Like we're really in the very earliest days.

Brian Ardinger: And are you looking at different markets? Like right now you're in residential. Are you're looking at smaller commercial types of opportunities or...?

Kathy Hannun: Today we're not. Today we're very focused on residential. What I will say though is that until now we've been very much focused solely on going into existing homes and replacing furnaces and boilers with heat pumps. One of our investors in this last round and in prior rounds is Lennar. One of the largest home builders in the US.

So, we're really excited to partner with them and extend this technology into new construction, because why put a furnace into a new home to begin with, especially as, especially as we see like all of these cities banning natural gas, you know, like there's just so much momentum. Pushing the building sector away from fossil fuels, so I think it will serve builders well to just have electrified homes to begin with.

Brian Ardinger: And then the last question is what other trends or things are you excited about politically or otherwise that you see the opportunity come to fruition of what you originally saw with Dandelion and where it's going to go?

Kathy Hannun: Well, I would say that I never expected in 2017, the change would happen so quickly. So, like, I did think electrification would be a trend. I did think that clean energy would be a trend, but like I would have never imagined there would be this much momentum so quickly, which is really exciting. So just the fact that we're seeing this recognition, that natural gas really isn't a clean fuel.

I'm like we can't keep installing it. If we're going to meet any of our emissions targets and sort of a greater willingness of policy makers and just citizens to put the policies in place that will transform our economy to clean energy.

I think there's a greater awareness that clean energy will create jobs. It's not going to be terrible for the economy. Like we are creating a lot of jobs. There's just a lot like that, that gives me a lot of confidence that this trend has already gained enough momentum that there's no stopping it, you know. So that's very exciting because of course that's exactly what we're doing and what we're trying to help make happen.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Well, definitely exciting times ahead. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about Dandelion, what's the best place to reach out to, or look at?

Kathy Hannun: I would encourage people to go to Dandelionenergy.com. And they can learn all about the company. Feel free to reach out to us at hello@dandelionenergy.com.

Brian Ardinger: Awesome. Well, Kathy, thank you for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to seeing what's next in the future and appreciate you sharing your insights.

Kathy Hannun: Thanks so much again for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust and Get Results Faster. This is part of our IO Live was recorded in front of the live audience. And Stefano and I talk about what it takes to align teams, build trust, and get better results. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to our IO Live event. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. As always, we have another amazing guest. This is our first Inside Outside Innovation podcast of 2021, that we're doing live. We're super excited to have a special guest here. Stefano Mastrogiacomo is the author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast. Welcome Stefano to the show.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor and hello to all of our listeners and viewers.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on here. I think you wanted to show some slides and give the audience a little bit of background on the book and then we'll get into a Q and A session.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Yes, of course. Thank you. So, I'm going to share the screen right now. This book, High Impact Tools for Teams, fully integrates with the Strategizer series. And as you know, the Strategizer series proposes amazing tools to help team innovate and deliver creative products and services. In this journey, in delivering innovation, I started working with teams in 2000.

So as a project manager, I've been using many of these tools, starting from delivering a banking application for large teams. We thought that there was a gap to be covered, which is the human side of innovation journeys. And mostly what I'm talking about here is how can we help cross-functional teamwork do better.

In particular, make us more successful team members, because these are journeys in very difficult conditions. A lot of uncertainty. Things keep changing all the time. And so the idea was how to help us become more successful team members and more successful project managers, knowing that there is real room for improvement. This was a study entitled we waste a lot of time at work. Where they reported that 50% of meetings are considered unproductive and a pure waste of time.

And that was true before the pandemic. I don't know about you, but at least for me, I've participated in numerous Zoom meetings now, where actually I felt that that statistic could be even worse when the meeting isn't structured, unfocused, and on top of that, we have the barrier of distance, and all the constraints of these new communication channels.

So, we published that book. It's been a long journey, been like 15 years in the making. Where we designed, experimented, draw into many various disciplines like psycholinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, things that could help us design tools that help create better alignment in the team. As things keep changing all the time, build more trust and psychological safety. And we know the, I'll come back on that later, the impact of trust, the direct impact of trust, on the capacity to innovate in a team, and in more generally, how to communicate better.

So, this was prior to the pandemic. You know how important it is for us, that things are visually shared by the team. That's why we designed these canvases. And that's how we used to work prior to the pandemic. And if you allow me and let me share you a workshop that took place last week. Same setting, but this time online having in parallel Zoom and digital whiteboard.

So, what you see here is 110 agile professionals together. Establishing a team contract. You have 110 agile professionals arguing and exchanging, brainstorming on rules of the game to hold more productive meetings, using one of the templates that is presented in the book, namely the Team Contract. So that tool, called the Team Contract, is a tool designed to help teams very quickly define and agree together on team rules and behaviors.

Why do we believe this is important, but first of all, let me show you an example of how it works. So, the idea is we sit together in front of that poster, whether it's in the same room or on a digital whiteboard. This is a simplified version of a real Team Contract. And that's where every team member, before we enter the journey, especially if we are a newly created team or if the project is very different from what we're used to do. The idea is let's sit together and respond to these two questions.

One. What are the rules and behaviors that we want to abide by in our team during that journey? And as individuals, do we have preferences to work in a certain way. I mean, we all have maybe certain preferences, so let's put it that, all these things out there, and you can see here, some of the examples of what people put on these team contracts.

It changes a lot the fact that these are said, and shared in the beginning versus not doing it, and keeping all this in our mind. Presupposing that the other think the same thing we do. That actually is a potential source of conflict. As you know, given the pace at which innovation journeys take place.

So, this is a very simple example. A team contract conversation typically lasts between 20 minutes to one hour, depending on the complexity of the rules the team wants to put in place. And the rules we agree are in the center. And also, we can define things that we don't want to see in the team. For example, here, not apologizing, if not attending, to give a very simple example.

Now that has implications, that very fact of making the rules of the game visible and transparent by everybody in terms of psychological safety. As we know how to position that increases our confidence that we know on which rule we will play. And psychological safety, I'm quoting here at the amazing work of Amy Edmondson is the belief, that the team is a safe place for me, for interpersonal risk-taking, that I will not be punished, humiliated if I speak up.

And that is crucial for innovation journey, because I guess one of our worst enemies in innovation journeys is silence. When we don't feel confident enough to share our ideas with the rest of the team, because that might backfire on us. So very simple poster, but with the domino effect of important consequences, for the later unfolding of the innovation project.

Another tool, for example, very quickly here presented in the book is called the Team Alignment Map. And this is a co-planning tool. This tool is as information keeps changing all the time. The idea was to have a very simple poster on which we can align frequently whenever we actually needed. But especially in the beginning of a project, where the level of alignment, the need of alignment is the highest because we have all different views.

So that poster, what's new with that poster is that we plan together. It's no longer a ping pong mechanism. We're sitting together and we talk about each other's role and negotiate a few things. Let me show you an example of how this works. Just also before I show you the example, know that Geneva's University Hospital has used the Team Alignment Map to become a COVID dedicated center in just five days.

And we're talking about an institution of 10,000 employees, with 2000 patients. And they manage that successfully. So, I'm giving that example because the poster looks simple. However, the effects are major, and the case is well-documented on Strategizer's website if you want to learn more about that.

And I also use at home with my kids, but that's a different story. So how does it work? Very quick example. So, we sit in front of the poster again in a meeting room or online a digital whiteboard. So, let's say we want to run an innovation sprint about an idea. We have to finish that by the end of this month. This is the period. And we start discussing together. First, the joint objectives, the first column you see here.

So, this team agrees to design and run experiments, coach teams on the process itself of innovation, and also ensure team set up and is driven forward. So, the first column, consistent responding to the question, what do we intend to achieve together? And what matters really is that we do that together.

Next step, we move to the next column, okay. Who is doing what? And for whom? And we place next to each objective, people who commit to that objective. So, all the team agrees to design and run experiments. There is fortunately, a Strategizer coach in the room, to coach teams on the process. And the executive sponsor accepts the responsibility with the team to ensure a team set up and is driven forward.

Now it's not finished. Every human activity uses resources. So, let's have a conversation, not about resources in general. But what do you need to do your part? What I need to do my part, and let's be clear about that. So, for example, we need the Strategizer app, and we have it. Let's put that in green. We need 15 Mondays, but we miss that resource. So, let's have that in red, for example, and we need a budget of 10 K to run this innovation sprint and we miss it.

Now that we have the very high level discuss the resources we need. Let's take a moment to discuss what might prevent us from succeeding. And these are the risks. And let me show an example here. So, for example, we want to design and run experiments, but imagine we can't contact customers. And as another risk, not for example, not dedicating enough time.

Now, what you see here? That movement from left to right in our conversation. The idea of the Team Alignment Map is to structure the dialogue, is what we call the Forward Pass. Now there is a problem. And the problem is that we have the big picture, but we still miss 15-man days, the budget, and there are these two risks that are open.

So, a team alignment map session is concluded with the so-called backward pass, where we do a live risk mitigation together, and maybe try to make risk management also an engaging and funny process. So, let me give you an example. We miss these 15 Mondays. So, we start talking about this and we transform that problem of 15-man days missing into a new objective. For example, validate, and allocate Mondays and budget.

And the executive sponsor agrees to do that. Now, while we're doing the backward pass. We realized that that new objective and that new commitment from the executive sponsor, also takes care of the budget of 10 K and also of that risk, not dedicating enough time. And we removed simply these problems from the posters.

So, this is what we call the Backward Pass. Very quickly, another example, can't contact customers. Well, we transformed that into a new objective, which is asked the customer success team to book clients time ahead, and the executive sponsor, again, agrees to do that. We're giving a lot of work to our sponsors and we remove that.

So now, we've performed the Forward Pass the Backward Pass, before engaging into action. That makes a world of difference in terms of understanding and having negotiated who is doing what. We've measured the impact of alignment on task performance. If you ever come to one of our training, we run an experiment where you can measure that yourself.

And we've measured that for the same task to be performed, the difference in performance between an aligned team and a misaligned team is 400%w faster, up to 1200% faster, for an aligned team. What's the cost of that this 10, 20 minutes where we sit together and talk for, I believe figures that are still today after all these years, measuring that still standing for me.

Okay. So winning combination today, we live in a time of pandemic and we have to make the best, out of the communication channels out there. So definitively a communication platform like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and many others, but also double that with a digital whiteboard where we can co-construct, share, and co build brainstorm collectively and work together in parallel and prepare these spaces so that meetings are structured and guided.

I gave you one and two examples on how we do that. For example, with the Team Alignment Map and the Team Contract, because meeting time is precious and we believe that with that approach, we can bring a lot more productivity in this precious time, we spend online together.

Just before we move to the Q&A and the discussion. Brian adopting these sort of visual tools, putting things out there so that everyone can see and using a digital board is also, we believe what will remain after the pandemic. As teams, will be able to work physical in the same room while remaining connected with people that are absent. I don't believe after the pandemic, it's going to be relevant to not attend to a meeting because of distance. So, we have to prepare also for these mixed type of meetings where some people are in the room and some others are not.

To conclude, consider these five tools, presented in a High Impact Tools for Teams as plug-ins. It's not methods. It's just plugins that we can use to take care of our own teams. They work with any beautiful method available out there. And surely, I believe with the methods that are in place in your organization. And this was a short introduction about High Impact Tools for Teams.

Brian Ardinger: Awesome. Thank you very much for doing that. I did put the book preview and the Amazon link in the chat. We are going to open this up to Q & A and live discussion, but I'll get the ball rolling. You know, one of the things we think about in innovation, we often have this misperception that the lone inventor or the lone person in the garage comes up with new ideas and that, but we all know if you've been in the trenches of building things, it takes a team to do that. Why are teams so important in making innovation work?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Because we're solving complex problems, Brian there is a limit to what a person can do now. I mean, we have amazing capacities, amazing capabilities, amazing skills, and the challenges we're facing are of complex nature now.

Brian Ardinger: You've been in the trenches and worked with teams for a long time. Like you said, I think you've been building this book over the last 10 years and looking at examples. And how does this all work? Where do most teams go wrong? Is it the forming portion of it? Is it later on when things go wrong and they run into obstacles, where do most teams go wrong in this particular process?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: At least in my experience, but I have some data to support my thinking, I believe we neglect two key aspects of teamwork. We take that for granted actually. The first aspect is mutual clarity. Share their understanding. All these are synonyms. In the book, I refer to that as a Team's common ground, is the fact that we share the same information and remain on the same page. Perception. Gaps is one of the biggest enemies of team performance.

And that's where I believe there is a neglect, because we take it for granted that communication is going to be successful or that people think, or know what we know, while it's not the case. That is challenge number one. And challenge number two, is in what climate are we working? Is the climate safe enough for me to really speak out, exchange my ideas with others, so that information flows freely, and triggers an incredible domino effect?

The domino effect is not that complicated. If I speak up, my information comes to you. You might see that differently than you will change perspective. We start entering into learning behaviors. And from learning behaviors, we enter into complex problem solving, because we benefit from the richness of our different perspectives.

Now what enables this virtuous chain is the climate and the quality of our relationships. And that is also for me a blind spot. That explains why some teams, even if peoples are not in question individually, we might have super talented people. The challenge is in the interaction between these people where mutual understanding and psychological safety is not taking care of.

Brian Ardinger: And that's one of the things I like about this book and about the Strategizer series in general is it gives a visual way to kind of walk you through the steps, and to give you visual way to ask the questions they don't always get asked. And this idea of collaborative planning and building the team together and thinking through the core questions seems to be one of the key differentiators that I've seen versus other team dynamic applications I've seen out there.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: This is a great point, and I'd like to quote Peter Drucker here, the management thinker. He was saying in the sixties already, I believe, you cannot manage a knowledge worker. Of course, if I hire you as a specialist, there is no way I can tell you what you do, because that's just specialty.

Now imagine a cross functional team. One of the strong assumptions between the book is that the best manager in the world today, when we're confronted with the cross-functional team is not a single person. It's the team. So that's why we spent quite some time designing, refining these tools so that they are accessible very quickly, and can be put in practice very quickly by any team member, because we believe it's a shared responsibility now to feel accountable for the success of the team.

Brian Ardinger: So how do you introduce these new techniques into an existing or a long running team? What are the typical barriers that you encounter when you do this and how can teams effectively introduce these new tools into an already existing system?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: That's a great question. In the beginning, I was doing a mistake. I was starting by explaining some theory why it's important and so on. And now I don't do that at all anymore. When I introduce these new tools in a team, I asked them, please, what is the current challenge you have? And we start immediately, immediately, no explanation.

We start immediately by solving one of the current problems with these tools. And then at the end, I ask them was that useful. And then they are maybe more open to listen to the theory and so on. And I mean, I start by solving a concrete problem together with the tools. That's how I introduced it.

Brian Ardinger: Is it best to have a third-party kind of moderator walk the team through that? Or how would you suggest teams introduce these tools into the dynamics?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: It's true that we've built these tools as self-coaching tools. However, to be guided in the first steps, they're not complicated, but if you do it right with an experienced facilitator, so for example, with the case of transforming the Geneva as a hospital in a COVID dedicated center, we had a facilitator because people wanted to focus on the content.

If you wish to have an experienced facilitator brings benefits. I, I, in my opinion, in two situations, one when you're introducing them for the first time. And then second, when even the, if the stakeholders, they know the tools, but they want to be focused so that they don't have to think of the process. So, these are the two areas where I see a lot of benefit in having someone external.

Brian Ardinger: Do you see the power and the tools being in the fact that it forces the teams to kind of work through the problem together? Or is it the fact that it asks and forces questions to be asked and answered that communication portion of it? What's the key component to using these tools well and where do you see that playing out?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: To communicate has Latin roots, and it means to put in common. What these tools do is provide a structure to put things in common that are based on solid science. One poster for example, is how to put things in common to maximize each other's contribution of the work we have to do. Another one, so this is pure efficiency on processes and work.

Another tool is how to put in common things that help improve the quality of our relationship. So, if you wish what matters is the conversation we have, what these tools do is provide guidance for it in a transparent and visible way for everybody. But what matters is the conversation we're having? Yeah. Okay. That's where collective power comes from. The tool guides that.

Brian Ardinger: Guides you through what questions to ask and makes sure you're not missing things.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Exactly. Exactly, exactly. And a lot of experiments, a lot of experimentation to get to that level of simplicity and have like the right, what we call trigger question so that the conversation goes in the right direction and create the right set of information for us to be effective together. A lot of design, oh.

Brian Ardinger: So, we want to make this session as interactive as possible since we are doing it live. We've got a number of people in the chat room here. You can either ask your question in the chat or also this particular tool is Run The World. So, it actually allows you to grab the mic and come on stage if you'd like to ask your question.

So, if somebody has a question for Stefano, you can click the little icon with the mic. As folks are figuring that out. Can we talk a little bit about diversity in teams? You mentioned cross-functional teams and that, but how important is diversity in teams and what's your experience or what case studies have you seen revolving around this idea of diversity and making sure you have the right people on the right team?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Diversity is paramount, and it has multiple dimensions. From our cultural background to our specialty, I believe it's a source of creativity. Now that source of credible creativity, under the constraints of time, the pressure, I still believe deserves some guidance on how to be channeled in the right direction. So, there is a tool we haven't been talked about, which is the Nonviolent Request Guide. The idea is this, if we disagree because we have different point of views, due to our different background and so on et cetera.

I mean, conflict is okay if handled in a constructive manner, if not, it can damage relationships and then have a negative effect on psychological safety and what we know in innovation. So, we provided a tool to help precisely diverse teams manage disagreement in a constructive manner. I don't, I'm not sure we have time to go through that tool now, but it's a template on how to express your disagreement in a constructive and empathetic manner based on nonviolent communication for those of you who know that.

And by the way, if you Google Satya Nadella, Microsoft Nonviolent Communication, you will find a series of articles where he explains that nonviolent communication is probably what helped him turn Microsoft toxic culture around to become what they are today. So again, here, diversity crucial again, how we put in common our differences, paramount.

Brian Ardinger: So, Darren in the chat asks how many different tools are in the book? I understand there's five different tools. Can you maybe just walk through what are the five tools and what are they good for?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Five, Cinque, Cinq. So, we've seen the Team Alignment Map, which is to maximize each other contribution. The Team Contract, to establish the rules of the game between us. We have a tool called the Fact Finder that we designed to help each of us ask good questions. And the good question is a question that reduces the perception gap between us. And bring us back to reality and the way from presupposition, judgements, and things like that. So another tool to ask good questions, which we believe is an important quality of leadership.

We have the Nonviolent Request Guide to prepare what we're going to say when we disagree so that it's not perceived as an attack for the other person. And then we have another card, another tool called the Respect Card. Because to display a little gratitude, especially when the project has been completed in an impossible timing.

And the team is kind of being heroic. I have noticed that we tend to lack very basic rules of politeness, just like saying thank you and stuff like that. So, and that is called the Respect Card that provides many ideas on how to demonstrate respect and how to value others. These are the five tools.

Brian Ardinger: You talked a little bit about the evolution of teams. So obviously COVID in 2020 disrupted everybody and quite frankly, changed team dynamics across the board. Everybody's moved to remote environment and while that's been challenging and difficult and people have tried to figure that out. I think the next evolution, when we go back to kind of a hybrid approach might actually be harder. What's your take on how people have moved team dynamics in the COVID era? And what do you see for the future?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: The COVID amplified, in my opinion, what was there before? The biggest change I have seen during this COVID period is probably the fact that what was used by a minority, I mean, videoconferencing, digital whiteboards have been around and were used by a minority of people.

What happened during the COVID is that the majority now is moving into these new practices. And you can see that from the growth rate in adoption of Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which is absolutely stellar. Now, for me, one of the challenges there is really how do we keep everyone on board with the right skill set to benefit from these tools?

Because to multiply communication channels and platforms might not necessarily be useful to the team if they're not used efficiently. And so, for that, one of the challenges I see working with organization now is how do we infuse all these new skills in the majority, say it's a training issue.

And then second, that brings the second challenge, which is this idea of okay, I know how to use the tool, but if I transfer my old practices into this new world, we're going to have the same problem. And that's where I, and I advocate so strongly going visual and using canvases, so that we can really co-construct and work at over distance. So, this is for me, the two important things I've seen during this pandemic.

And I believe that the teams that will thrive post pandemic actually will really have the right skill set, for the majority to be fluent with the tools, they will master the tools, but we, they will also structure and go visual.

Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into some stories or case studies. Can you talk about some of your clients or some of the folks that have used this particular methodology and some of the tools and what are some of the results? And you mentioned one hospital and that, but can you talk through a couple more examples?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: So, it's been used by Doctor Without Borders. It's been used by luxury industry companies. It's used in innovation startups. As I mentioned, I use it at home sometimes with my own kids, because we need serious alignment from time to time. I have two teenagers at home, so we established Team Alignment Map for the school, and we do the team contract and the rules of the game for home.

Brian Ardinger: Do you have a war room canvas for that where you or is that on the kitchen table?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: No. So, for example, we don't, one of my teenagers, we have a team contract on the frig about the rules of the game in the house. So, and we did that, and we established that together.

One example I can share is a typical ERP project about to start in an organization and people were quite aligned. And felt they were aligned, and they were about to start the project and initiate the project. And one of the participants heard about the Team Alignment Map and said, okay, we're aligned, but let's test this tool.

They decided to sit in front of the poster. This was like about 10 people coming from all over the world for a worldwide project. And they realized during the alignment meeting, that actually they were not aligned. And that project actually has been split in three subsequent projects. And it makes a world of difference to start with one project, everyone believing it's one project, or to start with three different projects there now we understand it's three separate things.

Imagine the level of latent conflict, that has been reduced by the fact that they spend this time aligning, ah, no so we're not talking about the same thing. So that is a story I will remember for a very long time.

Brian Ardinger: Amanda has asked to grab the mic, let me invite her to the stage so she can ask her question. Let's try that out.

Amanda: So, I'm working with kind of a change management program. And what are the markers that you look for that a team or an organization is actually ready to change and start taking part in a lot of these different techniques that you've been talking.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Would you help precise the question a little bit?

Amanda: Sure. A lot of the case studies that we talked about so far, it seems like those teams have actually been ready to change. They've been ready to make this agreement and push forward and finding out where they have common ground. But some of the organizations that I work with, their economic development, community leadership, and some of them are extremely resistant to change.

And I want to find out where I should actually place my energy and place my efforts. And what I should look for that says this organization, this team, this group is ready to make this sort of agreement and push forward with this.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Oh, that is an amazing question. Thank you for asking it. I'm confronted to the same situation, each time I joined a new organization because in the end we're talking about change management also. I see two scenarios here. Scenario one is both are great for me.

Scenario one is there is one volunteering team. And with that team, we start just like working with these new practices. And when that's done appropriately, you start seeing beautiful effects in that team. And then the other teams start noticing it. And that's what I call the organic approach. It's a pure, bottom-up approach. You guys want to do this. The others don't want, so I'm not trying to convince anybody. It's just on a volunteering basis. So, the organic approach works. The disadvantage is that it takes time, for one team to deliver. And then the others...

I've experienced a situation where there has been so much positive change in one team that members from the other teams, applied to join that team. I mean, everyone wanted to go there. So that is a great signal that you're on the right path. For larger organizations that can take up to one year or two years of incubation on that bottom-up approach.

That's what I see in experience, but at the team level works beautifully. Now for having faster, implementation of these new practices, definitely it's leadership support. If the top is convinced and I have recent examples of that, where like the C level people said, this is what we need now for our practices. Level of alignment happens at stellar speed.

Brian Ardinger: Is there a particular tool that you should start with?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Yeah, it's definitely the Team Alignment Map, which helps everyone understand who is doing what negotiate resources, talk and mitigate risks together. That is the best tool to start with. I wouldn't start necessarily with the team contract because then we enter into rules of the game relationships and so on.

So that'll requires a certain level of practice already and opening to it. But the Team Alignment Map is a great way to start.

Amanda: How do you market success? I've had some teams that have actually succeeded, but how would I package that and display that so that others would look at that and say, yes, that is my thing I need to do.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: I define success in using two criteria. First, we deliver what we intended to deliver. But what we imagined we would do is what we have done. And second, the vast majority of stakeholders is satisfied. So, it means we deliver, but not in any condition. There has to be some shared level of satisfaction when we have completed our work. So, these are my two criteria to define success.

Brian Ardinger: Are there ongoing measurements to see if you're on the right track? Is it something like a Net Promoter Score where you kind of continually evaluate the progress?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: I was talking about the definition of success. So now how do you measure progress? Of course, you have all the body of knowledge of project management. As I said, these are plugins. Okay. So, they're not substitutes to a scrum or the PMI or waterfall approaches and, and the other KPI methods, scorecards you want to put in place. They're not supposed to do that.

The result one way to use the Team Alignment Map is a mirror of our trajectory. I'm not sure we have time to develop that, but there is one way, very simple way to understand if our team is on the right path using also the team alignment map as a KPI for the trajectory of our team.

The idea is simple. If we are aligned, we will get there faster. So, if we can use the Team Alignment Map to display our level of alignment versus our level of perception gaps. So, for example, one person might think that the objectives are clear while another person thinks that the objectives are unclear.

One person thinks that we have enough resources and other thinks that we don't have enough resources. So, the Team Alignment map can turn into a vote system. Votes take literally one minute. And the dispersion of votes is an excellent KPI for the trajectory of our project. So, this is a, an additional KPI, as I said, these are plugins you can use on top of your preferred methodology.

Brian Ardinger: Anybody else want to come up or again, you can put your questions in the chat.

Amanda: I do actually have one other question. Once you've gotten like the successful team that's out there. And so, you've talked about some different metrics and different ways to have that conversation within the team, but I'm looking at ways to demonstrate the value of the process too. I work across a state. So, I'm looking at how to demonstrate the value of this process across organizations, not just within it.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: I think I get it. You tell me if I'm wrong, but this is outside of the pure collaboration space we are discussing. But what I've realized when I have to onboard people on a new project, it's also, if I'm struggling, implementing the idea, one of the first things I do is really try to reframe the challenge, the problem, not from my perspective, but from their perspective.

And then use, for example, the value proposition canvas, the right side of it, or an empathy map, to understand their challenges and how this initiative we're having brings value to them. Most of the time I struggled pushing a project was because I was presenting things from my perspective. And that's the best I can say for now.

And then, so it takes work really to put these posters out there and imagine for each stakeholder, what would be a benefit. For them in joining that initiative. So, it's changing perspectives and showing the benefits in their own words.

Amanda: So, I'll put what I did wrong out there for anyone who has also done this wrong. I triggered a fear in people. I did it completely unintentionally, but I started a workshop. I used the Miro as the shared whiteboard. But I found out that people were actually afraid to use the tool because it was unfamiliar. So, I placed an unfamiliar process on top of an unfamiliar tool and it was just too much new and then it raised people's hackles and I was just shut down immediately.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Yes. So, you know, that, you're not the only one. It happened to me too in my early days with Miro. By the way at the time, it was called the Realtime Board. I had another name when I started that's part of our learning process, isn't it? But then referring back to what I said earlier, Brian, when we mentioned, okay, what, what are the teams that will and organizations that will thrive post pandemic?

I think when we start using these new technologies, we need really to onboard people on the platform itself so that they feel confident, they can play together with us because there is a playful aspect once you master these tools. So now whenever I start a new workshop with a team that needs help on a Team Alignment Map or Team Contract or reboot a project, for example.

I always make sure in the first 15 minutes, maybe half an hour, or even sometimes I have an entire hour to ensure that people know how to use the tool. That's the skills challenge I was mentioning. And one thing that is worrying me a little now is that I see a divide that gap growing between those people who know how to master that, and those who remain in the classic practices, which are okay. I send you an email with an attachment and then you work on the poorer point and then you send it back to me.

So, the way now I cope with this is really onboarding people in a playful way before we jump into the work. And I need to have evidence, personal evidence that all member of the teams are confident enough with the platforms before I make I make them actually jump into the world.

Brian Ardinger: So, you start with the tool and then move to the methodology.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: For example, it depends on if it's a startup with young, very young people. The introduction takes 10 minutes because they're digitally native. If I'm working with more senior and experienced people and professionals, sometimes I need one hour to explain all the setting and explain the different, I take this part of my successful workshop, which is to deliver a Team Management Map, but you know, the risk.

Of not doing it, that I take it from my own, one of my own failures in the beginning, because they didn't know I was using these tools every day. It's not very positive in terms of reputation and face, for a person, a competent person to be on one of these tools and don't know where to click in front of their colleagues.

And that's where I got the strongest reaction. So now, if you look at the psychology of it, it's totally understandable. Not being able to click on a digital whiteboard in front of all of your colleagues can be perceived as a sign of incompetence, and then you don't want to people in that position. So that is a mistake I did in the past. I'm not doing it anymore. Trust me,

Brian Ardinger: Well we are working on a new tool with this, with one Run The World. And so, I'm sure there's some people in the audience that are feeling the same kind of trepidation as they learn new tools and that so, but hopefully some of these things will get people more confident in working in a hybrid kind of environment.

So, we have a time for maybe one or two more questions. If people want to jump in, I would like to thank Stefano for joining us. One of the questions I have is, so you've just launched the book. You've been on a lot of podcasts and a lot of places you're trying to get feedback in that from it. What's the question that people aren't asking you that you wish they would ask?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Well, that's a tricky, tricky one. Thank you, Brian. Uh, what's next?

Brian Ardinger: What's next. So, what's next? Yes. How do you see this playing out?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: So, what we're doing now is to think, of course there is a demand for having an online course on how to use these tools. So, we started working on this. But we started on another, also another project in parallel, which is more, a deeply anchored in my heart.

Basically, these tools reflect probably most of the mistakes I did managing teams. And I wished I knew some of these things earlier in my career. So, it would have made my life a lot easier. So, we started with a group of volunteers. Or project, and I'm opening a, the conversation here. If some volunteers want to join us on how to teach collaboration in schools.

And what we're trying to do now is with this group of volunteers, we're not actually targeting students. We are targeting professors. And the idea is to create a kit for teachers with playful exercise and, and so on so that these good collaboration practices can be taught early on. So that when we enter our professional lives, at least we know some of the basics that it takes quite a few years to discover if you've not been exposed to them.

So, we are building this kit for teachers and please reach out to me if you would like to join this volunteering team. We are preparing kits for teenagers, but also for graduate students. So, it's not the same exercise is not the same content.

Brian Ardinger: So, there's one other question that came in and this will be the last one we'll before we have to get off here, but how much effort do you need to put into developing the team members in addition to getting your work done and how does it fit into the everyday work flow and how much additional effort do you have to use?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Okay. So here is the thing. There is a quote in the book from a non psycho linguist called Herbert Clark and at Stanford. He said working together itself takes work. So, the answer is quite simple. If you don't invest a little time in how we're going to collaborate as a team, you're going to pay the price of misalignment later on in terms of difficulties to integrate the parts of everyone in terms of perception gaps, then things that have gone in a different direction. It's not what we expected and so on and so on.

So now if I had to put the metrics on it, I agreed to the principle that preparation and alignment is always a good thing because working together itself takes work. These tools really help do that in a very fast way. So, when I started the project now, a new team, et cetera, we spend half an hour on the Team Alignment Map, half an hour on Team Contract. I believe is not a heavy price to pay as compare to the effect it has both on our ability to innovate, and the real significant reduction of coordination problems because we predict each other, we know what the other person is doing, and so on. Half an hour and a half an hour, just as a first priority.

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Brian Ardinger: A nice initial investment to make everything go smoother throughout the process. Well Stefano thank you very much again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Tell us a little bit more about this whole world of work that we are in. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your efforts. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book and that what's the best way to do that?

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Of course, the Strategizer.com. You will find posts, articles, and a beautiful resources and references about the book. And also, I have my own personal blog, which is called teamalignment.co.

Brian Ardinger: TeamAlignment.co. Well, thank you again for coming on. Thanks all the audience for coming in and tuning in live. We will keep you posted if you subscribe and follow us at Inside Outside Innovation. At insideoutside.io you can follow more events and more podcasts that we have and appreciate your time today. Thanks everyone for joining.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Thank you for having me on bye bye. Bye. Bye.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tamara Ghandour, Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business. Tamara and I talk about innovation, what it means today in today's changing environment, and what individuals and teams can do to build their innovation muscles. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Tamara Ghandour

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tamara Ghandour. She's the Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business: How to Ignite, Scale, and Sustain Innovation for Competitive Edge.

You also have a podcast called Inside Launch Street, which I had great opportunity to be on last week when we recorded. And we said, Hey, let's get you on our show and let's share the community. So welcome.

Tamara Ghandour: Thank you, Brian, it's good to see you again. It's been so long.

Brian Ardinger: It's nice to have you on our show. You know, obviously our audience is probably overlapped to some degree, but I thought it'd be an important to get you on our show to talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there in the world of innovation.

And one of the reasons I liked your book and some of the stuff that you're doing...it's not just about the people, it's about the mechanics behind it and the blocking and tackling, and you even have an Innovation Quotient Edge Assessment that people can go through to find out how they can be coming an innovator and that.

Tamara Ghandour: We believe very strongly, and I think science has also shown us that everybody has the ability to innovate. I've been in innovation 25, I don't know so many years, I can't even count now, but you know, this because you're in it too. There was a lot of focus on the process and the initiatives and the kind of structure of innovation. But what I kept seeing time and time again, is that those efforts failed.

And when I really kind of dug into it, what I really realized is that they're failing because they weren't focusing on the people side. Like how do we as humans innovate? How do we unlock that in ourselves and our teams? How do we tap the power of diversity of thinking. How do we drive it from the inside to the outside, to the culture and kind of bubbling up from there.

So I think over the years, that's why our business has transformed into what it is. And why its been successful is because we get people at an individual anda team level to recognize their power of innovation and how to apply that in their daily world. And then from there, the initiative and the culture and the process and all that kind of follow, but I'm sure you've heard this too Brian.

It's like, I can't tell you the number of times I got a phone call from a client who says I've invested a lot of money in whatever the latest and greatest innovation philosophy is, and my team's not doing it. What do I do to get them to do it? And there's always this kind of, you know, awkward silence of, well it's not that you need to do something to connect them to the process. It's that you need to do something to connect them to themselves and how they innovate.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's a very important point. I think a lot of people think that innovation is that mad scientist or that founder, the only way you can innovate... So the fact that, we talk about this too, where you don't have to be a founder to be innovative. And, you know, first of all, it helps to define what innovation is for your company. And it's not just creating the next Uber or the next Twitter, but it can be just as simple as, Hey, I've seen a problem in our way we process things. How do we go about making it better?

And so that's what I liked about the assessment. Is it allowed everybody to play a role in innovation because I think everybody does have a role to play in creating new value in an organization.

Tamara Ghandour: Actually, I want to highlight something you said, because I think it's so important. You said that innovation doesn't have to be the next, like Uber, Twitter, Airbnb. I think we put a lot of false pressure on ourselves to make innovation this big blue skies, disruptive thing, but, and I'm sure you've seen this in your work. What I find is that, that the challenge with that is it's great. If it happens. But there's incredible opportunity to just rearrange the box you have.

And I think that when we, as the leaders go to our teams and go, we gotta be disruptive, disrupt or die, like all the cliches, right. I could come up, with what ends up happening is people shut down because they're like, well, but I'm staring at my box and my box is my reality. And you want me to go out the box, but I don't even know where to go outside the box. So like, I think there's this funny struggle that happens unintentionally when we're trying to force the next Uber.

And if you really look at Uber, it actually, isn't what it did ended up being disruptive, but it was just some mapping technology and allowing people to use their cars. And I don't mean that to put down Uber. I love Uber, but I think your question though, was around the assessment. Right?

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about like, what does it show? And one of the things I liked about it is it talked about the diversity of skill sets and that, that have to come to play, to become an innovative team.

Tamara Ghandour: So, I got super obsessed with how we, as people innovate. And I came to this realization very early on in my career that everybody is innovative. Right, I had some experiences that made me go wait a minute, did Jill and accounts payable just come up with an innovative idea? Like she's not the creative one, hold on. What is this?

Coupled with people constantly saying to me when, I do a lot of keynoting, so when I go off stage and saying things like, well, that's great Tamara that Apple does that, but what about the rest of us? Like, and how am I supposed to apply that? Me, Susie? Right.

We started to dig into the neuroscience, the behavioral psychology, like the real, like the research and the science behind our brains and how we innovate and what we came to uncover and all the research, and combining that with our years of experience, was that everybody's innovative. It's universal. That we all do it.

However, how we innovate is unique to each of us and there's actually nine styles or triggers. So, ways that we can innovate and we all have this thing. Think of it as like an equalizer. It's not that we are a void of all but two, but there are two in there that are your absolute power play, like your wellspring of innovation.

And the way I do it, the two that are me. So, I'm a risk-taker experiential, might be different than like Laura who's on my team, who's a collaborative tweaker, and we can go into what those mean if we have the time, but the people can go to the website and take the assessment and find out.

But the point of it is it's really empowering when you understand your own strengths around innovation and how that maps onto your behaviors and your actions, and really aligning that with how you operate when people are able to tap into that innovation and bring it to their work and life every day when they understand that.

So, it was a combination of years, wonderful experience, but also the science behind it that actually shows us that we all have these incredible structures for innovation, but we do it a little differently. A lot of us fall short because, see the cover of Fast Company magazine, but the article in it says, I need to meditate in the morning and be fearless, right. That's innovation.

And then I try to do it and it doesn't work for me. And I go, well, I'm not innovative. So, we have to recognize that we all do it a little differently and there's power in ourselves for that. But there's also power in, Brian if I know how you innovate, I know how to leverage you best. And if I don't, then I don't.

Brian Ardinger: Well, let's talk a little bit more about the team aspect of innovation. I think a lot of times, again, we think about the lone wolf or the person who comes up with the crazy ideas as the innovator, but...

Tamara Ghandour: And they do It all by themselves.

Brian Ardinger: Exactly. So, we know that that's not the case, but we also, I think under estimate, like how do we bring a team together, cross-collaboration and different types of skillsets to actually take on bigger problems. When do teams start in the innovation process and how does that actually evolve? And what have you seen in your experiences?

Tamara Ghandour: Can I share a couple of client stories with you? Cause I think that probably explains it best. We have worked with teams. We have an online Academy, whereas kind of like the tools, resources, and support to innovate and I have seen people and teams come in at the starting point where they're like, we're pulling the team together and we got to start with a place of innovation, but I've also seen teams come in that feel very siloed, disengaged, stressed out, especially with everything we've been through kind of in the last year.

So, there's a lot of places you can start from, but let me share an experience I had. I was working with a huge reseller of electronics, a billion dollar company. And this was the internal auditing team. So, this wasn't the sexy marketing team, right? It wasn't the R and D team. It wasn't the innovation team.

These are the guys and gals that are responsible for operational excellence inside the company. And the leader of the team. And in fact, I have this whole story in my book too. It was one of many, but he was brilliant. He said, you know, we have this team we're global. We got this when we could all get together.

So, you know, we're coming together, and we've got new challenges that we're facing. We've got to dial up innovation, we're all smart. We're all good at our jobs, but we've got to dial up the collaboration and the innovation. I see it framed at the edges, but the challenges that are coming up are bigger than what we faced before. So, we got to do this.

Well, so everybody takes the assessment. Everybody's does their IQ like knows what their everyday innovator style is. They're all excited of course, to learn about themselves. But then we do this exercise that was the eye-opening for them. The first was about 25 of them. I broke them into teams where everybody is the same.

So, everybody in this team is a collaborative. Everybody in this team is a futuristic. And with M&Ms I have them build this thing. And you could see. So, first of all, the inquisitive, which is all about innovating by asking questions, didn't finish the exercise because they were too busy asking the other questions.

The collaboratives, which is all about like intersection employment perspectives had a fabulous time and talked on and on, but the ideas were meh that they came up with on the table, right. Futuristics were too far in the future to like pull it back. So, they're all brilliant in their own. Right. But when they were together and acting the same, the ideas were okay.

Then I broke them up into diverse teams. So, they had a little bit of everything at the table and there was some discomfort, there were challenges. And once they figured that out, right. Cause now you've got to deal with people, not like you. Who think differently and you've got to respect it and understand and pull it out of them really.

But the, Oh my God, Brian do things that they came up with were game-changing and this just a hypothetical exercise, but they actually came up with stuff that they could apply to their world. I did this exercise with the Hilton as well. And the same kind of thing, the client afterwards said I think the most brilliant thing that came out of this is we now understand how much stronger we are as a team when we recognize each other's differences and actually pull it out.

We're so busy trying to get a herd mentality that we're killing innovation. We're having a great time. But we're killing innovation in the process. So hopefully that answers your question kind of where we're headed.

Brian Ardinger: That's fantastic. I'd love to get your perspective on what have you seen, maybe the mistakes that were happening 10 years ago versus the. Mistakes that are being made now, when it comes to innovation. And what have you seen from that trend line, from where companies have moved from innovation to where they are now?

Tamara Ghandour: Yeah, I think you, and I've talked a little bit offline about this too. I think the big shift, which I'm most excited about and hopefully will continue to push in that direction, and help our clients do that. I do think there's a democratizing of innovation.

So, I do think that innovation used to be highly siloed. It was a select group of people with a special t-shirt right. And they got to do crazy stuff. And in fact, I used to work with a large consumer-packaged goods company, and they had a whole disruptive innovation team. This was about 10 years ago, actually.

And their ideas were brilliant. And never went anywhere because they put that idea ball all over the fence to the base brands, the people that were running the business and they were like, duck and weave, we want nothing to do with it.

I do think we've come to this realization that innovation shouldn't be siloed. And also that it's not only for the select few. We used to believe that innovation was like this magical thing that you know Brian, maybe you had, and I don't, but maybe if I'm by you you'll say something brilliant. I can like attach onto.

So, you know, we attach these special titles to people. I think that's starting to go away. And I think to your point earlier about innovation also being small, I think companies are starting to realize that the most innovative companies are innovating across the business, not with one breakthrough product or service that happens sometimes.

But it's that innovation infused across everything that actually makes the biggest changes for them in the marketplace. So, I do think there's a shift to democratize innovation, which of course makes me thrilled because I think being an innovator and being innovative as a choice, not like you can choose to leverage that, or you could not, but it's there for all of us.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and the democratization I think has sped up as well and accelerated. Where I'd imagined two or three years ago, you were talking about disruption and people would "get it" with quotes around it. They would get it, but now they actually get it. When the fact that the world has changed under their feet in virtually every single industry, every single company has been impacted by the pandemic and other changes in and around that, that have accelerated.

And so the, you know, the speed at which people have now realized that they do need to innovate because the world is not going to be the same as it was before. I'd love to get your input or insights into what are some of the trends that you're seeing now because of that shift. And how are maybe corporations approaching you or, or thinking about it differently now that there's, that understood pressure.

Tamara Ghandour: I'm glad you asked that. It's a great question, because I think there's so many angles we could cover. So, I'm going to go outside and then come inside. I think externally to your point, innovation and disruption was this thing that we put in quotes, right? Innovate or die, disrupt, or be disruptive. Like it all sounded good, sounded really sexy, but we were at the top of our curves, our business lifecycle curves.

And as you know, every curve has a cliff or a decline and before 2020, many industries, we're on a top of that curve. And maybe there was a decline coming, but they were good enough, that they didn't have innovate. Right. And we always say success is the enemy of innovation, but it's really true because why would we, when what we're doing is working. It makes it harder to take the risk to make the investment the time the energy.

And all of that is actually harder. And I don't really even know that I really understood it until this last year. I think this last year has forced innovation because a lot of companies in a lot of industries, not just technology, right? Not just hotels with Airbnb, right? Like everybody felt it in some way.

So, I think one of the biggest trends I'm seeing is people are innovating outside of their inner circle in a way that I haven't seen. And let me give you a small business example. There's a restaurant around the corner from me that when the pandemic hit, they did what every other restaurant did at first, they went to, to go curbside, right?

And I'm not knocking restaurants. They had it rougher than a lot of industries, but this restaurant, the founders are really innovative, and they realized we've got to do more than just what we're doing on the curb. Right. That's not enough. And they realize they're in a community, of families where suddenly we had kids at home, all the time, and we were cooking all the time and we don't want to order everything over Uber Eats, like we're cooking all. And I know this because I have two boys. I'm like, they ate me out of house and home in 2020.

And so, they started creating these at-home meal kit. So, you got the experience and like the flavor and the joy of this meal, but I got to make it at home and not feel like I was just ordering in and wasting all my money.

I think those one-rung out innovations are the trend that we started to see, that we'll continue to see, because there's so much opportunity for innovation, and success in that like one, two rungs out, that we haven't explored. We either stay super close in or we try to get super disruptive and go 10 rungs out. Right. And I think one and two is the play. I think that's a big, big trend.

And then I think internally, we are seeing way more innovation in actually how we work than ever before. I was talking to a colleague of mine who owns a real estate company, with a lot of realtors and investors and all that in his company.

And he goes, you know, we had four floors in my office. He was like, I felt very important. He said, but the truth is we learned that we can work from home. So now they're taking half of one floor and they're completely remodeling the office to be this kind of flexible rotating workspace. It's going to look nothing the way it did, how we interact with our virtual meetings, our workflow process.

I think that there's this huge trend in not just the product and the business, but also our work style and our workflow as well. And I think we've all learned a lot of what works and what doesn't work and that's going to change everything.

Brian Ardinger: It's also interesting to see which companies have approached this as the opportunity to reset and look for father ahead versus the companies that have said, okay, let's just ride it out and get back to normal - quote, unquote normal.

Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see which of these types of transformations and changes actually stick. And which particular companies continue to innovate and continue to move things forward versus the ones that tried to go back to something that, you know, in my opinion is not coming back.

Tamara Ghandour: It is not coming back. Here's the thing I'll tell you this very early on, I was in a mastermind with a bunch of other people who owned businesses similar to mine, right? Like we're, we're delivering expertise and platforms and whatever. And I'll never forget one woman in there said, I'm just going to ride it out and see what happens.

And I remember thinking either I'm the idiot or she is. Yeah. Like I'm not sure which one of us is wrong. Because I'm over there making changes, hustling I'm up at 3:00 AM trying to get like this online platform developed. Right. But wasn't sure at that point, which one of us was going to be on top because it was just so new, what was happening.

But I really think that I understand being afraid of change or hesitant or wanting to really think about it. Like I get that. But to your point, I don't think we're ever going back to the way things were, so if we don't raise our heads up and start to go, where's the opportunity in this obstacle? How do I turn this uncertainty into my success into innovation?

Then here's the thing, when you stand still, the world still moves. So, you're creating a bigger disconnect between you and what you're going for. I could get on my soap box about that. I just, I get that it's hard and I've done a lot of digging into the science of fear and how to get over it, but it's happening whether we like it or not.

Brian Ardinger: So, do you have any examples either from your own business or other clients that you may be working with that seem to get it and are pushing the boundaries further forward?

Tamara Ghandour: Yeah, I'll happily pull back and be transparent and share mine because like a lot of us, I was in the situation where at the start of 2020, the rug was totally pulled out. So, we develop innovators and innovation, right, skills within companies. But I did that, and my team did that through being in person. Right. That was the whole in person.

Like we had some like some online tools and platform, and I'd always wanted to build something online, but I just, because I was at the top of the curve, like the success, was I was too busy doing what I was doing. Right.

So, as you can imagine, and for a lot of us, it just came to a screeching halt one day. I mean, really, it was just like this domino effect of cancellations, not just because they didn't want to be in person, but because my clients were trying to figure out what the heck to do. Like all of us were going well, what do we do now? Right.

So that's the situation I was in and I felt like I had two choices. Choice one was to incrementally improve, meaning take a keynote and put it online. Take a strategic session and put it online. Right. Take a workshop and put it online. And a lot of colleagues, right, your face just said it all Brian. And you're like, yeah, all right.

So that's like curbside and to go for restaurants. It's so close in it's really not even innovation. And that was one path. And then the other path I could take was to say, all right, and this is where I think my clients are doing it really well too is what are the new problems created by this change that I can solve? What are the new challenges and what are the new needs of the people that I serve that my company serves, and how do I bring my solution to them in a way that works for them?

Brian Ardinger: I think that's such a great point because I think a lot of companies thought about it from the standpoint of, well, what do I have to do now, as a company, to change, versus like, what are my customers going through right now?

And how can I address their problems because they're obviously going through the same kind of things, but maybe different on how I address those particular problems. If you only focus on what your core problems are and how you delivered it in the past, versus what are my customers really going through? I think that's a big disconnect.

Tamara Ghandour: Well, and I think a lot of us were on the hamster wheel of trying to solve yesterday's problems. But in a way that worked for us virtually, and that's it. And I think this, by the way, I think this is true across every industry. I don't know one industry that isn't trying to figure out or needs to figure out, how do I innovate against the new problems and the new opportunities.

And I think to me, that was the key to our transition, was okay we need to develop an online platform that's about driving innovation and delivering it to people who are now virtual and needed it to deal with the uncertainty, versus it's a nice to have and an added culture benefit, right? So that switched for us.

And we had to switch everything and how we did it. Do you get emails? And you look at that emails from a business that you buy from and you think, why are you sending me this? So in the retail business there, Walmart sent me this wonderful email the other day that said, Tops that will make you look good on a Zoom call.

I was like, yes, that's what I need. In that same day, and they're all trying to sell online. Right? Like online selling is the obvious part. And the same day, I got an email from White House / Black Market, who I've spent a lot of time and money in, saying evening gowns for date night for Valentines. And I was like, where am I going? Like are you kidding me?

So sorry, White House / Black Market, but you're missing the part. So, when I look at like what one company has done versus another one is solving a new problem that I have that they'd realized. And the other one is still solving an old problem. To me, that's the fundamental shift in how to be innovative right now.

Brian Ardinger: I was just reading an article today about Levi's. Apparently skinny jeans are now out and they're going to much more, a loose fit, you know, because that's what customers want. We've got that to look forward to.

Tamara Ghandour: Well, yeah, that's what I was wondering. Like, are we all going to have closets full of unfashionable 2019 clothing? But I think the point of that though is change creates new problems to solve. And that to me is that's where innovation is. That's the exciting part. That's what we help our clients do. You know, you've got to get over that hurdle and start thinking of it that way.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think to bring it back to the beginning, and you know, at the end of the day, it's going to be required by individuals to create and build that competency of innovation. That muscle of innovation. It Is not just something that again, used to be the creative thinkers in your group.

Everybody has got an opportunity now to play a role in that. And the sooner people can start building those skills and understand where their strengths are and that, and solve real problems in the marketplace, the better off we're all going to be.

Tamara Ghandour: I agree. And I think the key in what you said there too, is the fact that it's a muscle. So, the brain is not actually a muscle, but it acts like one. And so, we need to warm it up. We need to exercise it. We need to be intentional about doing innovation every day.

If you look at the difference between someone who you would consider wildly innovative and someone who's stuck, it's just a matter of practice. Right. And going to the gym of innovation, that's really the big difference. And I think that as leaders, we have to give our people, the platform, the tools, and the resources to innovate daily.

I can't tell you the number of times, and I'm sure you've seen this too. Where leaders say, I asked my team for innovative ideas and I got nothing in return. It's like, well, you did a 180 on them. Right. You've never asked them before. And suddenly you're saying, well, my team doesn't have innovative ideas. Well, the problem is not that your team doesn't have the ideas. The problem is you suddenly gone from 0 to 250 and they're not there yet. We've got to warm them up a little bit.

So, I think as leaders, we have to do a little bit more work, especially right now where we're dealing with fear and uncertainty and that on one hand shuts us down. But I think we need to do more work to warm our teams up and build that muscle that you were talking about.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think leaders to have to warm up from the standpoint of incentivizing different things in the past and recognizing that innovative ideas are sometimes going to fail and that's okay. Versus old ways and old measurements and old means of creating or building that existing business versus something new.

Tamara Ghandour: One of the things I talk about it in my book and we delve into on the Academy is it's about rewarding behaviors, not outcomes. So, I always joke about, there's a longer story in the book that we don't have time to get into, but I joke about it's like either you try something, right. It works or doesn't work, and it's either the failure shelf or is Cake on Friday. Right. And there's no in between the Russian roulette of what you're going to get. And if you're on the other side of that, why would you put your ideas and your innovation forward when those are your options.

So, I think as leaders, we want to reward the behaviors like collaborating, helping someone when it doesn't benefit them, taking a risk, speaking up in a meeting and disagreeing. In fact, that's one of the ones that I reward my team for, because as you can tell, I tend to not talk with question marks. I tend to be very declarative of everything I say, even when I'm asking you a question.

And I know that, but I don't want to drive a culture where everyone yeses me. So, I reward people for disagreeing with me, regardless of where it goes. It's irrelevant. I reward people for giving me ideas for challenges that face the company without even reading the idea, because it's not about that. It's about rewarding them for the behaviors that drive innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Well Tamara, this has been a great conversation. Thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of your insights. And I'm sure we'll have you back to talk more and keep this conversation going. I encourage everybody out there to grab the book Innovation is Everybody's Business. Go online and check out that assessment. It's really a great tool and it's free to kind of figure out where you sit. If people want to find out more about you or the book, what's the best way to do that.

Tamara Ghandour: Our website is probably the hub. So, it's gotolaunchstreet, G-O-T-O-LaunchStreet.com. So that's probably the best place. And the only thing I'd say is thank you. It's great to be on. I think actually cross-collaboration drives innovation. So, I'm always excited when I get to be on these, not just to share my world, but I learned so much. Thank you.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, thank you again for being on the show and looking forward to continuing the conversation.
That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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Innovation is Everybody’s Business: How to Ignite, Scale, and Sustain Innovation for Competitive Edge

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Johnathan Grzybowski, co-founder of Penji and on-demand graphic design service. Johnathan and I talk about the changing face of graphic design and the new trends making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Johnathan Grzybowski. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service. Welcome Johnathan.

Johnathan Grzybowski: Brian, thank you so much for having me appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. I wanted to have you on as a founder to talk about what it's like to build a startup outside the Valley, but I also want to talk about some of the new tools and trends that we're seeing that's making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Penji's one of those. And so, what is Penji and what do you do for them?

Johnathan Grzybowski: Penji is an on demand graphic design service, where our customers can essentially sign up for the service, get immediate access to the top 2% of graphic designers in the world, and be able to receive a completed project in under 48 hours. That's essentially the nuts and bolts of it.

We want to make graphic design more easily accessible and not necessarily this commodity where you have to spend thousands and hundreds and thousands of dollars in order to receive something really good and custom and unique to you. So, we're really trying to just challenge that mindset, that old school mindset of graphic design.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the genesis of Penji. How did it start and how did it grow?

Johnathan Grzybowski: We were a digital marketing agency that necessarily wasn't the best at a lot of things. However, a lot of people kept mentioning about how good our graphic designers were. So, we started interviewing people and we talked to them and we said, well, what are some problems that you have, or it comes to the marketing space.

And we started to see trends and people say that they had an issue with finding reliable talent. And then we realized that that talent translated to somebody who could execute the graphic design. So that's one aspect of it, but more so we also thought about the big picture of who we wanted to be as a company.

We are a digital marketing agency. We only helped, you know, maybe 10, 15 customers a year, new customers a year. People cancel people, come and go and et cetera. And I remember the time when I sat inside of a meeting at Rutgers with like a chancellor of some kind. And they wanted like a website. And I just remember sitting there, and this person's like talking to me and sharing to me about like what they want to do and how they want to promote to get more people.

And I realized that the thing that we were creating was only benefiting like the higher ups. It wasn't necessarily benefiting the actual students or, or anything like that in which we really wanted to change the philosophy and say, who do we want to be when we grow up? And we thought to ourselves, well, we want to make an impact.

Well, how do we make an impact? And then we kind of put the two, all of the pieces of the puzzle together. To basically say we want to make graphic design more easily accessible. So, you know, your company can actually come in and get some really cool graphic design work done. Or what about like Jimmy who decides they have this amazing idea, but they can't necessarily hire somebody full time in order to complete their idea, their app, their whatever it may be.

And then what about the person who is. A marketing manager in a really big corporation. They have all these brilliant ideas. They don't have the time or the technical skill to actually do graphic design themselves, but they don't necessarily have the ability to hire somebody else for their right hand. All of those scenarios are really essential as to why we created Penji.

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you mentioned impact. We talk a lot about on the show, we're kind of entering this age of impact, where, you know, access to new tools and new talent has never been easier. You know, quite frankly, if you think about starting a company, you know, 20 years ago, especially a tech company, what you had, they go through and now everything's in your pocket or available in the cloud or other places.

So, talk a little bit about that trend of democratization of tools and things for builders. How are you seeing that affecting your business and what do you see for the future of this trend?

Johnathan Grzybowski: There's always going to be people out there. They want to do a DIY. There's always going to be people that want to create their own website that do the graphic designs themselves. But I think you have to look at it as like, how much is your time worth? Yeah.

You can get something to what it is and you could probably get it to be somewhat manageable, but there's always going to come a point in time where it has to go above that. And so that ultimately depends on what you want you to do with your business.

For us in particular, we want to talk to the people who have that need. There's always going to be that sector of people that want to DIY. There's always going to be people that want to be able to, that just need that additional help. And those are the people that we really want to talk to.

Brian Ardinger: And so that kind of brings to the question, like there are all sorts of new tools for, I guess, that you wouldn't typically think in the past, you'd have to go to creative agency to do it. So now you've got tools like Canva, for example, or even like Photoshop and that are technically getting a little bit easier for the person to hack together things or see templates and utilize that in such a way that makes it more graphically sound or more visually appealing than ever before. What's the difference between something like that hacked together versus going to like a Penji or...

Johnathan Grzybowski: So, I think when it comes to the DIY aspect of this, the company that you mentioned, there are skill sets of graphic designers. Let's just say you want to create a website, that's a technical skill. You might be able to put pieces of a puzzle together to do like a social media meme. Right. You could do that, but can you create a website and then when you create the website, and you send it to a developer, can they actually code what you do?

And the short answer is probably not. So, the benefit of Penji is essentially that you have a pool of hundreds of graphic designers that specialize in very specific things. So, if you could do like the big things, like, let's just say you are a web designer, but you can't necessarily illustrate, well, then that's where Penji can come in because we have illustrators.

If you're able to do social media memes, but you want to have an artistic element that you can't physically do again, that's where a Penji comes in. So, I think Penji is more so the once you know, you can't do it on your own and you hit a boiling point, then you hire an outsource. I think that is the reason why Penji is successful to this day is because all of us focus on the things that we're really good at.

And then we move on and then we outsource, you know, we hire somebody else in order to take the things that were really bad out, off of our plates.

Brian Ardinger: How do customers typically use the service? Is it at the beginning of a project when they're trying to build out the new logos and letterhead and that kind of stuff, or is it more ongoing marketing campaigns and things like that?

Johnathan Grzybowski: All the above. So, we work with a lot of agencies that have clients that have needs. If I were to put percentages, it would probably be 80% of people that have ongoing needs of some kind, whether they are an agency or whether they are a graphic designer themselves. And then maybe the 20% of people that have like a, I mean, again, those numbers are probably lower of people who just kind of have that one-off tasks that need it.

Either way, that's the beauty of our service. We're cancel anytime. We have no contract, so to speak. So, you can cancel, you can get a refund within 15 days if you're not satisfied. But for the most part, we pair you with as many graphic designers as we can, until we find the right team that works for you. And then you really build a team.

And then once that team happens and you can just ask for anything, you have a guy, so to speak in order for you to go to and say, Hey, do this because you're really good. And Hey, this other person you do that because I know you're really good at it.

Brian Ardinger: As a founder. Talk to me about like, how did you build out this particular service? Is it freelancers? Is it, how big is the team? Talk about like the thought process you had about what you thought for the original idea then kind of where you're at right now.

Johnathan Grzybowski: The original idea was all based out of Trello. So, we had about our first 100 customers. And as soon as we got a customer online, we created a Trello account, a Trello board for them, and we added them into Trello.

And then we really started to look at the scale and we realized that we need our own technology in order to actually scale this higher and be able to help more people. In which it probably took about six months to a year in order for us to even create that. We've had multiple iterations when it comes to the software and in order for our customers to experience what they've experienced.

And now we have over 150 designers and growing. We have helped thousands of customers being able to assess their graphic design needs. None of them are freelancers. They are all employees. And that is done, and when I say employees, we don't really call them employees. We call them team members. So, we have over 150 team members on our team and growing. And I think this is just like the start of this.

Brian Ardinger: You are in some ways disrupting the existing creative services marketplace. What's been the reaction from traditional creative service firms and that, to this new model that you're trying to introduce.

Johnathan Grzybowski: It's very similar to like a political climate. You'll meet people who are like very strongly against it. And you'll have people who are very strongly for it. And I think that people who are obviously strongly for it, they understand the value.

If you are listening to this right now, and you are agitated by us disrupting the market, then you just simply don't understand the, I mean, this with respect, you don't understand the value because we're not trying to take away jobs. We're trying to enhance them.

We're trying to take off the things that you don't want to do to give you more time for more things that you can do. You know, like, I'm sure you can think about a hundred things, hopefully not a hundred, maybe 5 or 10 things that you simply hate doing every single day.

And as you could never do that again, I'm pretty sure you live a pretty happy life. And I hope you think of those things right now, as I'm talking. If you're a graphic designer, I can assure you, you have those same problems. If your creative agency, I'm sure you have those problems. We're fixing that problem because we don't want people to be stuck doing the same thing every single day.

Brian Ardinger: So, are some of your clients, actually some of the creative agency firms that are outsourcing it to Penji?

Johnathan Grzybowski: Absolutely. Yeah. A hundred percent. A large majority of them are actually that, and that's on purpose because we were our first customer. So, we, as a creative agency would die for Penji, because we didn't have the money to, or the necessary resources to hire somebody internally. We solved our own problem and it ended up, the solution, ended up being the business.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, you guys are based in Philadelphia. I always like to ask founders that are building companies outside of traditional Silicon Valley places, what are some of the good things and bad things about building outside of the Valley?

Johnathan Grzybowski: So, we actually tried to be the first, so to speak, to try to create a business inside of an economic city that their economy is just like really bad, in like Camden, New Jersey. It was one of the most dangerous cities in America. We really tried to create the Silicon Valley of the East Coast, so to speak, because it was a very...outside of Silicon Valley it's not like the sexiest place on planet earth. Right. A lot of people don't know that.

And so, it's kind of the same aspect. Well, you know, here's this place that had unlimited possibilities and very cheap rent. And we tried to create that ourselves. And we had a lot of in the very beginning, a lot of notoriety from that to trying to bring more people to do it.

And then politics happened, and it ended up just like the city ended up just crashing and burning, and we just got out. So, we actually moved to Philadelphia and I would say a large majority around 100 to 200 of our first customers. I'll say 90% of our first 100 to 200 customers were from a 15-mile radius of Philadelphia.

So, I guess when you ask the question, is it hard to necessarily grow a company? For us, we didn't have that problem because we're cashflow positive and we've never actually received an ounce of funding. And we've been that way ever since. So, I can't necessarily speak to that type of growth because usually Silicon Valley is immediate like, you need capital.

I can say the VC community in Philadelphia specifically are very tight. And are very understanding. However, Philadelphia particularly is a lot of Eds and Meds. So, I can see that if a company were to come into Philadelphia or the surrounding region and have a business that isn't that sector, that category, I can definitely see them having a hard time.

And then on the flip side of that, I would say if you can bootstrap as long as you possibly can. Do that, that is always the safest bet. Don't just immediately create the idea and try to seek funding, like actually live your life and do your own thing and push it for as long as you humanly possibly can.

Brian Ardinger: Makes sense. The last question I want to ask is what's next for Penji? What's next? What are some of the things you're excited about?

Johnathan Grzybowski: The thing I'm most excited about now is we want to change the landscape and the definition of the terminology of Penji. So, we don't want Penji to be associated with the words, unlimited graphic design.

We don't want people to associate Penji with affordable graphic designer, cheap graphic design or whatever you may be. We want it to be associated with the word graphic design. So very similar to the company that you mentioned, you have that name in your head, you immediately know exactly what it is that they do.

I'm sure if you think about other marketplace software or services, you'd have that same feeling. The thing I'm most excited about and why I jump on podcasts and things like that is to try to simulate the name Penji with the word graphic design. So, within 2021 and 2022 and beyond, that is the main goal.

When it comes to other things that I'm excited about, we're going to be launching a pay-per-click model, pay per project model, to widen our fan base of graphic design. And then also we may be launching a content service, very similar to Penji. Where not only can you do Penji for unlimited graphic design, but you can do content fuel, which is the name of it, where you could do unlimited blogging.

Right? We all need blogs. We all need content in order to generate some type of SEO or even just notoriety and content in general and make it look like you're in business. And that's kind of what we want to create as well as that additional service to, to be the perfect partner to Penji.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Johnathan, thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, telling us a little bit about what's going on in the world of graphic design and, and some of the new trends that we're seeing when it comes to the world of work. So, appreciate you coming on and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Johnathan Grzybowski: Thank you so much.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tom Bradbury, author of The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Tom and I talk about the changing role of technology in the workplace and how companies can better deliver value by aligning culture with technology decisions.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Tom Bradbury, Author of The Culture Project

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tom Bradbury. He is author of a new book called The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Welcome Tom.

Tom Bradbury: Hi Brian. Thanks for having me today.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. Our friends at Sense and Respond, Josh and gang, connected us about your new book that's coming out. You're a two-time founder, a technology advisor, author of this new book.

You've spent about 20 years of your career focused on workplace technology assessments and how do people use that. What have you seen in the last 20 years in workplace technology and how did you decide to write a book about culture?

Tom Bradbury: Great question. Thank you. So, Brian, for a big chunk of my career, 18-19 years, I owned a business, Labrador technology, before selling it to a great competitor in that space. But what we did was help design and manage technology as part of workplace transformation projects. Mostly connected to real estate transactions. i.e., A lease comes up, we're building out a new workplace and we would design all the connectivity and all the AV in the boardroom tech for these companies to leverage in their new spaces.

And for doing that for some of the biggest global brands out there, we ran into a lot of different scenarios and a lot of different approaches. But one thing was for sure, that the design and construction process had such a gravitational pull from a budget perspective, and a resourcing perspective, that the decisions around investing in technology weren't as strategic as they should be or could be. Right.

So, I would see and hear these discussions about Pepsi, Unilever, BNP Paribas, Alliance Bernstein, Bridgewater Associates, where they were going and how they wanted to represent themselves with this new workplace. But some of the technology discussions or that thread of the project didn't always match the same level of strategy as some of those other conversations.

So the final handful of years of me owning Labrador Technology, what I did was create a methodology to go in and understand an end-user's reality of what it's like to use technology at whatever organization they work for.

And I would overlay that with either a direct experience interviewing executives on where they were taking their business, right, or some material that was released in a board meeting or what was presented at the start of the mission of a new workplace. And I'd get a sense for where the executives were trying to go and what they were trying to accomplish.

And then I would talk to it and in some cases, HR, to get their perspective on technology and its importance within a business. And I'd lay those perspectives over each other. IT, HR, employee experience, and executive senior leadership's perspective on where they were going. And there was a hundred percent of the time, there was always a mismatch in each one of those realities and what they were seeing.

So, I really started to set out and say, what's driving how people invest and how they enable internally technology. And it connected. And I mentioned HR, really, what I started to focus in on was the use of technology by talent, by the people in any organization. And seeing the influences of culture impact how they made tech investments, and how they were rolling them out and giving them to people to be productive.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagined 20 years ago when you first started, a lot of those technology decisions were probably, Hey, we just need a computer. Technology was not ubiquitous, as it is today. And culturally, it wasn't as formative. How have you seen that trend evolve? And is that one of the reasons why you believe culture plays a more important role in those technology decisions and that?

Tom Bradbury: A lot of the organizations that I've worked with and many or all organizations have a culture. And that culture either pushes people, whether challenge their comfort zone, or constantly look for things, whether they're policies, processes, tools, that match where they're going next. And sometimes there can be tension between that attribute of a given culture and what a domain expert sees, knows, and how they run their domain, whether it be an IT or HR or any other finance, right.

An IT leader, as an example that you bring up, where technology used to be, give me a computer and I'll plug it into the server or the switch plugs into the server. You know cloud, going to cloud. It sounds very easy today, right? And it's much more common, right. But still not as common as we probably think, in you know, many organizations.

But that being said, operational experts knew how to not only understand, control, keep secure an environment that's on prem and the cloud technology and making that transition, which might offer more flexibility, efficiencies, costs, productivity, can impact positively all those things but it's out of their realm of experience, right? So, it was a challenge.

So, it, wasn't only how do they navigate the company there, and are they comfortable navigating out of their comfort zone? It also is a paradigm shift internally for IT on how they operate right, in a cloud environment versus an on-premises environment. That would be another challenge that they have to deal with to get the whole staff to buy into. We no longer have control over how we upgrade. We receive notices that there will be an upgrade and we need to understand what it's going to do to our environment before we unleash it.

Brian Ardinger: I used to work at Gartner. And that was one of the challenges that the IT group, were the gods and they controlled exactly what was displayed and put out there into the organization. And it seems to be much more collaborative environment now, where their power shifted.

And because technology is ubiquitous across different verticals, and it's no longer a vertical in and of itself, per se. It has definitely impacted the way people act and move and do things within organizations. Let's dive into the book. So, it's called The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Tell us a little bit of overview of it and what people can get out of it.

Tom Bradbury: So, when I wrote this book, it was informed by many workplace technology assessments that I performed either on my own, being invited by the client, or in conjunction with a partner, like a great partner of mine has been Cushman and Wakefield, the global real estate firm, their global workplace strategy team.

And we would go in and they would say, Tom, we're doing space and people. Technology is really the third leg to this bar stool. And we need to go in and holistically assess this environment. So, I started to do a number of those, and I would see how each unique culture, despite there being common problems or situations that every client, the unique culture, really had an impact on how people were using technology or not.

And the other thing I noticed, and this is something that's talked about widely is whenever there's going to be a transformation or change, leadership needs to lead that change. They must get behind it and push for it. So, at the same time, we can't expect leaders to spend too much of their time. They're working on very big, important components of their own role, leading a very big ship.

So, I looked at writing this book, I set out to say, how can I help a corporation establish urgency? And help a leader spend a specific amount of time understanding the fundamental or foundational issues that culture is having an impact in and around that nexus of technology and talent. That's where I choose to overlay my lens for culture.

How can we get them to spend time doing this, but not saddle them with all of the minutia and details? This is a way to get them behind it to say, Oh, I really do have to get behind this. We have some fundamental things that we have to change, and we need to address the culture around that nexus of talent and technology.

And so, I bring them through a number of activities and steps. That being said as much as I'm voicing this to the CEO or to an executive leader, I hoped as I wrote it, that I would also illustrate whether you're the digital adoption expert or trainer or HR in, you know, learning and development, that you saw what your role would be in this, even down to any given employee.

Every employee is a significant component of a culture and contributing to it and having that culture reflect upon them and their productivity and their work styles. So, I hoped to write the book in such a way where again, it was voiced towards the leader, but illustrated how everyone had to be considered.

Brian Ardinger: What's encompassed in that 30 days? What should people be looking at if they're trying to adopt a better culture and trying to understand how technology plays a role in that?

Tom Bradbury: One is, as I said, getting leadership involved. So literally they can spend 30 days doing this activity for each day or over a longer period than 30 days, but you get the point of it. But it's also that they need to empower some people to be able to think outside of the current, like a river's current, think outside of the everyday current of the organization.

So I'm a proponent of using internal thinkers and innovators from various areas of the business and putting them together. I term them to be a strike force in this book where they literally work with, or for the senior leader, to get them behind it and find those really great people in the organization who are capable of living that dichotomy of I'm doing my day job, but I can think about something in a different way.

I can compartmentalize that for an hour, a few hours a week, so that I can come up with new ideas that are not just bulldozed by the current culture or around this thinking. So how can we develop this strike force to think outside the box a little bit and lead some new ideas, and then go back and present some of these ideas to the domain leaders, the CIO, the CHRO.

And that could be a very careful process too, but there's a way a leader can get behind a Strikeforce and find the business drivers to say these options should be considered about where we take our business and how we deal with that culture around nexus of technology and talent.

Brian Ardinger: What are the biggest mistakes that most companies often run into when they're trying to make big transformations like this?

Tom Bradbury: They focus on the specific solutions, first. Microsoft is a great solution. Cisco offers great solutions. Different training tools offer great solutions. But before we get into, does this solution work? We should map out what attributes do we need as part of our solutions that fit our business, our goals, our people, our culture.

And how do we adapt our culture to nurture those attributes so that when we do invest in a specific solution that embody those attributes, that we're going to get the ROI and the productivity that we're thinking about. So too often, I think certain firms lead with the technical solution rather than understanding the kind of problem statement and what would solve that problem.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's a very similar to what entrepreneurs, they've developed a technology and try to find a market for it versus the other way around, you know, find the problem in the market and then build a solution around that. Right. I imagine it's similar.

Are companies, when they approach technology, are they looking far enough ahead or are oftentimes when you see hear, these transformations, they put a new technology solution in and it's immediately outdated within the next year or two. That kind of stuff. How are people approaching the use of technology and developing for a changing world that's rapidly changing faster and faster?

Tom Bradbury: Yeah. Well, first I'd say the cloud obviously is helping us, right. We're not investing in our own hardware and in charge of our own data, 24/7. Right? So, we're putting it somewhere else, whether it be in Amazon's Cloud or Microsoft's Cloud or Google's Cloud or some other form of a cloud. So, it allows us to be a little bit more nimble, right.

And move on from a specific application. If it proves not to be a great fit. That being said, what I talked about a couple of minutes ago, which is understanding what we're trying to solve for before prescribing a technical fix, is the key to that.

So just the other day, myself and my friend at Cushman, my colleague at Cushman, we've done a lot of these assessments. We were talking with a mutual client that we both did an assessment for. It's a very large corporation. That's for a couple of few years planning a move, and they're still not going to move for another couple to a few years.

And they recognize that they can't select every component for the audio-visual setups in conference rooms. Right? Because to your point, it could change. But, you know, you have experts in the architectural world. And in this case, I designed a construction project that will help you map out the milestones or trigger dates for when you have to start committing to specific applications.

So, it's really, and this particular client, and maybe this is a better approach to answering your question is. They're focused on how they need to change culturally, to embody all the things that they're saying they want to embody. And they're spending time coming up with this is how we need to do things. These are the things we need to consider. This is how we need to work with our employees to marry what we're doing with what we say we are.

And the technical pieces will come in at the right time. And many IT folks, highly technical folks, experts in their field. They get the hives sometimes when they have to make a big decision and they say, well, is this going to last, right? Right. Because things can change. Right. You're talking Teams and Microsoft. And then the next day Slack is acquired by salesforce.com. Right? Like that's a big change to consider how you, your people are going to talk and collaborate, and message.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and that leads us right to, you know, we're in a midst of a pandemic and obviously everybody's talking about remote work and how that's going to change, and facilities and that entire industry has been disrupted as well. I've been working with a couple different startups in the facilities space. They've had to pivot their particular software and focus it on optimization for example of a office space.

We know that we can't put as many people in a particular space because of spatial distancing, or we're not going to need as much, but because half the workforce is going to remote, what are the tools and technology tools that we can use to actually map out that space more effectively? What are you seeing when it comes to these particular trends and how is this going to map out and change the world?

Tom Bradbury: Yeah. So, I'd first say that when I wrote the culture project, it was the idea and a bulk of the writing and my perspective was formed pre COVID, but I don't back off the importance of all of this, including COVID and beyond.

What I'll say is that COVID provided cover for a lot of leaders to do what I think leaders should be doing. What I offer up in the book, right, is add some urgency and address transformation. Some have done that. Some have gone deep to understand how they need to think differently and approach things differently.

So COVID offered them this opportunity, this cover to push ineffective people or policies out of the way with some anxiety around how are we going to survive through this period of the pandemic getting right to it. And that's really what I pushed for my book to be doing. You know, where as an entrepreneur, how do I bring that urgency to a corporate mindset and help them change? COVID has provided that for many.

Some felt as though the zoom subscription was enough, right? So, we're going through this now and to your question. What does it lead to? The pandemic is going to have some short-term, maybe midterm impact on people staying six feet apart and taking temperatures, going in and out of buildings, but knock-on wood, we get to a place where the pandemic is more than the rear-view mirror, and we still have shaped the workplace or reshaped the workplace.

So, I think I heard recently that on average, they feel like digital transformation for many businesses with sped up to six years, right, due to COVID. Now people are coming back to the office. So, I believe that it's not crazy to say 25-50-25.

25% of the workforce will be full-time in the office. 50% will be flexible and another 25% might be paralegals, accounting assistants, or whatever. And they have roles that can be full-time remote, walking into any business. You have that. So, we have to think about that. And we have to think about from a cultural perspective, we just pushed everyone out real fast.

So, everyone's in their home. Their culture is more about the cat that runs across the zoom screen and dealing with kids while you're trying to do calls. And how do I do work? Right. All of those things have impacted what we're looking at. So, in the future, that's going to settle down a little bit. Some of the activism of no more workplace for anybody is going to dissipate.

And we're going to find how we right-size the future of the workplace that's going to be configured specific to each proprietary need of any given organization. But going forward, one of the things that I've seen, which is amazing, is that yes, we've come to terms with people working remotely more so over the last year, but the profound impact is what they were thinking of on the employee's behalf in the workplace.

So, there's the technology and there's the ability to collaborate and communicate and be productive. But there's also health wellness, ergonomics, sustainability. And what we're seeing now is businesses and their culture they're trying to adapt.

Hey, we have to include all of these people that are decentralized either on a fixed basis or flexible basis. How do we establish a culture around that? And one of the areas they're looking at is saying let's take those same things, those attributes that an employee experience, those attributes that we looked at in the physical workplace, and make sure we're accounting for them at everyone's remote working spot.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think it's accelerated the employees, both access to technology and their understanding and the need and importance of it. Again, everybody had to accelerate if you hadn't been on zoom before, you obviously were quickly indoctrinated into it. And I think that's across the board.

So, my premise is that more and more folks are now more technology savvy. They're not the greatest per se, always, but that's going to change the way the next technology tool is going to be adopted or used. And how does that play out?

And I don't think I've talked to anybody that said, we're all going to go back a hundred percent the way it was in the past. So, by default, we are living in a new world. And just like you said, how do we create the culture to adapt in this new world that we're living in?

Tom Bradbury: Yeah, getting leaders to invest in that. So, on one hand we might go down from 200,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet just to make a point, right? What are we doing with that savings? Let's invest in the technology or sending everyone the best chair, you know, as a very tactical example to help them.

And I talked to someone earlier today who has a very good friend that works at a big furniture manufacturing company, where everyone went remote. And what they do is, they send someone to everyone's house, and do an assessment of their workspace and their work area. And then they have a, like a standard, and then they go back, and they accommodate for those standards within everyone's work area.

So that's a cultural thing, but it also Brian, this thing has many tentacles. COVID and accelerating the push. Cybersecurity. How are we thinking about that? That is intertwined.

On one hand to think of cybersecurity and culture together might seem like I don't get it, but on the other hand, how people work and how people think about how they communicate and collaborate is intertwined with cybersecurity and a corporation or organization's ability to maintain cyber hygiene and protect their data and their people.

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Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely. So, this has been a fantastic topic. Thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk a little bit more about it. If people want to find out more about your book or more about yourself, what's the best way to do that.

Tom Bradbury: Well, they can go on Amazon and look for The Culture Project, of course, 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. They can also check me out on LinkedIn, Tom Bradbury. My consultancy is Helix2.us, is the website, or they can email me at tom@helix2.us. I'd be happy to exchange thoughts and ideas with anyone who's interested in this subject.

Brian Ardinger: Awesome. Well, Tom, again, thanks for being on Inside Outside Innovation and helping us navigate this new world that we're living in. Look forward to staying connected and hearing about the future as well. So, thanks very much.

Tom Bradbury: Thank you, Brian. I really enjoyed the conversation.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Ryan Green, Co-founder and CEO of Gridwise. Ryan and I talk about the future trends of the gig economy, ride sharing, and mobility analytics. We also talk about his experiences helping to navigate his startup through the pandemic.

Interview Transcript with Ryan Green, Gridwise

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside outside innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Ryan Green. Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Gridwise, which is a mobile app powered by gig mobility analytics to help rideshare and delivery drivers do more and do better and welcome to the show Ryan.

Ryan Green: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, Ryan, I'm glad to have you on the show. One of the things we wanted to do this year is to bring on more founders and tell their stories. As I was doing research and looking around, you've got interesting story, interesting space that you're working in. And so, I wanted to have you on the show to talk a little bit more about that.

You used to work at the Naval Academy, then you did some foreign exchange trading at PNC, and now you've started a company called Gridwise. Why don't we talk a little bit about your background, how you got to become an entrepreneur and what Gridwise is all about.

Ryan Green: When I was studying at the Naval Academy, I ended up starting my first company there. I was an economics major, Chinese minor. And then I really got into trading and keeping up with the stock markets and later the currency market.

So, we started a company called FX Connection, that actually taught people how to understand the currency markets. And then our platform connected you with coaches who helped you actually apply that knowledge. And they were very, you know, vetted, very successful traders who traded for a living.

I really learned how to stand that business that like, stand the business up. I didn't know how to buy a domain when that first started, when I started that company. And so, learning curve at that point, but grew the team out to a few people, started generating revenue, and made some big partnerships with brokerages, global brokerages, and things of that sort.

So, it was really great experience doing that in parallel school and then going into active-duty military. And I ended up shutting the company down as I was in active-duty military as all my partners and I were operating in different parts of the world. And it just became an operational mess. In addition to so many other mistakes we made in this company that gave us so many valuable learning lessons.

But ended up after I got out of the military, I ended up going into banking, doing FX trading, which was related to the company I started before currency trading. And that's what brought me to PNC and working there. And in between the midst of all of that, when I was in the military, I had a period of downtime where I was tinkering with a few ideas, but this new concept came to our city called Uber and I took a few rides and I was like, wow, this is interesting.

I'm definitely a part of the early adopter cohort of technology. So, I was really intrigued by the model. I ended up signing up to drive. And I became a driver for Uber later for Lyft. And it was like really interesting for me to just be able to like tap a button and be able to go out and make some extra money.

And I had experienced what it was like to be the driver. The pain points that really persisted as drivers at that time. And then you fast forward to the time I'm in banking, I'm still an active driver driving less, but taking a lot of rides with Uber and Lyft drivers and just hearing them complain about a lot of the same pain points that I'd experienced firsthand.

From those rides and my perspective driving, during my time at PNC was like where the light bulb lit up. I knew I wanted to start another venture. At some point it was expected to be a little bit farther down the road, but I had a list of about 25 ideas and the concept of GridWise popped up to number one. And I had started working to validate that on my personal time, while I was at PNC. And then I ended up validating demand for the concept and ended up going to start Gridwise and became the co-founder and CEO of the company.

Brian Ardinger: It's kind of an interesting concept and how I found you is you put out a report, The 2020 Ride Hailing Industry Report, that talks through a lot of the data that you've seen with GridWise on how drivers and Uber and all these things are shaping the world. And specifically, how it's changed in a pandemic environment. Let's talk a little bit about that report. And what have you learned?

Ryan Green: I would say with us as Gridwise in operating in mobility spaces and focused on empowering drivers, drivers using our application and it gives us a glimpse into supply and demand across the different services, both on the ride hailing side, as well as the on-demand delivery side, whether that's food, grocery or parcel.

And so, I mean, in looking at this past year of 2020, I mean, it's what a year it has been. But, you know, in our industry instantly, as COVID really took off in mid-March, you just saw a drastic drop in the industry, just ride hailing activity. And I think the service providers reported seeing anywhere from a decline of 80%-90% of activity on their platforms. For us at Gridwise, we saw a direct decline of about 70% of drivers stopped driving for ride share services.

A good portion of them ended up continuing to drive but ended up moving over to delivery of services. And so, as we saw ride hail decline, we just saw a huge uptake in delivery demand as people started ordering food and in groceries from Instacart and Door Dash and platforms like that.

It was really interesting we saw that there were drivers who would continue to drive for ride hail through this year. And you've seen from an emission standpoint, it's created a great picture where it's like these vehicles have been more utilized, because there has been some demand that's persistent in this, and has picked up over the coming months, but there hasn't been as much of a movement of drivers to go back to driving rideshare.

So, for the drivers who continue doing that, we've seen just, you know, more utilization and we're looking at that from the trips per hour increase that we've seen there for drivers and as well as for their hourly earnings, you'll see that hourly earnings did increase for ride hail drivers. Specifically, for a period of time, it started to decrease or normalize back towards closer to normal levels.

But overall, the drivers across all services did really spike in the summer, but it's really come down to, it was around $18 an hour, but now it's back to about $15.50 somewhere around there.

Brian Ardinger: So, with that, obviously things have changed and we're probably not going to back to a quote unquote, regular normal for a while. What are some of the trends that you're seeing or how do you see this playing out once maybe they're post COVID or currently where we're sitting?

Ryan Green: Yeah. Currently where we're sitting, I think ride hail has been trending upward. Whereas we saw that 70% decline from our end, we've seen that come back up to a 50% decline relative to the 70% that existed earlier this year. But we did see a dip in the end of this year, as I think the second wave of COVID is just started to just continue to grow.

So, there's still some time to go here. It Is really going to be dependent on what the rollout is like for vaccination, how effective the vaccines are. But as we do get towards more of a new normal, I think what you're going to see is quite a spike in the demand for ride share.

If you think about public transit or related to buses or subways, it is going to take people time to really get back on those modes of transportation. So, what you're going to see is just people who weren't taking rideshare before starting to take it more because it is more of an isolated setting that you're in.

And I think delivery is going to normalize more so as people are able to get back out a little bit more, I think people are going to enjoy maybe stop at the grocery store to get groceries or go out to a restaurant and be with friends out in public. Things that we've missed doing for some time. So, I think you're going to see a decline and delivery demand and activity, but it's still going to be much higher than it was pre COVID because I think there's been a lot of habits formed around those services. It helps people save a lot of time in some ways.

If we think about passenger movement back to the ride share side, one interesting element related to the change in the way that we're going to be working in the future, the future of work. And so, what we're thinking a lot about is just that particular aspect, but also just that. We think people are going to be more remote. There's going to be less commuting going on.

And so, you would always see like a morning rush of rideshare demand happening. But if people aren't commuting as much as they were, then you may not see that exist anymore. So, it's going to be a new type of pattern that exists from that ride share demand curve that is going to come into play and something we will have insight into and will be interesting to see how that plays out.

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Brian Ardinger: So obviously that's affected a lot of your customers and that. How's it actually effected Gridwise, as far as you as a founder and use a startup yourself. What's been the impact of this and how have you managed to work through it?

Ryan Green: As this whole situation came into play earlier this year, it turned into wartime at that point where it's just like, Hey, really our core focus going into COVID was around rideshare and ride hail and so at that point, as COVID was starting to spike in the, in the number of cases there, we had to start really thinking through, it was like, all right, let's look at the roadmap here. Is there anything that we're missing anything there's like, Hey, we saw like delivery is becoming more and more relevant.

And that was on our roadmap to support delivery drivers and build features that provide more utility then, but it was further back on our roadmap. So, we reprioritized everything that was related to delivery and move that to the front of the roadmap, which we did see a decline in revenue and a decline in users that persisted to about middle of the summer.

And the changes that we made in that time period between about March and the middle of June or the end of June, enabled us to really start to, it lagged for a little bit of those changes, the results with them. But we started to see the positive impact of those started to see an uptake of user growth at that point. And then revenue really started to turn back around in Q3.

And since Q3 we've seen just, we're reaching higher highs than we had been at before COVID. So, I think the team has really been able to execute this year to, to make the changes we needed to, to overcome the adversity of the situation and better position ourselves for the return of rideshare. But I would say as COVID, it's brought so many negative outcomes to the world.

For people who have been more impacted from a business standpoint, it's really, I think, catalyzed a keener focus on your business and its operations, and really being, you know, delving into the details of all the aspects of your business and making sure that Hey, we're spending in the right places. And we're actually getting ROI from here and if we're not then we need to cut the fat. Why are we doing this?

And whether that's from a team standpoint or there's people who aren't performing the way they need to be, we were more strict on that then, in looking at that, and more strictly than we were before, and through other elements of the business. So, there's a lot of positives that have come out of this quite negative situation.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'd love to unpack that a little bit and really understand a lot of companies aren't as resilient or aren't as adaptable. Were there particular things that you did or your team did, that made you more capable of making that transition? Because again, it's a pretty big transition. Obviously, a lot of folks were going through this. Can you give me any examples or things that you did that would be relevant for our audience?

Ryan Green: What did enable us to, to be a little more nimble there were things that were part of our strategy before COVID. And that was really our focus on building a platform that empowers multiple stakeholders within mobility ecosystem and those who interface with mobility. And so really, it's like we've taken a very different approach than a lot of our competitors out there who also have mobile apps that are trying to empower drivers in some way.

Where they're like, Hey, let's build an app, open it up everywhere and charge drivers to use it. And we're like, Hey, let's build this app. Let's give it to drivers for free, let's focus on building everything we can to empower them. And then on the back end it's like we're monetizing for more B2B channels. So those B2B channels, one of them was advertising. And we built our own brand network of advertisers, but that was impacted directly right off, right off the bat of COVID. Advertisers started to churn off the platform.

We started because of the future ease and rideshare drivers, but what we ended up is we started to pick back up our user growth and grow because of the delivery segment, we also changed our model to where we focus more on the kind of brand awareness element and the sponsorship packages that we can create, that were kind of more fixed recurring revenue channels. More so than the volatiles cost per click type model.

And so that really changed the game for us to not be purely reliant on, Hey, how many clicks are we going get this month to like, Hey, we're focused on building broader packages that get people more eyeballs and are actually driving more traffic because we're providing more static presence in a way where it's not intrusive to the user experience for the drivers.

But then the second part of that is we've been building out an ecosystem of offerings for the driver, so a marketplace of services. And so, all of the services are applicable to ride hail and delivery drivers, but they also enable us to monetize through more secure revenue models.

And so, one of things that we launched, our new services that we launched towards the end of Q3 is called Gridwise protection. And that is essentially a service where drivers pay a monthly premium to have their income covered for a certain number of days that they may be out of work because of hospitalization or they become sick let's say because of COVID.

We saw that over 60% of drivers were still driving if they felt sick because they purely relied on it for income, which is very dangerous to anybody. Right. And so, it was like putting their minds at ease to be able to take off the time because of those situations and actually receive income for that. So that was a big needle mover for us in a big way where we could impact drivers more.

There's more services that we're adding such as gas, perks and discounts, and some other things that we'll add in 2021. And thirdly is from a platform standpoint is standing up a new part of our business, which we're starting to publicize now is called Gridwise Analytics. And so, what we're actually doing is taking a lot of that.

We talked about some of the industry insights and data, is we're taking a lot of the data that we're collecting that helps us understand supply and demand across all the major service providers in the US. And we're aggregating that data and anonymizing it to where we are packaging analytics that we provide to industry stakeholders who are operating within the mobility space, or even tangential to it in the real estate course, real estate space, or retail, financial services, et cetera.

And so, we've started to partner with some companies and researchers and other platforms, automotive companies there. That a part of our business that we're pretty excited about as we're taking off in 2021. So those things have really enabled us to overcome, that focus on building that platform and having kind of a multi-pronged approach in terms of our business model and monetization strategy has enabled us to be nimble and overcome a lot of the downfall that had persisted for a lot of companies because of COVID-19.

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Brian Ardinger: Well, it's a fascinating space. And you know, I'm really excited to see where this all goes, not just ride sharing, but you know, like you said, food delivery, a lot of things are changing in the world. So, it's exciting to have people in that space, actively innovating and trying to make it better. And I appreciate you coming on the show to tell us a little bit more about this. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about Gridwise, what's the best way to do that?

Ryan Green: Go to gridwise.io. That's our website there. If you happen to be listening to this podcast and you're working for any of the service providers out there, then you can go to the website or go straight to the app stores or play stores and find Gridwise there. And I would say to directly connect with me, I think the best way would be to connect with me on LinkedIn and reach out to me there.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Ryan, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, look forward to continuing the conversation and thanks very much for being part of this.

Ryan Green: Likewise, thanks for having me Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Manbir Kaur, Author of the new book Get Your Next Promotion. Manbir and I explore what it takes for leaders to navigate today's changing work environment, the power of a growth mindset, and how you can set yourself up for success in the new year.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Manbir Kaur

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Manbir Kaur. She's a techno banking, corporate professional turned executive coach and author of the new book Get Your Next Promotion. Welcome to the show.

Manbir Kaur: Hey Brian, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm so glad to be here with you today.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you as well. We were introduced by a mutual friend and she said that we needed to connect because you've helped many folks in your practice kind of navigate this new world of work. And we thought it'd be good to get you on the show. One of the key areas we're focusing on in 2021 for the show is some of the tools and techniques and mindset that individuals can use to become more innovation competent. And so, let's start there. Let's talk about innovation and how you got involved in your practice on coaching folks around this topic of innovation.

Manbir Kaur: I started my career as you said in banking, moved to the FinTech world. And in the FinTech world, basically, I got exposed to the word innovation because as you know, tech world needs innovation all the time. And 10 years back, I moved to coaching. I got intrigued towards human behaviors, human mindset. Behaviors and mindset are two things which I really, really got attracted to. And that's how, you know, I transitioned to coaching side.

So now it's been 25 years of working with people, including corporate and coaching. How I got involved into this is basically as that I got intrigued by human behaviors. And when we talk about human behavior, every day is new. Every day, especially in the world, every day is new. So, we need to innovate daily what's happening in our own life. How do we have conversations? How do we do stuff with other people. So that's what, you know, for me, innovation starts from there.

Brian Ardinger: I agree. And everybody I think is facing it obviously more and more 2020 gave everybody a kick to the gut when it comes to innovation. I think people realize that it's part of the core competency that they've got to start building. So, you have a book, called Get Your Next Promotion and give me an overview of the book and what can our audience expect to get from it from reading that?

Manbir Kaur: So, this is my second book, Brian, which launched in this year 2020. You know what happens is basically individuals, especially high-performing individuals, high-potential individuals, leaders, they get stuck at mid-level. And their point of view is I'm not getting promoted because other person who's not that capable is getting promoted because of politics because of something is happening there, which I'm not understanding. I'm performing at my best, but still are not getting promoted.

So that's individual standpoint of view, but organizations have another point of view. They are looking for leadership pipeline. They're looking for right individuals. And they feel people are good performers, but they're not good leaders to execute things, to have strategies, to have innovation, to have the right mindset at that level, which they are expecting.

And I found that there is a huge scar between these two perspectives. So, I wrote this book, get your next promotion to bridge this gap. To help people understand that, you know, organizations are looking for right people and you have the capabilities, you have high potential. What else you can do to basically bridge that gap?

Because career is no more a ladder now, right. We can't expect, you know, manager, senior manager, director, blah, blah, blah. No, that doesn't exist. And after pandemic, that word is not going to exist now. Right. Or it is going to be flatter. So, coming back to the book, the book bridges the gap of expectations from organization standpoint, that, you know, what are they expecting for senior positions and that this book also, you know, it's not only my perspective of things. It's not only my research. The book has 10 stories of 10 CEOs across the board. They bring in their life journeys, they bring in their learnings. It's basically, you know, I mean, one coach and 10 mentors helping you to bridge that gap.

Brian Ardinger: Through your research and through your coaching practice, what are some of the skillsets and mindsets that tend to get the people promoted to a leadership position or what stands out nowadays, specifically around, you know, the changes that we're seeing?

Manbir Kaur: That's a good question, Brian. What helps people get promoted? At certain level, especially at mid-level, people get promoted because of the good work they have been doing. You know, they have been rated five by five, four of five and or something like that. And they have been getting promoted.

After a certain level, it's more of a mindset. It's more of an attitude, which we can call it leadership skills in some way, but I prefer to call it, you know, kind of a leadership mindset. We have the words like agility, innovation, whatever, basically it all relates to the mindset. How do I come across as a leader? How do I take people along? What kind of conversations am I having?

Do people trust me? Do I come across as an authentic leader? All these things to actually help you getting promoted and even your visibility. You might be thinking, yes, yes, yes. You know, I'm doing this. But do clients see me as a stakeholder. That, you know, Manbir is doing all these things. What's your perception in the organization? Your perception, your branding, your conversations, your emotional intelligence, how people perceive you, your trust, authenticity, all these things help you and over and above the work you have been doing.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's one of the key focuses as we get into more of an innovative world is the fact that it's not just about your ability to execute on what you've done in the past, but really to explore and open to navigating whatever is new from there.

Manbir Kaur: And one more point, you know, as you said, it's not only execution, you know, as you said, and aligning that strategy to your team also. That is also a big point when you get promoted to that level, which you are looking at you know, from mid-level to senior level. So, aligning your team to that bigger picture. And for that again, you need, a mindset.

Brian Ardinger: That's a great point. So obviously getting a promotion that, there's a lot of individual skills and mindset that's required, but you mentioned it's really a team sport. Let's talk a little bit about how innovation is a team sport and where do companies and individuals fall down when it comes to that?

Manbir Kaur: Well, innovation happens when people across functions collaborate to find new solutions. So now when you do that, we need knowledge and an ownership from multiple stakeholders. It's not one person job, right? We need necessity buy-in from multiple parties. He may also need some funding for innovation.

So, in real sense, in the real world it's really a team, team across multiple functions team across multiple levels. And for that, we need a big word called trust. Right? So, there's a big trust we need to have. I am afraid that if I give some idea, I share some idea. I bring my point of view and I'm getting blamed if I do the work in the other bit, which is not that so-called safe way. I have a fear that I'll get blamed. I would definitely want to play safe. Isn't it? Right.

So, innovation strongly require the acceptance of failure risk, which of course, you know, is easier when it's team. Because if I fail as an individual, my mind always will tell me play safe. If I know we are together, we are in this together. Then it becomes deaf on my mind, right.

It all runs from the mind. Right. And to the second part of your question, what stops all this is basically I feel that, you know, one is definitely trust. And second one is teams are not aligned to vibe. This point is very close to my heart, actually. Every organization has a vibe, right? Has a purpose by whatever word we use, basically, you know why you exist.

If we don't align that vibe to all the levels, you missed on that caliber. You are only using one part of the brain in that particular circumstance; you are not using the whole individual. That individual is not bringing in the whole energy to the work. You know, if I know that why my organization exists, innovation is definitely better.

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Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting question. So, do you believe, or have you seen the instance of innovation driven by the top down versus bottom up. And how can, I guess, you get that alignment? How can you develop that vibe so that you are aligned?

Manbir Kaur: It's definitely top down. So, if my management is not, you know, showing not imbibing that innovation culture, you know, they are not asking open-ended question. They are not giving psychological safe space. They're not establishing that trust. Definitely not going to happen.

Brian Ardinger: If you are an individual in an organization, you don't feel that vibe, what can you do as an individual within the organization to get realigned or to move the organization in a more innovative fashion?

Manbir Kaur: If you are a leader at that level, that you can have that kind of impact creating culture with you and your team. Start creating that environment which is a trusting environment. If you are a C-suite leader, if you have, if you can create that kind of impact, have innovation in your performance review process formally.

And what I mean to say is, you know, reward innovation in one way, because until innovation is part of your performance review. You know, anyways, you know, people say, you know, I mean, I'm not being rewarded for that. Why I'm doing this, why what's happening. Again, the story is the same, you know, if I would try to play safe because ultimately if I need to climb up the ladder, I need to increase my salary.

So, you need to create that environment and that culture. So that starts from trust, respecting, creating psychological, safe space. Those are the things which you need to really, really imbibe and talk about it. Have those conversations, which are, I call it, you know, not I call it, you know, Judith Glaser is a neuroscientist, was a neuroscientist, and the founder of something called Conversational Intelligence.

And she talked about trust really, really in deep way. She says it takes 0.07 seconds, for us in any conversation to establish statement in the mind that I am going to trust this person or not. And then another thing she brings in you know with her love is the environment, the conversation.

If your conversation is, you know, something like, no, I did, I said this. You didn't do it. It's I and you. What I hear as a human being, I and you. If you bring in more of we, more of inclusion in the conversation. That's how trust building starts. These are the basic pillars. I would say the foundation of innovation. That's how you can start as a leader.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The last core topic I want to talk about is we're heading into 2021. A lot of people are thinking about goal setting and how they can set themselves up for success in the new year. What are your thoughts on how people get goal setting wrong, or what are your thoughts on how can people better prepare themselves for heading into 2021?

Manbir Kaur: So, I think that's something which is really being talked about in this particular phase, end of December and early January. I get a lot of articles and a lot of information on goals setting. I feel that goal setting is a very good idea. And your goals should be aligned to your inner being. I'm not making it philosophical here. Don't want to do that.

So why I'm saying that, you know, because every human being is different. We bring a unique identity. We bring our unique strengths. Know that what are your strengths. Align your goals to those strengths. Why I'm saying it? Because most of the times our goals are driven from the outside, not from the inside.

My peer who did MBA with me, has reached this level. Okay. I should be doing this. So that becomes an external goal. Of course, haven't had that impression, but check with yourself. Is it really your goal? So, the first thing, what I'm pointing out is the goal has to be your own goal. It has to come from inside aligning to your stance.

Every time you set goal, have accompanying goal of learning always. What are you going to learn? Not only reaching that, it's not about the destination. It's about the journey. So, what are you learning? So, how I do with my clients is that not only set goals, but also have kind of a few words in which you are going to imbibe in this journey. Maybe thought agiles, domination, bold. I'm just throwing out some words here. But what I'm trying to say is it's not about the destination. It's about the journey also. Enjoy the journey, be accountable for your goals. Enjoy it.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's great advice. And, you know, especially nowadays where it again, I think a lot of times we can get wrapped up on what's that end goal or what's that core, final thing. And 2020 proved that we don't always know exactly how we're going to get there or what that end destination is going to be. But persevering and being adaptable to the changes in the environment is key. What else is going on in your world? Anything new or exciting that you want to talk about

Manbir Kaur: 2020 has united us all right. So, in all parts of the world, we are going through similar pain, similar issues. Some people are talking about failure. Right. You know, so that we have failed. 2020 has failed us. I think that's something, you know, if we can talk for a couple of minutes that yes, a lot of plans, maybe your plans Brian, also right, might have derailed.

My book was supposed to launch, I supposed to travel a lot for my book launch in different cities. Nothing happened. So yes, 2020 has certainly derailed that plan. You might have failed in different other ways, but that's okay. That failure is an experience. It's an opportunity. So, I would like to, you know, talk about that is failure is an opportunity.

May never, this thing happened, and all of us look back and reflect that how can I know. Let me reframe here. What are the gifts here? What can I learn here? That's something that is very important. Every situation the security in growth mindset we say that every circumstance can be turned into a gift or an opportunity.

So that's what I would like to say. Whenever there is a circumstance which are not according to your plan, and so-called failure, take it as an experience and as an opportunity, and see what you can learn and how can you move forward rather than being a victim of the situation.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Well, I love that concept of a learning journey. And obviously I learned quite a bit here and we can continue the conversation and look forward to doing so in the future. If people want to find out more about yourself or about your book, what's the best way to do that.

Manbir Kaur: My website is ManbirKaur.Com and LinkedIn is also a good way to connect with me. My books are available on Amazon, across the world.

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation and thank you again for sharing your thoughts on how we can get better in 2021. Really do appreciate it.

Manbir Kaur: Thank you, Brian. It was lovely talking to you. Thank you so much.

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On this week's episode, Inside Outside’s Susan Stibal sits down with RSM's Deputy Chief Economist Kevin Depew. This episode was recorded live at the IO2020 New Innovators' Summit on Oct. 22, 2020. Susan talks to Kevin about actionable insights for a turbulent economy.

Interview Transcript with Kevin Depew, RSM

Susan Stibal: I want to introduce Kevin Depew. Economic trends have been on a roller coaster ride and Kevin will provide actionable insights to help you plan for the future. He is the Deputy Chief Economist and Industry Eminence Program Leader at RSM. Kevin provides RSM's clients with macro economic and industry perspectives and insights they need to successfully manage their middle market businesses.

He is also an Emmy-award winning writer and producer. So we look forward to hearing more about that. Prior to joining RSM, Kevin worked in economics for Bloomberg, Dorsey Wright & Associates, and PaineWebber and A.G. Edwards. So thanks for being here, Kevin.

Kevin Depew: Thanks very much, Susan. Just so you know, the Emmy was not anything to do with economics. We did have a show on Fox that ran. It was a little bit like the daily show of finance. We had about 18 episodes and then it was canceled the day before we were nominated for the Emmy. That kind of derailed those aspirations right out the gate.

So I'm going to share just a couple of slides, then go through and talk about where we are. When we talk about the economy recovering and I see in some of the Q & A there, some of you had similar ideas to what we have at RSM about so much being depends on the pandemic.

But when we're talking about recovery, I thought it would be useful to go back before the pandemic and talk about what kind of economy we are recovering into. So, this is a slide from, I think we were doing road shows in February last time I was out somewhere. I think maybe it was in Nashville in late February. And so we had just started to see the appearance of COVID-19 on the West Coast and had not really moved at that point to, at least as far as we knew, to the East coast.

But these were our forecast, what we were anticipating for 2020, pre-pandemic sub 2% growth in 2019, so that's suboptimal. Anytime you're below 2% growth, then it doesn't take very much to teeter the economy into a recession. So that's one of the reasons, that's kind of the threshold we look at for being a positive economy versus one that's not really firing on all cylinders.

Our forecast for 2020, prior to the pandemic was for continued deceleration to one and a half percent. And really the economy has been characterized for much of the past decade by a couple of things. The first an economy that's being propped up by the consumer. So what we mean by that, the consumer of course accounts for about 70% of economic growth, but we've really seen weak fixed business investment. Capital expenditures being a drag on the economy, something that was really restraining growth. So everything was sort of in the hands of the consumer.

The good news about that is we had 3.6% unemployment at that point. So we had a lot of people in the workforce nearing probably full employment. Of course, things have changed now. Just a couple of risks to note, at the time we saw the potential for fiscal policy or administrative policy error, so if the administration re-escalated the trade war with China or migrated the trade war to the European Union or the UK, that was a potential risk. And also a potential error on the part of the Federal Reserve. So for example, if they raise interest rates too quickly.

At that point, based on what we do, we viewed the COVID-19 epidemic at that point, not quite a pandemic, as really a liquidity event. So something that could have the potential to derail the economy in the short term, but once we get past it, then we'd go back to where we were before. Even though it is a pandemic it's been far worse than what any of us anticipated.

There still is the potential that we return to the same type of economy we had prior to the pandemic. But as you can see, the forecast for that type of economy was not quite robust. And the longer this persists, the more we have the potential for long-term economic damage to happen. It's why fiscal policy is so critical right now.

So just a couple of things to talk about in terms of the recovery. You know, we really had a supply shock, a demand shock, and a financial shock all occurring at the same time. So any one of those in a sub 2% economy, would be enough to turn the economy into recession.

We had all three at the same time. So we had what were essentially depression like shocks. You see the first quarter minus 5% growth. The second quarter astonishingly horrible, minus 31% growth. And then our forecast for the third quarter, a sharp rebound at 33.5% and then moderating in the fourth quarter at 2.25%.

And I'll talk about that moderation just a moment, the reasons for that household consumption remains risk due to the lack of fiscal policy support and we'll get into those numbers in just a moment. The major risk to the economy is, as some of you noted in the chat portion for this, is a second wave of the pandemic, which we seem to be on the cusp of right now. If we look around the globe and we see what's happening in Europe, then I think it's very likely that we will see something that looks more like a second way in coming weeks.

In terms of policy response, the initial response and a catastrophic economic shutdown, was very robust. You had the Federal Reserve learned their mistakes from the great recession and acted very quickly. And even with the polarization that we have in DC, the fiscal policy, the Paycheck Protection Program, the pandemic unemployment, those things happened relatively quickly when you consider where we are now. Where we're past the stop gap measures that were designed to move the economy through very dire circumstances.

And so now we're at the point where fiscal policy is needed to provide economic stimulus. So going back to the spring, that was really crisis management, making sure that people who suddenly lost all income had the ability to purchase food, the ability to take care of their families, even though you've had since horrific labor market numbers. Now we're at the point where through partial recovery, we need stimulus to get over the hump to keep the long-term damage from impacting the economy.

The reality, and I think that you probably all are aware of this based on what you were posting in the chat prior, is that until there's a vaccine or multiple major therapeutic breakthroughs, we just cannot anticipate the whole problem.

You hear a lot these days about the shape of the recovery. Will it be a V-shape, will it be a W or an L? The most recent one that has been making the rounds has been a K shape recovery. And what's meant by that is in line with some of the things that you've probably been talking about the past couple of days at the Innovation Summit. There are people and businesses on that upper K path that have largely gone through the pandemic relatively unscathed.

So you think all of the things that make this event possible, for example, the technology behind it, the innovation behind it, those businesses, people employed in those industries are on that upper K shape path. The people in the consumer facing industries - hospitality, leisure, all those dining, all those industries that remain impaired, those folks are on that lower K path.

But what we would say is we would go back a little bit further. And so prior to the great recession, I think that what we were really dealing wiht and what we will have to continue to do with longer term is in fact, a K-shaped economy. And so the recovery is just a mirror image or a reflection of what has essentially been, for more than a decade now, a K-shaped economy. Where you have people who are in major cities prior to the pandemic faring very well. You go outside of a major city, and for much of the past decade, if you asked anybody on the economy is doing, they will tell you that it's terrible.

And so that's really how we end up at this place with high polarization, all of those issues that we're dealing with as we get into the final stretch of the election. The reality is that the economy and the recoveries would be elongated and very frustrating in some industries. It's going to take some time to be able to heal and get past this. What's been really some dire economic straights.

To put some real numbers to this. We've had more than 62 million. I haven't updated this in a week. So we saw new unemployment figures this morning and initial jobless claims. So it's really closer to about 64 million people have experienced some form of unemployment and loss of income as a result of the campaign. Right now we have 7.9% unemployment and 12.8% underemployment. So people who have taken jobs because they need the income, but are probably overqualified for those jobs.

The real unemployment rate is likely about three percentage points higher. So it's probably closer to about 11%. High savings rate, part of that related to just as a result of the stoppage in business. There are fewer places to spend money, but this is also indicative of, we think some risk aversion. Upper income earners, those who are on that upper K shaped path. They've actually pulled back spending by more than 7% since January, predating the pandemic. And right now that cohort are net savers.

Low income earners, their spending is up 0.3% since January. Those tend to be the net spenders because those are households where almost every dollar that goes in has to go to some form of payment, whether it's food, shelter, insurance, car maintenance, bills, those types of things. They're the ones that tend to be net spenders. And the increase there is reflective of some of the pandemic assistance that has since expired.

You know right now, $15 billion per week in lost government income support due to the policy impass, that is going to start showing up in the economy very soon. We've had only about three or four weeks or so, where that has ended. And so the longer we spend negotiating for some type of fiscal aid in DC, the more a risk the economy becomes. And so that's the sense of urgency from an economics perspective that we talk about with making sure there is some kind of fiscal aid that is on the horizon.

I think the worst case scenario would be we have an election that may be contested or may be not clear. I don't think that's a likely scenario, but I think that is probably the worst case scenario. And in that case, I think you would have to say if there's not an agreement soon that we may not get this glade until well into January, possibly February.

So looking at some of these random abstract numbers in context, every Thursday, you get the initial jobless claims reported at 8:30 Eastern Time. This morning, we had almost 780,000 new initial jobsless claims. In the entire history of this data, the first peak that we had the largest claim for one single week occurred in September of 1982, with 656,000 initial jobless claims.

And then you can see on the line here where those quickly moderated before 500,000. After 1982, the single largest week we had of initial claims occurred in March, 2009. The heart of the great recession when 665,000 individuals filed for initial jobless claims, those then slowly receded over a couple of years to below 400,000.

And so here's where we are today. So I think it's very important to put this in context because while you have policymakers in DC, sometimes talking about the robust employment reports we've seen on a monthly basis. These are still crisis level initial jobless claims on a week by week basis, more than 31 weeks since it began.

And so the four week average 866,000, is still not even at the two prior peaks, which were indicative of extreme stress and extreme crisis in the labor market economy. So we're not out of the woods. And this I think is a good way of visualizing how extreme the pandemic that we're dealing with continues to be this long into the pandemic.

The real question, how long before the U.S. Is back to a full functioning economy? I think we can take scenario one, probably off the table. What has occurred in the Sunbelt in the summer and the South and is now appearing as another wave, the virus, what looks like another wave in the upper Midwest, we would really characterize that as essentially the first-wave extension.

So spreaders from the Northeast and from the West were largely responsible for taking the virus out to the Sunbelt, taking the virus to the South, and then you have the large event in Sturgis. 250 some thousand people in the summer. And that seems to be related to the spread of the virus in the upper Midwest.

In fact, I read a study, I think from several Harvard economists recently that said that the public healthcare costs of the Sturgis rally. If we had paid everyone $25,000 roughly to stay home, it would be about what the public health cost is for that event. About 250,000 people attending largely not engaging in social distancing, not wearing masks, engaging in behavior that is directly that we know scientifically helps suppress the virus in the States.

I think the most likely scenario is either scenario two and possibly scenario three, where we have some regionalized lockdowns, likely not to be as severe as what we endured in the spring. But either way, we're looking at a recovery probably in the second half of next year. If we do not get an effective vaccine, or if we have difficulty in getting people to take the vaccine.

So you may have seen some of the surveys I've seen from various outlets, that show as many as 30 to 50% of people in the United States would not take the vaccine, even if it were available today. So all of those things put the economy in jeopardy and would likely prolong the pandemic. And delay the recovery until 2022.

So here, just to wrap up the opening comments, I don't want to leave everything with such dire straits. This too is a slide that we presented back before the pandemic. And all I did was go through and just color coded from red, the ones we can kind of take off the table and green, the ones that are happening actively and yellow, the ones where we're not quite sure about yet, but these are the things that could actually go right.

The first one that innovation takes off and that hopefully you've had some experience over the past couple of days, seeing all of the different areas where that is already happening and where this type of innovation, helping the pandemic really re-incentivize innovation that goes directly to quality of life. Those are really exciting things to be happening.

Unfortunately, sometimes it takes something like a pandemic to incentivize that type of innovation. Otherwise, Well, we typically get the cycle of innovation where the low-hanging fruit. So consumer-facing innovation that translates directly into app purchases or consumption. Those are the ones that businesses are mostly incentivized to work on in the immediate.

Longer-term innovation, the types that make meaningful changes to quality of life, those are typically precipitated by crisis. And we saw this not only with say the great resession and some of the policies that emerged from that. But throughout history, even going back to the 1918 pandemic, a lot of the public health innovations that were made in America were a direct result of innovations that were forced to be created as a result of that 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

The other thing that I would point to is for much of the past decade, the recovery was really isolated in those major urban areas. So if you think about the high-tech urban areas and the San Francisco, San Jose. Even if you look at places like Atlanta or Austin, Texas, Boston, there was really a very strong divide between the fortunes of those who lived in those urban areas. And if you go even 60 miles outside of a major urban area in rural America, you saw the perception of the economy and their experience of the economy being radically different.

And that in our view is indicative of that K shaped economy. So what has happened as a result of the pen is you have a different incentive to move away from high density, urban areas. You have technology that has enabled people to work from home indefinitely, sometimes permanently from different areas.

And then this creates new demand in those areas where things like 5g that could enable a significant quality of life differences. So if you think about something as normal and everyday as dealing with diabetes or high blood pressure to keep it in the health realm, that if you're 90 miles from a quality medical institution, your access to that care requires significant investment in your time.

Whereas, if you live in a high density urban area, then you may be 10 or 20 minutes from high quality healthcare. So 5g enabling that type of telehealth and telemedicine to be monitored from afar in high quality days, that could be a game changer and could be incentivize businesses to locate to areas where prior to the pandemic, you might never considered.

The other thing that I would note that I think is optimistic is at about a week and a half or so, less than a week and a half, we'll have another election and regardless of the outcome, I think that we'll be able to look back at 2016 to 2020 as really being the peak period of polarization in the United States. So at least in our lifetime.

And so as baby boomers begin to age out of policy-making roles and you have millennials and Gen Z aging into those policy-making roles, I think that will bring with it a new view on collaboration, which is likely to find the coming decades and just-in-time, because we do have some significant policy challenges that'll have to be addressed.

So if you think about the labor enabling technology, things are enabling this conference for example. Migrating now towards use of technology that is ultimately labor replacing. That's going to pose a significant policy challenge. AI and robots don't pay payroll tax. They don't consume. And so the more that labor replacing technology starts to take away some of those jobs. And some of the incomes that many people have relied on, there has to be a safety net to be able to get past that type of real policy crisis. As well as addressing the unbalanced growth we have in that K-shaped economy.

So I'm going to stop sharing here, get your comments, find out what your thoughts are. It looks like Jeff is requesting the mic. There you go. Hi Jeff.

Jeff: I just reached out to you on LinkedIn. I'm interested in tapping your expertise at another time, but I'm curious if you have any sense of the kind of pushback. I represent a technology platform that to a certain extent is replacing jobs within database administration, things like that. And I'm wondering if people can be pivoted and excited towards new opportunities. Or if there's going to be like serious pushback and fear and Oh, no, I don't want to have anything to do with that. Or how would you best suggest to like, get people excited about the positive aspects of change and not losing job stuff?

Kevin Depew: That's a great question. And that's what we mean by a policy challenge. We've talked about infrastructure investment for four years now and regardless of the outcome of the election, there likely will be some infrastructure investment. And what sometimes gets lost, people think of bridges, roads, tunnels, and it's infrastructure, but infrastructure is also education and provide the ability for people to skill up, to meet new labor challenges.

So I'm optimistic that type of labor replacing technology will create new jobs, but in the near term, it's not going to create jobs that the people who need jobs are qualified for. And so that's calls for some infrastructure investment. Longer term, I think the pushback you anticipate is similar to what has been announced recently with anti trust, of Google breaking up big tech and figuring out how do we generate tax revenue by focusing on technology companies that are engaged in those labor replacing technologies.

It's going to be a serious discussion. I don't think it's going to be a smooth road. And even if you go back to the industrial revolution, you have long periods where governments actively suppressed technology because of the fact that it was labor replacing. You think of textiles. One of the first areas where that occurred, there was significant pushback.

In some cases, outright banning the use of technology because of the social unrest that will be created if you reach a certain scale where people just did not have any access to info. Like even in New York City, you had the Lamplighters Union that persisted long after it was possible to just flip a switch and light up all the streets, they would literally go around and turn the lights.

We can anticipate some of that, but I think that what I'm optimistic about, the Luddites, I see that in the chat. What I'm optimistic about is in a period of increasing collaboration that we're able to work together to meet that type of challenge, so it's not oppressive of technology and not keeping it at bay when it could really provide significant quality of life enhancements.

Jeff: I'm thinking on a policy level that it might move the government to offer some kind of incentives to retrain employees or somehow so that they can retrain employees without it being like another painpoint on their books.

Kevin Depew: I'm optimistic too. There are a number of cities and areas around the country that are experimenting with universal basic income. I read a great story in Compton about someone that it wasn't a major amount. It was like $1,500, I believe per month. But what it enabled was for somebody to skill up without the stress of just buying shelter and food for the family.

And so I think those types of policy decisions can go a long way towards smoothing this out. And so we can have an economy that's functioning, that's taking advantage of innovation and technology, but at the same time, providing people with at least a safety net so that they can pursue different skillsets, longer term.

Susan Stibal: That was a great question. And we have one more question from Greg Christensen. Do you see the opportunities for rural areas to leverage this new dynamic? Or do you see it as accelerating the decline in the population?

Kevin Depew: This is already happening? I think it's a little bit akin to the old frog up out of boiling water that you wake up one day and you notice that, Oh my God, the water is boiling. That when you start to look around rural America and travel around, which I used to be able to do, you would see this already happening.

5G investment, for example, and you dealt with the technology company that was in the rural part of Western New Jersey. And they went in and had a conversation because they wanted to open a business there, but they didn't have the infrastructure from high-speed internet to be able to do it successfully. And they were able to create an incentive program that benefited not just the company, but the entire rural area.

So I'm optimistic that those types of out of the box thoughts and collaborations will be something that makes rural America more attractive and also reduced to some of the stress that you have in major urban areas where they're overcrowded. There's not enough housing. The public transit is overwhelmed. So thinking specifically of places like New York City and San Francisco, where prior to the pandemic you had outrageous housing costs, nobody could afford to live there.

So I think it also reduces the stress and has the two full benefit of making rural area more attractive and then urban areas, a little more livable.

Susan Stibal: Kevin, thanks so much. That was one of the best economic presentations I've seen in years. So thank you.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Martin Babinec, Co-founder of TriNet and author of the new book More Good Jobs. Martin and I talk about the importance of community dynamics, and the creation of new businesses and the changing trends, that are affecting building startup communities outside the Valley.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Martin Babinec

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and as always we have another amazing guest. Martin Babinec is the co-founder of TriNet and author of a new book called More Good Jobs: An entrepreneurs action plan to create change in your community. Welcome Martin.

Martin Babinec: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on the show. As a lot of our audience knows, part of the stuff we talk about in innovation, it's not just about startup innovation or corporate innovation, it's about community innovation. And your book around how do you create jobs and how do you create new innovations outside of the traditional tech hubs, was quite interesting to me and obviously up my alley, as far as what we've been doing here in the Midwest as well.

You're an entrepreneurial by nature. A few years ago, you started TriNet back in Silicon Valley and grew that to a, a major company, but you've got some interesting things about how you did that. Not only did you create it in Silicon Valley, but you commuted back and forth from your residence in New York. So, take us back to the early days of starting a company from scratch in Silicon Valley, and then we'll eventually progress to talking more about the book.

Martin Babinec: I'm a very lucky guy because when I began my entrepreneurial journey in 1988 and living in Silicon Valley at the time, I didn't realize how valuable it would be to be starting a company in what would be considered the most entrepreneur supporting place on the planet.

I had no appreciation for it at the time. It was a struggle. And when Tri-Net began, since in the late eighties, you couldn't say the words HR and outsourcing in the same sentence and have people understand what you were talking about. We're talking pre worldwide web. So, we didn't have the connectivity that we take so for granted today. And like most entrepreneurs, I began with only the vision of trying to create a small business. I was tired of working in a larger organization. I wanted to be more in control of my destiny. And that's a very common thing that prompts people to start companies. But what I did not understand is that the very nature of what we were creating a TriNet would depend on economies of scale.

And so as an entrepreneur, once I began trying to start this business and sell to other small businesses as a business to business kind of approach, we were not successful. And we were on the verge of going out of business, when I kind of made the decision to really do something counterintuitive.

Even though this is an economies of scale kind of business, it required having lots of scale for it to be successful. It was waning our direction towards saying we're only going to sell to emerging world technology communities. It really changed my life and outlook as an entrepreneur. And then became for TriNet to over the entire 20 years of, as the CEO, that was the focus of our business initially in Silicon Valley and then on, from, as we expanded to other markets, still retaining that very tight focus.

And by doing that, it brought me into the world of Silicon Valley in ways that made me appreciate how important was to get support from the community. And it wasn't till I moved my family from Silicon Valley to my hometown in upstate New York, which is more like the Midwest in terms of culture. All right. It's 210 miles from New York City and a small community.

And I spent 10 years commuting from my Mohawk Valley home in Little Falls, New York. Back to Silicon Valley while still running the business. And it wasn't supposed to be that long, but that's how it turned out. And over that 10 years of commuting, I really began to think hard about the difference between my two valleys and Mohawk Valley and Silicon Valley.

And that's what prompted then this journey to, how do we take the assets in a place like upstate New York or in a lot of places in the middle of the country that have a lot of intellectual capital that is underutilized. And how important is it of a supportive community to help entrepreneurs start and grow companies? And that's ultimately what led to the start of our nonprofit Upstate Venture Connect, which in turn led to writing this book More Good Jobs.

Brian Ardinger: This conversation has started about the rise of the rest and startup communities outside the Valley and that. What do you think started some of that conversation early on to even think about the fact that companies can be created outside the traditional tech hubs and that there was a yearning and a desire to actually create these ecosystems?

Martin Babinec: National recognition through Steve Case's Rise of the Rest was illuminating for some, but for me, it goes back much earlier. As I talk about in the book, in 1995, my good friend, Brad Feld moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hotbed of startup activity in the nineties, he goes to Boulder, Colorado. And at that point in time, Boulder was not a place VCs were flocking to, to find the next big thing. All right. Nice college town, but not a whole lot of action.

And here, even by 1995, TriNet's businesses is a hundred percent focused on emerging tech. Brad Feld moves to Boulder and not much going on there, but I decided to open a TriNet office just because Brad Feld moved there. That's how much confidence I had that this was going to be a game changer.

And lo and behold, those people that follow Brad Feld and are aware of his book Startup Communities that talks about how did Boulder transform to a community that then rose in the ranks to be second in the country on the metric of venture capital investment per capita, trailing only the San Francisco Bay area. I mean, how did that happen in a period of call it 10, 15 years, which is not a long period of time when we think about major transformation of a local economy.

So I had a ringside seat and watched that unfold. And meanwhile, still growing the company and it was long before I started the journey of trying to learn from Brad's experience and the experience of TriNet in many markets where there was lots of startup activities since that was the focus of our company.

I was taking in a lot of what I saw elsewhere and all the times thinking about someday, somehow, you know, if I had the time and more resources, I could put into it, what could I, as one guy do to help bring about some transformational change in an area that I really love? Not just in my hometown, but more broadly, the more difficult challenge of how could we leverage the assets that are dispersed geographically across the broader region? Because that for me is what made the most sense. And it's also a lot more difficult than just trying to grow a startup community in a single city.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's go and talk a little bit about the book. The title is called More Good Jobs. And you really talk about how do you turn your community into what you call a magnet city. Unpack a little bit about what people can find in the book and some of the core nuggets.

Martin Babinec: We actually did some research and that research included what happens with cities that..like in upstate in New York, we've got a hundred plus colleges and universities. We flow a huge amount of talent that comes into our area to attend these colleges and universities. And then we watched them disappear as they move other places.

So we did some research and said, where are these people going? And as we talked about in the book, actually going through Crunchbase data and looked at where did people that were coming out of especially STEM programs, where were they going to? What cities? And lo and behold, the research showed that from upstate New York colleges, there was a consistent four or five cities that the majority of this talent that was then landing in the Crunchbase database, Crunchbase reflecting emerging world technology companies, where were they going after college? It was the same four cities.

It was Silicon Valley, New York City, Boston, Washington, DC. Same four cities. And it got 85% of the talent that we were able to identify. And so, we would look at those cities and others as magnet cities. And we also did some research showing the growth in jobs in these cities that are attracting talent for these newer industries, had not only high growth rates of what we'll call tech jobs, innovation economy related jobs, but because of the attributes of that workforce profile, it pushed up overall job growth in a lot of other jobs, even outside the tech community.

And so those cities, which we refer to as magnet cities have the enviable characteristics that all of us want to be in cities where the best talent is flocking to these magnet cities. And they're being exported out of the other end of the extreme talent exporting cities like Buffalo, New York, like Syracuse, like Rochester. Great cities that have some assets, but we keep waving goodbye to our top talent that are coming out of these universities.

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Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's almost like it's flipped the old economic development model where you would try to attract a big company to put some headquarters in your backyard. And then that would attract talent. It's now almost the reverse where the talent itself attracts those big companies to come and smaller companies to come as well as new companies to be created, in the scheme of things. So, talent seems to be the driver rather than the jobs itself.

Martin Babinec: Yeah. But even when you apply that lens, which our government frequently tries to do. New York state in particular, we spend billions and billions of dollars on economic development that would include taxes incentives for companies to come and open up a facility because we got all these great universities.

It sounds logical, but guess what? The numbers show it ain't working. We've been doing that same approach for 50 plus years. And it hasn't moved the needle, but we still keep doing the same thing. That's been part of the inspiration of my wanting to write this book is say, let's debunk this approach because it's not working. The talent continues to leave.

So how can we change the paradigm here. And what we believe in what we were able to show, even in the 10 years we've been on the journey with Upstate Venture Connect as a nonprofit, is that, that top talent when they are early in their career, and before they'd had a chance to really develop a good personal network, the ability of the community to help that top talent get connected to the right resources locally that's how you can change and begin that journey to go from being a talent exporting community towards becoming a magnet city.

So, we've spent a huge amount of energy, and this is what the book goes over in terms of a menu of different approaches. And how does a group of leaders, local leaders and community leaders, business leaders, government people, think of different stakeholders in the community. How could local leaders start orchestrating a more combined effort to help talent who have entrepreneurial aspirations or maybe are starting, even if they're students or developing relationships while they're still students, so that they can put some roots down in these talent exporting communities. And it's the roots that will keep them. And that's part of what we try to do in the book and explain how that works

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. And one of the things I like about the book is it does go into some tactical ways that a community can foster this and start building that magnetism, so to speak. A couple of things you mentioned are increasing the volume of collisions and this idea of creative collaborations and that. More angel investors. Having the entrepreneurs lead the communities. Can you talk about some of the tactics that you recommend in the book for how communities can become more magnets?

Martin Babinec: What we believe is most of these cities have the right assets. Just like you mentioned, they have entrepreneurs, they have capital, they've got industrial resources that can be useful. So, they have the right assets. And why are they not producing the level of startups that a place like the cities that I mentioned in upstate New York have the capability to produce.

And it's because too oftentimes in communities that have a strong industrial past, as we have throughout upstate New York, that industrial pass was also built on a notion of hierarchy rather than network. So, hierarchy, meaning that companies would get started and everything would be driven from the top down.

You know, once there was a certain amount of capital that powered the growth of a business, there would be that combination of government support, which is very top-down. And then even colleges and community organizations are kind of approaching things in a hierarchal way, serving only their constituency.

And there's very little recognition of growing a network from the bottom up. So we know when we think of today's digital generation in particular, they tend to look less about what's the hierarchy. And instead, they say, I can go online and meet people. All right. Or I want to be out there with my peers.

The reason they move from talent, exploiting cities to magnet cities, because they want to hang out with other people that look like them. And when they're there in a talent expert in community, and they don't find any startups and they don't find any things in new industries, they say that's why I got to leave.

So what can people do to answer your question? It's provide visibility to the assets that are there in these communities because traditional media, broadcast television, local print newspapers, they don't provide much visibility to the activity in the newer industries. It's been a super frustrating thing for us.

And so, by the way, the next generation, the digital generation, millennials, they don't watch broadcast television. They go read print newspapers, right. And somehow, they pop into these magnet cities and they figure out, who do I need to meet? And that makes it inviting for them to go there. Even when they don't know anybody, the day they walk in.

Okay. So here we had the assets inside these communities, and yet they're siloed. They're siloed by institution and they can be siloed by geography. So, the focus is finding the right tribe of leaders that can break down these silos and be thinking more about collaboration that includes crossing institutional boundaries instead of focusing only on their own constituency.

Let's open things up a bit. Let's provide some visibility to where are the kinds of events going on, where the right people can come together and bump into each other in what we call a creative collision. Cause this is how relationships often get started. And then when relationships get developed to a certain point and there's trust in the parties involved.

There are also opportunities for especially experienced people, experienced entrepreneurs, and those with some capital to make referrals. And when you make a referral, by a have trusted source. This is such an important attribute that helps entrepreneurs in the newer industry, especially those earlier in their career that don't have deep networks.

So, the more a community can do to help put those roots down, and form relationships, and be embracing of those with innovation, ideas, and growing businesses. This is what can change the direction for a local company.

Brian Ardinger: I'm curious to get your take on the COVID pandemic and maybe some of the changes and trends that we're seeing as people move to more remote workforce and the ability to tap into networks no matter where they're at. How does that potentially change the dynamic of a magnet city? What are your thoughts on that?

Martin Babinec: As we speak there's no question. The out migration from some of these magnet cities that have shut down offices and just have people cramped in some cases in small apartments, without much contact other than virtual. Some of our talent exporting cities look really friendly by comparison. And so, we're getting near term some benefit from that. And some people are now making life choices about what's more important. And the fact that companies are now more embracing of the ability for our professionals to be productive on a remote basis.

I think it's a game changer and that's going to create some opportunity for what have traditionally been some talent exporting cities. But as we know today, maybe by April or May or sometime next summer, things are at some point going to start looking a little bit more normal as the vaccine becomes effective and we reach herd immunity and we put the pandemic behind us. Things will start reverting back to what we used to have.

And yes, there will be people flocking back to work in offices. All right. And there are reasons that the attributes of these magnet cities will power back up. So as good as it looks today. I think there will be some changes ahead, but it's still we'll leave the residual benefit of corporations and businesses of all kinds who will now have both the tools and maybe a little more confidence that work can be done on a remote basis. And that presents a tremendous opportunity for cities.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think it provides an opportunity for communities to kind of reinvest and reset themselves as well for this new world. As well as more visibility, like you said, to alternatives that are out there that people may not have ever looked at until this pandemic came around. The last topic I want to talk about is this concept of capital. And one of the things you talk about in the book is how to increase more angel investors and ability to have people to bet on these early-stage ideas. Not only with cash, but also like corporations to bet on these new companies to use as beta customers or, you know, as customers themselves. What's your take on the importance of venture capital, angel capital, in creating a community in a new city around this?

Martin Babinec: We devoted a whole chapter of the book to this very topic, chapter seven. And the key understanding that I'd share here would be that when it comes to institutional capital, like venture capital, once a company arrives at a stage where they can qualify for that institutional capital, capital increasingly gets more mobile. It'll cross geography. Particularly when we get to what are called Series B level.

So, think of the capital stack beginning at the very start, the first money an entrepreneur typically gets comes from the three F's, friends, family and fools. Okay. And that capital is pretty available almost anywhere. You can find the three F's and so entrepreneurs can usually begin with that. Then the next stage is what we'll call seed, up to and we'll call it Series A.

So, seed capital is after they've exhausted the friends, family, and fool money. They move in and maybe get some angel investors who ideally pool their money together in a fund rather than operate as a network. They'll oftentimes, angel investors that are in that three F category, are operating as wildcatters, which is not a good way to go. But when you pull lots of these angels together into a fund, as we explain it, the book that starts really now picking up into seed capital.

And so seed capital checks can be in that $150,000 to a million and a half. And sometimes more, depending on the opportunity. And then from seed capital, that first level of institutional financing Series A, which can be checks in that $3 million to $10 million range, that's where more sophisticated money comes in.

So, the biggest gap in talent exporting communities is in that seed capital to Series A. We're not going to attract Series A investors to come in, to start up shop as a Series A fund, until they see it's in their advantage to do so. We worry less about attracting capital in that sense. And my energy is focused on that seed capital stage and building relationships with Series A investors, including those outside the local area.

So that when the right company has reached that stage, where they now qualify for a Series A investment, we have the network of relationships, including those, bringing us outside the area, to qualify Series A firms who then will value the opportunity to get into these companies. Because oh, by the way, when these Series A firms, which are oftentimes in magnet cities, where they're a wash in dollars going into these companies.

If you're in New York city or Silicon Valley, and you're a startup that qualifies for Series A, the capital is almost irrational. Like if they get bid up, there's so many dollars chasing the best deals. The valuations are really high. So, when you present a good Series A investor, with a great opportunity and an area of coming out of a talent exporting community and can show that, Hey, this thing can really work.

The valuation for the quality of the companies is oftentimes significantly lower than the equivalent company in a magnet city. And if you're going to make money as an early-stage investor, as we say, basis matters. Meaning you pay too much. You really do reduce the opportunity for it to be a significant win at the back end. So, all that's explained in our chapter on private capital. And it's a great question.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: I appreciate you coming on Martin to talk about the book and that if people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that.

Martin Babinec: Visit our site moregoodjobs.org where you can also not only get the introduction and some information about the book, but you can join our community. We created a community site. In which we welcome the opportunity to interact with others, not only about the book, but those that really want to help grow their startup community wherever they might be and interact with people that share those same values.

Brian Ardinger: Well Martin, I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to continuing the conversation and seeing where the world takes us.

Martin Babinec: Thanks so much, Brian. Appreciate being here.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Ty Montague co-founder and CEO of co:collective and author of True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business. Ty and I talk about his career in advertising and his pivot to a new framework for how companies should be approaching a changing landscape, customers, competitors, talent, and more.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Ty Montague of co:collective

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Ty Montague. He is the co-founder and CEO of co:collective, which is a creative and strategic transformation company. Serves clients like Google and YouTube and IBM and MoMA. And the list goes on and on.

Ty's also been named one of the 50 most influential creatives in the past 20 years. One of the top 10 creative directors in America, as well as the top 10 creative minds in business. Ty, you also wrote a book called True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business. So welcome to the show Ty

Ty Montague: Brian. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I was super excited to have you, because I want to talk about the transformation and the things that you've seen in this whole world of advertising. If I understand correctly, you've had an illustrious career in the advertising world, but about five or 10 years ago, you made a pivot from that world of classic advertising. And so maybe we can start there. Can you tell us a little bit about that shift from what you were doing in the past, in the advertising space, and where you are now?

Ty Montague: I used to call myself a storyteller for businesses, helping them craft their story, and then tell it using paid media 30 and 60 second television commercials primarily. But about 15 years ago, I started to notice that it was getting harder to tell stories using traditional paid media. And I also noticed what seemed to me to be a new kind of company being born. These companies had a story, but they weren't telling it using paid media, they were actually doing it in their customer experience.

First one that I remember noticing because I was still in advertising at the time was Starbucks. You know, there's a moment that all of us I'm sure had where you wake up one morning and suddenly there's a Starbucks on every street corner in America, but there was no Starbucks advertising anywhere. And I couldn't figure out, I was like all other things being equal, right, the Starbucks way of building a business has got to be more efficient.

And so I looked into it, and I started collecting lists of companies that seem to be operating in this new way. And about 10 years ago, once I realized that they actually did operate in a very different way, I decided to leave traditional advertising. I was the co-president and chief creative officer of a big agency called J. Walter Thompson in North America. At the time, my partner and I decided to leave and launch co:collective. And what we do is we help more traditional companies begin to function in this new way.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about that thesis. Can you unpack this quest that you see companies going through and who's good at it and let's start there.

Ty Montague: We have two theses at co:. First to be successful today and increasingly in the future, companies need to be pursuing a higher purpose. We call it a quest. It is something that transcends merely creating shareholder value. Making money is a great result of having a quest, but it's not the point of having a quest.

There needs to be generosity to a good quest. It needs to be something that inspires your customers and your employees to engage with and come along and try to achieve it with you. And so, we help leadership teams define and align on this quest, this higher purpose. And then we help companies actually enact that quest.

In other words, the quest isn't a communication strategy. It's an action strategy for the company. You take your quest and you put it to work in your customer experience. Defining innovative experiences that you make to make your quest real and tangible for people inside and outside your company. And 10 years ago, we had no idea whether that idea would float at all. And fingers crossed. It's a much more popular idea today than it was 10 years ago. And we're excited to see the world pet in our direction.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about framework. Can any company embark on a quest and what's that framework to do so?

Ty Montague: We have a process that we've developed. It's been iterative. As you mentioned, I wrote a book and published it in 2013 that's really about the process. And it hasn't changed massively since then, but there've been a few tweaks to it. So, we basically look for four truths for a company as we look for inputs into how to develop your quest. We look for a truth about the protagonist and this is all story language, right?

Ultimately, we consider the protagonist to be the company itself. So, what is your true state of play today? And we do a lot of desk research. We do a lot of internal interviewing at these companies to define, like, what is the truth about your current state today? We then look for a truth about the stage.

And by that we mean the stage that the story is playing out on, what's going on in culture. What's going on in your competitive set, what's going on in technology that you need to pay attention to. We look for truth about the participants, the people that you actually want to serve in your business. Your customers would be another way to put it. We think of them as participants though, because if you're on a good quest, they want to come along with you and help you achieve it.

And then we look for a truth about the antagonist. So, it's not enough and know what you're for. We believe you need to know what you're against. What is the dragon that you're trying to slay when you get out of bed every day? And a good antagonist can be extremely motivating.

And then we take those inputs, and we work collaboratively with the client to develop their quest, usually with the whole leadership team. Often, including the CEO. From there, we take that quest and we put it to action both in again, four quadrants offer, your identity - so the products that you make and then, you know, your identity including communications, your community -internally like internal stakeholders in the company, and then capabilities. Because if you have a good quest, a good quest is ambitious over time it may require you to add capabilities to the company, which can be done through acquisition or by hiring new kinds of people.

Brian Ardinger: Is this something that pretty much any company in any industry can go through and take part in? Or are there particular industries or types of companies that, where the story model plays out more effectively?

Ty Montague: No, we are industry agnostic. Our belief is companies are at their base route, a collection of people and people always have, and always will respond to a powerful narrative. It's what inspires us. It's what attracts us to businesses. And companies that have a compelling quest are, particularly with young people, are particularly attractive. And in some cases, young people will decide not to do business with a company that doesn't have them today. For a time, it has been a competitive advantage for those who adopted early Today I would say we're moving to existential threat to not have some kind of higher purpose.

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Brian Ardinger: And it does seem that this ability to not only affect the market or your customers that you're dealing with, but how you attract employees and how you maintain that relationship can come into play in a much more effective way than just saying here's what we do. And let's put advertising dollars behind it to tell that story.

Ty Montague: Absolutely great point. You know, in the war for talent alone, I think 85% of millennials when asked, would take a cut in pay to join a company that shares their values. And so, you're getting better talent cheaper. If you're a CEO, if you have a well-defined and inspiring purpose.

Brian Ardinger: We're actually recording this the day after the election. Votes are still being counted and all that kind of stuff. As we get to more of a polarized place, where we have a protagonist and antagonist in the story. How do you see brands playing a role in that? And or do you see them taking sides and helping with that, or what's your take on that.

Ty Montague: Great question also. You know, I would say again, back to millennials, right? If you want to do business with young people today, who are, by the way, as boomers age out, we're seeing this massive shift in generational wealth. So, millennials are legitimate consumers today and will become the dominant consumers quite rapidly. And so, what we're seeing is companies that are not activists, companies that do not have a point of view are increasingly rejected by consumers.

Having a point of view, it's an odd thing because for years, I'm 57 years old, like, and in the advertising business companies were very reluctant to take any kind of political stand at all. But today it's almost required to have a point of view. Pro or con like pro-Trump or anti-Trump or pro black lives matter or anti-black lives matter. You need to have a point of view and you need to be seen to then be acting on that point of view, as opposed to just saying it, you got to do it. You got to participate.

Brian Ardinger: You spotted this trend early and how's this playing out now. How do you see things like COVID affecting the adoption or this way of positioning your company and moving forward?

Ty Montague: Yeah. Well, I think again, having an activist point of view as a company is a 10 or a 20-year strategy. This isn't a short-term thing. Hopefully COVID is a shorter-term problem, but it is an opportunity for a company once again, to show what they're truly made of, right. Consumers respond to companies that take action based on their beliefs.

And so this is a period of time when the best companies have seized the opportunity to show consumers that they are on the side of right. You know, they're trying to take whatever capabilities that they have and put them to work in service of making sure that people are safe and healthy. And you see that happening in multiple ways.

One example, a client of ours Under Armour, you know, they took their know-how and capabilities, which are around making athletic gear and made a mask for athletes. Got it out onto the market. First, they made them freely available to first responders and people on the front lines. And then they started to sell them because they were proven to work really, really well. Under Armor did what they do best and put it to work doing good during the pandemic.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's bring us back on the innovation front. How can companies start maybe using this methodology to rethink how they should position themselves and do business in a new and dynamic and disruptive world that they're living in.

Ty Montague: One of the things that we have noticed is that the innovation space is full of smart, talented people. And design thinking is really well understood in that space. And our thesis is that design thinking is absolutely crucial, but it is also not enough. It is insufficient. That merely having a customer insight is not enough today. That companies need to step back and really figure out what they stand for overall in the world before they get into the design thinking process.

And so that's what we would say is that design thinking is vitally important, but companies need to take a step back before they get into product innovation. They need to decide whether those products actually align with their overall thesis as a business.

Brian Ardinger: How do you actually then put that into action within your company to drive towards it, especially if you're building products and that differently in the past, and now you're moving to this new way.

Ty Montague: Absolutely. Well, once you understand the thesis, once you have a quest, then you unleash the power of design thinking and you go and look for consumer insight, you look for pain points and you look for ways to delight customers, but through the lens of your quest. And so, quest led companies often over time becomes slightly hard to categorize because they tend to burst out of the silo that we think of them in.

Tesla is a great example, right? Tesla is a company that people might think of Tesla as a car company, but Tesla does not think of themselves as a car company. Their enemy is the hydrocarbon economy. They are trying to disrupt the hydrocarbon economy. Trying to accelerate adoption of a new economy based on sustainable energy.

And they think of themselves as an energy and transportation company. So, cars makes sense, but also charging stations and also grid level battery systems and also battery packs for your house and also solar cells. And who knows what else in the future? Right. So, you take your quest and your enemy. You use that to then define your innovation roadmap and then at a product level, you unleash the power of design thinking to make sure that the products that you're putting into market actually solve a pressing human problem. And the company said to do that best become disproportionately successful. They're on a tear.

Brian Ardinger: And also, it seems to allow them to be more resilient and adaptive to change because they're not tied to, this is the one product that we serve or the one particular vertical that we're in. It allows flexibility in a ever flexible world that we're living in.

Ty Montague: Exactly. Right. That's another great point. We often say that a good quest is often the answer to the question what business are you actually in? Tesla isn't in the car business, they're in the business of accelerating adoption of an entirely new economy. And because they think of themselves that way, they're very nimble and flexible, and they're able to see opportunities where a traditional car company probably does not.

Brian Ardinger: So, we talked a little bit about Tesla, but I was wondering if we could use the last couple of minutes to maybe give any kind of other case studies or any examples of companies that are doing this well or mistakes, or things that you've seen along the way.

Ty Montague: We work with a lot of different companies. One of the really interesting case histories for us is Sallie Mae. And this is in progress, right? So, I'm not able to talk about everything that they have planned, but they came to us. They were defining themselves as a college loan company. And we said to them, if you took on the quest of equipping, aspiring minds to live the life that they imagined.

Rather than thinking of yourself as a college loan company, you're in the service of helping people live the life that they want to do. Going to college is the gateway to that. But you can have a very long career, a very long relationship with them. So get into the credit card business because establishing a credit rating, once you've gone to college is a good thing to do. It will be helpful to them and potentially a good revenue stream for you.

So that's an example of taking a quest and expanding it into a new category. One other thing that I wanted to talk about is just the future, because we've gotten to a point where being quest led is now de rigueur like a lot of companies understand that they need to have and articulate a higher purpose. I think we're in a zone now where purpose washing is something that we need to be really careful about. Right. And holding yourself to account as a company to literally do what you say you stand for, as opposed to just say it is incredibly important.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's probably, if you take that quest on, it's much more of a high profile, and if you don't continue on that particular path, it's very easy to see that transparency from a consumer or participant employee perspective.

Ty Montague: Exactly. You're handing the world a stick to beat you with if you don't live it. So once you do it, you need to really mean it because otherwise you're going to get beat up a little bit, I think.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Ty, I'd love the continuing conversation. If people want to find out more about yourself or co collective or your book in that, what's the best way to do that.

Ty Montague: You can reach co:collective at cocollective.com. You can reach me on email at tmontague@cocollective.com. The book's available on Amazon.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Thanks again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation.

Ty Montague: Thanks, Brian. This was great.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Xiaoyin Qu. Xiaoyin is the founder of Run The World, the new virtual events platform startup. This interview took place at our IO2020 New Innovators' Summit in October. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front-row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Xiaoyin Qu, Founder of Run The World

Brian Ardinger: My name's Brian Ardinger. I'm Director of Innovation at Nelnet and Founder of Inside Outside Innovation. And I wanted to have Xiaoyin on, obviously, as I started trying to think about what we’re going to do with this particular event now that COVID hit and we weren't going to be able to have it live.

I started looking at a lot of different platforms out there and I ran into Run The World and Xiaoyin and I was really impressed with not only her, but what she's pulled together in a very short amount of time. And so, I figured I'd invite her to the conference and expose her to what we're building on this particular platform and give her an opportunity to showcase what they're doing and tell you the story of what it's like as an early-stage founder, to go from seven failed ideas, to raising $15 million in the middle of a pandemic and launching and scaling and building a business.

So, with that Xiaoyin Qu is the founder of Run The World. She used to work at Facebook and Instagram as a product manager, she was an MBA at Stanford before she decided to start Run The World. And went out and raised $15 million, I believe, from Andreessen Horowitz and a number of other folks. With that, I will turn it over to you to give your story.

Xiaoyin Qu: Yeah, thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for coming to Run The World. I'm Xiaoyin, the founder and CEO of Run The World. You mentioned one fun fact. I actually didn't finish my degree at Sanford. I dropped out after a year, to start Run The World. It was actually around July last year. We started the company.

Initially the idea came because my mom was a doctor in China. She still is a doctor, and she has never been to an international conference before, until last year. So, she had an opportunity to fly to Chicago. And that was a great experience. She met another doctor from Dubai. Turns out they share the same, like rare patient case, but because she's from China, it's really hard for her to get visa.

She had to fly to Beijing just to get visa and it's getting unpredictable because Trump has a new policy, you know, every now and then. Basically, it's just really hard for her to travel all of that and really expensive. So, she told me that she doesn't think herself can make it to the next conference. You know, even though that was a great experience.

So, the original idea was really like, how can I help my mom? And meet other doctors like her, if she cannot really travel herself. So, we figured the only way it will be, we have to like digitize the whole experiences, especially the social part, so that my mom can meet other doctors.

Obviously at that time was before COVID, so saying that you have an online event was consider stupid because people thought, Oh, I'm going to fly to Vegas for fun. My company's paying for it. You know, why do I have to do this online? Doesn't really make any sense. So we do have sell pretty hard, but we actually then decided to run our own event to see if people can actually show up.

So at the very beginning, I am a product manager. I knew a lot of product managers. I just got a bunch of product managers from Google and Facebook. When we did our first PM conference, I was the organizer back then. We. just wanted to see if people will buy the ticket to attend it. We just promoted in some Facebook groups and it turns out in a week. We sold like 300 tickets in like two weeks. The people who bought the ticket are not people necessarily from Silicon Valley. Those are people from 20 different countries in 20 different States.

And by that time, we didn't have anything still. We hack around like Zoom and Slack and like even Brian, it was a jaunty experiences, but people like it because they couldn't get it elsewhere. You know, they couldn't have access to other people elsewhere, but it was still pretty broken. You have to share like six different links. At the right time, you know, at least we proved the concept.

And then we, that's when we started raising from Andreessen was October last year. And then obviously when we launched, it was February, March time this year, that was our alpha version. And we immediately saw a lot of demand and interest. So yeah, so now we kind of have around 45 people in the company now across three times, Europe, Asia, and US, and we had around six people at the beginning of the year. So, it's kind of been crazy, trying to scale a team and hiring everybody. So.

Brian Ardinger: I can attest to that. I mean, when I was looking for different platforms out there, I think I got to you guys really early. And I think what I was most impressed with is you said, well, here's your roadmap. You were very transparent with here's what we're building and where we're going with this. And then every week I'd go to the next demo and find the next platform feature that was put into it.

And so, the ability to move that fast was pretty interesting to me. One of the things that you wrote about in a LinkedIn piece, your story and that. And you talked about how as a founder, you iteratively mapped out different ideas. And I think you said that you had seven failed ideas before you came upon this particular one. Can you talk a little bit about that journey of looking at ideas, iteratively, figuring out if you're on the right path, and then eventually getting to the path where you're on right now?

Xiaoyin Qu: When I first wanted to start a company, it was probably a year before that. I mean, I kind of want to start a company even when I was a Facebook. And so, it kind of took me, I will say, in total of a year, to try a bunch of different ideas to see which one I'm interested in. I would say like, there's like seven ideas and as I tried more and more, I think I'm getting better and better. And just engaging if the idea makes sense or not.

But the first idea was I still think that's a good idea. I just, I thought at that time, mental health was a huge problem. Have a lot of friends, who've got pretty stressed out, burnout at work. And so, we're just thinking what if we can have some kind of an AI system that will help people whenever they want to talk to somebody, you know, there's some kind of AI system, they can talk to them.

That was kind of the intention of the idea. And then I guess what we did is we tried to figure it out, like I've no idea how people like with depression or anxiety, so we basically read some books and are trying to build something, and then we thought, you know, when you're anxious, or when you're depressed, you just want to hear certain things.

And as soon as we tell you how to think, then that will work. So, then we try a bunch of different things. We were trying to build some kind of bot. Then as the more we delve into that, the more we realize that when people are actually feeling depressed and lonely or anxious, when they go to a therapy is less about the knowledge of how to control your mood that are important. It's more about the fact that there is somebody who understands you, that are listening to you as full attention. That is something that is truly important.

So, I guess what we have learned is that we could use some AI to give people some wording. But that was not like the entirety of it, but that was basically an idea where it was not really a, I mean, I guess it's not really solving the problem in the right way. But we didn't actually end up building it, because we were just doing a lot of research and realize that that was not the right one. So that was probably an idea that we decided not to do. Even during the research phase.

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Brian Ardinger: The process that you used, basically you'd build a prototype, you'd get it out in front of people. You see if, what resonated, what didn't resonate. And then you would build a business model around that and say, yes, this is something we continue to do. And then you'd say no. We're going to try something different. Is that the process you used or...

Xiaoyin Qu: Well for that one, actually, yes, we do a little bit, but I think for that one, we're just trying to understand, what is exactly, do you really need? You know, when you're feeling anxious, we're depressed. We did have a prototype; we didn't capture the whole picture. And then we basically talked to a lot of like therapists who actually know what they're doing. And then they were just talking about the fact that the sense of belonging is something that you kind of need to create. So, at that time we don't believe that the AI prototype we created, was basically hard-coded, can create that kind of experiences.

So that's kind of when we decided that's probably not the right direction. And then there's a few other ideas that I tried, I guess I didn't end up trying. Maybe I should have tried, but there's a few ideas I tried. I came up with the idea of some kind of presentation that I should share to my friends who are VCs, who are people in the space. And they normally say whether it's like, this idea has been tried before, but failed. Can you figure out why they fail? Then I went to the other company, figure out why they failed. Whereas they will say, Oh, there doesn't seem like there's a market.

So I would say the first, like three ideas, four ideas. I'd like to talk to other people who are like VCs or investors or who are experts. And I tend to trust their opinions a lot. So, when they say is about idea, I tended to say, Oh, I guess pretty disappointed me. That's a bad idea. I should move. And then until like probably the four ideas in, I realize that wait a minute, every single idea, people think that was bad.

Basically, all of the ideas, some of them are like, you know, people have tried it, but didn't succeed. Then the pushback I got is like, why can't they succeed. Then why can you succeed? You know, there must be some reason that they didn't succeed.

Or some ideas I tried that I'm like, no one has ever done this before. So, then the question is like, Oh, how big is the market? Do you have a market report? There's no one that has done this, before there was no market. But there's no proof that there is a market. For them, the pushback is like, Oh, there's no market for it. There's no demonstrated need. No, it doesn't seem right. So, as I go get that, that does make sense.

Then we have like some ideas where people have tried it and, but also succeeded. And obviously the pushback, we got is like if they have succeeded already, why can you compete? How can you compete with them? And why can you be successful. For the first time I heard about those kinds of pushback was like, Oh, wow, that makes perfect sense. So maybe we should change a different one. Then I realized, wait a minute, all the ideas. In the world can be categorized in the following three categories. People have tried it. Succeed. People have tried it, not succeeded. Or people have never tried it. So, it was basically, by that logic, I will never be able to find any ideas. And that's when I say like, you know what, maybe I should just ignore those people first, just like try something and test it out and really based on the results.

Brian Ardinger: So, with Run The World, you start out, I believe with a mobile application and one particular feature set, which is the cocktail party, instant mixer. And we'll get into, actually we're going into that session right after this, where I think that's one of the unique features that you guys created. The opportunity for attendees in an event like this, to be matched with somebody for a five-minute virtual video chat, you started out with that.

Obviously, the platform has changed and engaged in morphed, even in the short amount of time. How did you go from that initial concept? Get some traction, get user feedback, and then to where you are in a very short amount of time. I mean, even scaling to 50 employees in a, in a matter of six months, that's challenging. Tell us a little bit about how you did that.

Xiaoyin Qu: So, we actually had the ability to, so what we had the first version, was we have ability to set up an event with like an agenda. You know, you can run a multiple session back then, but it was mostly in mobile. Cause at that time there was no Covid. We thought that's the best way for people to access. So, at the very beginning we had a desktop version and for management and running speakers and share presentation. And we're focusing our efforts on the mobile.

You know, we have the abilities for people to consume and contact everybody mobile. That was our first hypothesis. Then when we launched the first version, it was a little janky in terms of video quality and everything. And we also realized that people are just like, not really using mobile as much as we thought.

And so, at that time we saying, you know, at a cocktail party is still a social thing. We should have it in mobile. I was a little stubborn on that. I still feel like it should be in mobile. So, then we'll make people download the app in the middle of the session. And then we still realize that people were just not downloading the app.

Then I was like, okay, that doesn't seem to make sense. So, we then start adding more web features and enabling people to meet each other, like during the events, mostly in web, but we still keep the mobile app so that they can keep in touch, you know, if they want to after the event. So that's something is more like a test in progress.

And then the cocktail party was initially. We never thought it will be like this popular. Cause now it's like the number one thing that people come to us for. Originally, it was just more like, we think that if you're just passively consuming the content, it seemed pretty boring. There must be some way, like, you know, my Mom can her meet doctors, can meet other doctors. There must be some way then that you can meet other people online.

We did like have a really long conversation and deeply thought about the idea of like meeting other people. And that's when we come up with the cocktail party. It was just like, it was kind of like a speed networking. You can meet a new person, every five minutes kind of thing. So, it was like every five minutes, you meet a different person. You choose if you want to keep in touch with that person later. But even if you enjoy the conversation and we didn't enjoy the conversation is always five minutes.

So that's basically something that we probably thought about for like a few months, because the idea is that you need to have a social experience that does not make people feel rejected. That came from my Facebook world. I know that, you know, if you make people feel good, they will stay longer. So, if you make them feel rejected, they will leave.

Then the idea is like, okay, how do we make people not feel rejected? Because in fact, in the real world, they are feeling rejected. A lot of the times you hold your cocktail drink and you're like walking around, you're trying to figure out which table you want to sit on. And then you're observing other people and you don't know if they want you to sit next to them or not. There's a lot of question marks. And then you sit and, you know, they're a little nervous and trying to, and you're like, okay, I have to shake my hands with other people. They're like, Oh, hello, they're a little cold. And you're like, Oh, they don't want to talk to me. You know?

And then you were trying to like move tables. And when do you leave the conversation? Or if the conversation is really bad. Can you leave? I mean, the physical world that you cannot really, you have to like make some bullshit excuse like, Oh, I need to get more drinks, you know? Or like, Oh, I want to use the bathroom. But we really want is want to leave the table. Basically, we're thinking, okay, we need to figure out a way where people can be easily turned into the first sentence, can be easily a match. We need a way where if you really, really don't like the conversation, you can leave the table with style.

We also need a way where you don't feel like you're being judged by other people when you first sit down. So, then we figure, there needs to be a way where you get matched with somebody. And then we just match you. You don't choose, you just wait there, because in that case you don't need to be judged like Tinder people swipe left and right. When you don't, you don't want to do that. You can just sit there. There's going to be probability that you're talking to people that you think is a complete waste of time. Then there needs to be a way out, but then when you, when you get out, you're going to reject the other person. So the other person's going to feel bad.

The best way is to blame the matching part on our platform is you can say, Oh, Run The World only let me match five minutes. Run The World matched this person who is so stupid to me. Like it's not my fault. It's like bad match. We thought that was the only possible way to shift all the social pressure onto the platform and give them a few minutes so then they can do this without much rejection.

Brian Ardinger: I've done a number of these, obviously, as we were getting ready for this and attending particular events. And actually, we met a couple of speakers in this particular process. I had five-minute matches with folks and they were interesting enough to start that conversation that we could then later on, tell them about the conference and bring them in.

What I found interesting about it. And I've talked a lot of both introverts and extroverts about the platform. Both seem to like it, introverts are a little bit more hesitant at first, but what I found is the introverts are like, this gives me that safety zone to have that conversation or be in an environment that is less stressful than walking up to a table of extroverts or something like that.

So. We were really like this particular platform. That's what we're going to again, test it out for those who came to the event last night, we did it. And so, I'd be interested in the chat if who attended last night's instant mixer, who did you meet that was interesting, or what did you think of that? And we're going to go to that at 10:30am here.

So, before we do that, let's open it up for questions from the audience. Any questions coming in that you want to ask Xiaoyin about the platform or about her journey as a founder? One of the questions I saw was do you see the platform moving more towards like a second life model? Or where do you see the platform going?

Xiaoyin Qu: For us, you know, the most important thing that we think that events are for, is really to meet other people. So, we are really focusing on giving more excuses for people to meet. We believe that all events are all about providing excuses, even the long line and Starbucks that you're waiting for coffee back then. Was an excuse because you're like, Oh the line, so long, huh? I'm like, Oh yeah. Yeah. I'll be waiting for a while and then you're like, what's your name? So, it was like a great excuse or just sitting in the launch, like whatever. And then you're trying to charge your laptop or like, sorry. Do you mind moving your legs a little bit so I can use my charger, right? So that's an excuse. There's some and then the social lounge, there's different social expectation, right? And the social lounge you can talk, or you can just chill and that's fine. In the cocktail party of a physical setting, you're expected to socialize with other people.

So, if you really want to meet other people, if you're shy, you just go to the cocktail party. You know, everybody is at least supposed to talk to you and then you can just like sit and talk and everybody has the same exact social expectation. I think with the beauty of an event is that it offers many different types of nuanced, a social context, where there are different social expectations.

But, and then, you know, when exactly do people want to talk to you, when exactly they just want you to leave them alone. In the online space, you know, we need to kind of create similar type of social excuses that helps people connect. So that's where we are right now. Like, you know, we're trying to invent more social excuses for people to meet. Personally, I don't really believe that it has to be the replica. I don't really believe we need to add a waiting in line feature online. That's will just piss people off. So, there must be other ways that we can offer excuses in a way that makes sense. You know online?

We're just thinking, what are the best ways possible to connect the most relevant people together. And what is the best way possible to connect people with similar type of social expectations? Meaning I'm here to definitely want to meet somebody or I'm here just to consume the content and be able to kind of divide the right people to the right people. And what will be the right way to nudge them into the first conversation.

Like I really believe that our goal is to help ease the first conversation. Then once you have the first conversation or not, you guys will figure out what to do. So, our job is just be the, kind of the Tinder for like many people, just to make them connect. So that's kind of the way we think about that.

Brian Ardinger: Some of the questions are, what did you build it on? Did you build by, or did you start with any no-code tools or how did you actually go about building out Run The World?

Xiaoyin Qu: When we first do on prototype, it was hacking around doing a Slack, which was definitely a no code tool, but everyone knows that we were using students Slack. But then after that, we just built everything ourselves. We did use, we are using a third-party like video streaming infrastructure, but we are building everything ourselves. Like, I guess this is too complicated to use no code tool. There are some kind of stuff you could, but we didn't it's way too complicated. Well, basically I had a native app and that's entirely built. In-house. And then we have the entire experiences built in house as well, so that we do have a lot of engineers.

Brian Ardinger: Who's the first person you hired once you decided to move forward with the project?

Xiaoyin Qu: Me and my co-founder back then, my co-founder is the CTO. So, she's an engineer at Facebook and then we hired another engineer from Facebook. So that's kind of the third person.

Brian Ardinger: Question on, could you talk more about your experience pitching Andreessen and what would you advise founders to receive funding from top VCs like them. Any founder stories from the investment side?

Xiaoyin Qu: It's really, really important to get kind of the first check. When we pitched Andreessen, we actually already got our first offer. It was more like a conversation that's towards our favor. It was more like, you know, look, we already got an offer. If you want to chat, chat with us in the next day or something. And otherwise, we're not going to make it or whatever. We were just like using those kinds of stuff. And then I guess they bought it. It was a good leverage point at that time.

When we got our first offer like, we had some traction. Like, I actually got some VC friends to say, Hey, I can give you like a few hundred thousand dollars just for you to try your idea before this idea. But I kind of always hesitant in getting money before I know what I'm doing. So, we actually did everything ourselves. And the traction point at that point was we ran our first event. It was successful. We help five other people run their events, using the Zoom/Slack, whatever hybrid. It was successful. They all made great money and people like it, that was the attraction point at that point.

And then we just like, basically raised money with that. And I noticed a lot of the VCs that I know they changed their opinion. Like when I first say we're doing online events, it was like, Oh, it was kind of stupid. I'm like already flying to Vegas every year. But then when you say, you know, here's traction, you have real events and people like it. And then it was like, Oh, that's interesting.

And I was like, sometimes their opinion may change too. So, it's not like when they say that's a bad idea. It's definitely going to be like never changed. Sometimes they could. So that's kind of how we got our first check.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I imagine obviously now with COVID, I mean, the entire space blew up as far as everybody starts to look for these new ways to engage and connect with people in the virtual world. So, I applaud what you're trying to do here, and I want to thank Xiaoyin for joining us at Inside Outside, the summit here to tell us a little bit about what she's doing and her journey as a founder.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Nahia Orduna, Author of Your Digital Reinvention: A Practical Guide for Discovering New Opportunities and Finding Your Place in the Future of Work. Nahia and I talk about the journey of reinvention and her agile sprint framework for how to practically work through the process, from inspiration to execution. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses.

Interview Transcript with Nahia Orduna

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Nahia Orduna. She's actually calling from Munich. Welcome.

Nahia Orduna: Happy to be here, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. Now, you are the author of a book called Your Digital Reinvention: A Practical Guide for Discovering New Opportunities and Finding Your Place in the Future of Work. You're also a Senior Manager in Analytics and Digital Integration at Vodafone. You're one of the leaders of the women in big data organization.

I'm so excited to have you to talk a lot about what you're seeing when it comes to digital disruption. As everybody knows, the world has changed quite a bit. And we, I think are all now struggling with that whole idea of what do we have to do to better prepare ourselves for this new world.

Nahia Orduna: During the last years I've been talking like industry forums about the future of work, which are skills we need to remain competitive. I've been also coaching people to find their place in their digital workplace. And we have higher reputation institutions like the World Economic Forum telling us that by 2022, more than half of us will need to have a significant upskilling and reskilling or that in 2018, they said by 2032 to 35 million jobs will be displaced, but over 150 million jobs will appear. And of course, now it's like 2020, a global pandemic has accelerated all this digital future.

We were talking about...we are forced to builds new ways of interacting of working and learning. And we always hear this thing of like, yeah, every crisis is also an opportunity. How do you put this into practice? This can be a very difficult transition if you're not proficient in this digital environment.

I created a Blueprint to help people get better digital skills. I put it like for free on my website in May, and then a lot of people were downloading it, downloading it. And then I thought, well, I got to do this blueprint. I got to bring it to the next level. So, I actually started meeting some industry experts that I know. I got testimonials from them. That their tricks to get re-mentioned. I edit these and I published the book in September.

So, it's basically the purpose of this book is to help people to remain themselves, given the current environment and crisis. I truly believe that the world will be a better place if we all use our talents and our abilities. So, putting together my expertise, the expertise of industry experts, bring in practical examples. Overall, the book is the blueprint for anybody who wants to thrive in this digital world.

Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into that a little bit. You have these five sprints that you have to think through as far as you have to first be inspired and then take direction and learning and that. Talk us through a little bit about the methodology.

Nahia Orduna: That's the thing, like, what is remain? Remain cannot be something that I say, okay, tonight, I'm going to remain myself, but tomorrow I met a new expert, right? It's a journey. And a journey is like from the moment you get inspired that you look into a travel catalog and you think. Look, there is a nice place in Maldives or in Nepal or in California, that the more you get inspired to the moment that you are already in your destination and sharing pictures with a wall, Hey, look, I'm here. Do you want to do this journey as well?

It's a journey and every journey needs a map, right? So, these sprints are the map. And therefore, the sprints come from my background from Agile. Like we always look at the sprints, but yes sprinting in a time box, for example, like usually two weeks where you're focusing on the area. So, either one that somebody says, okay, I'm going to get inspired tonight. It should be like at least two weeks to make an exercise, to read interviews, and to think how you get inspired.

And only when you are ready, you can go to the next sprint. That's the idea of the sprints of how the exercise is done. And there are effective sprints. One is Inspiration, there is Direction, the other is Learning. There is another Networking. Finally, the last one is Share.

Brian Ardinger: So, you mentioned Inspiration. You've got to obviously recognize the fact that, Hey, I need to reinvent myself. Things are changing. And so that inspiration is partly to figure out what am I good at? And some of the skill sets that I should be either learning about and that. Or is it more from the standpoint of like, I want to work in this particular area, I want to go down this path. I want to change my life.

Nahia Orduna: So, Inspiration is the first sprint. And it's how you discover new trends. What is happening? Your area of interest. This is, for example, as I mentioned with that trip is when you get the travel catalog and you discover new places, new trendy places, you didn't know it exists there. So it is, this two weeks is not yet about thinking about your own strengths yet. It's about researching new trends.

For example, what is your area of interest. In my mind, you are like a marketing professional. One of the successes is to up your area of interest with words like digital transformation, the future of work. Yes. Google them. If you start looking like Future of Marketing in 2025. If you start like Marketing Big Data. So, you will start looking into new information that you didn't know.

There's got to be if you're in marketing, if you're in HR, if you're in finance or for example, if you passionate on sports and you want to do something with a sport, or you want to start out with sports, just start looking how big data and digital transformation is effecting the sports, because everything is effective. And then read what is there?

So, there are different exercises about things you can watch, the lifetime report. And also, in the end, what I also say is that you have to write like a journal, like a journey journal to write everything that resonates with you. Think about the new ideas. Take two weeks to really get inspired and get those ideas in and write down what resonates with you.

Brian Ardinger: And seem to follow that curiosity. Being OK with going down a particular path that you're not comfortable with, but give you some inspiration to, say yeah I really liked that area and I want to dig into it more.

Nahia Orduna: Exactly. And then when you are ready, then you can go to the next one, Direction. And Direction is what are you thinking, what is the best for you. Direction it's like, imagine you have a travel catalog. And I see like, okay, I would like to go to Alaska, but really, I have very small kids. And maybe for me it’s better if I go to a hotel on the beach. While when I didn't have the kids, I was going to bungie jumping. Right. So, there are some destination a lot better for ones than for others. While all of them are good it's just like, you have to go which destination is the best for you. Are you looking for relaxation or for entertainment?

Right. In this case is the same in this virtual world. And here, the exercises have individual direction. The sprints are about some techniques to discover your strengths. Then once you know your strengths and your weaknesses, which you can do, for example, asking the people around you, and as you have from the previous sprint, all those new ideas and from the areas, then you can uncover opportunities for you. And this is also the moment where you have to do a skill prioritization and create your development plan. That's all what is happening in the Direction.

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The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Sponsor Voice 2: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private nonpartisan foundation that works together with communities in education and entrepreneurship, to increase opportunities that allow all people to learn, to take risks, and to own their success. The Kauffman Foundation is based in Kansas City, Missouri and uses its $2 billion in assets to collaboratively help people be self-sufficient productive citizens. For more information, visit www.kauffman.org. That's www.kauffman.org.

Brian Ardinger: And so, you've got a journey that you want to go on. You figured out how you can best take that journey based on your skills and mindset. And then you go into sprint three, which is Learning Time. Can you summarize that?

Nahia Orduna: Exactly. So, learning time is like, what do you need to bring your backpack to succeed? Right? You always need to get new stuff. Now it is, you know, there's a lot of digital learning available. And how do you prepare yourself? Which are skills you need to develop now that you know, what is your destination?

You will not succeed in your three. You will not bring the same equipment and distribute you go to the mountain, or if you go to the beach, so you need to get the best. And then I shared the tips about how to find your best learning experience. For example, do you like to learn with video with audio? For example, I am a very visual person. So, if I will be just like with podcasting, I will prefer to see something, but I know that many people just prefer like to listen instead of to read a book. Are you a reading person, a listening person? How do you absorb the information better? You can find in the digital world, so many options for you.

Also, I always advise that you get some certifications and some proper learnings. There are platforms. You can also know that you know who you want to be. You can also look in LinkedIn with Certificates, you have the experts in the area and follow some of them. So this is sprint is all about how you're going to learn and how to learn more effectively, answer tips to learn, and get the best learnings for you.

Brian Ardinger: So, this is the place where you find new skillsets, you refine your skill sets and you refine your strengths. You understand and start beginning to outline the network, which is the next step, which is networking and taking those skills and then amplifying that out to the network. Is that correct?

Nahia Orduna: So, the networking part is around the people that about you. Imagine you go in, if I go back to the trip, usually you want to review some travel forums of somebody who has gone to the same destination as you and get some tips from there. This is what is not working about. Currently in the digital world, again, there are too many ways of networking. There are so many events.

And so, this is what I said in that, the top that like focus on networking or finding people with similar mindset, to follow up with them, establish relationships with them. I explain how to do that and how to find your network. There are a lot of like meetups, Eventbrite. There are a lot of tools. And I also interviewed people who are like, okay, I didn't find my network. So, I created one. And with the real world, you don't need to just focus somebody in your neighborhood. You can get anywhere. We served the experiences of how networking is so important.

Brian Ardinger: And then the last sprint is sharing that, sharing your journey. So, tell us about that particular part of the journey and why it’s so important.

Nahia Orduna: Well, to be honest, like some years ago, I would have thought when I already learned, I get a new learning, I'm already an expert. And then I found out in the last year, how its so important networking and sharing. What we have right now. Right. Like sharing in this journey, it’s like, when you go to your destination, you like it. And you are like, sending pictures to your friends and family. This is not like a vanity exercise. It Is not like look how cool I am now.

It's about generally sharing how, you know, I'm helping people who want to get into that journey and bring them with you because those people will get inspired, will learn a new place through you, maybe some react and give you advice. Like I've been there before and also will consider going there. And when they didn't think about that.

So, it's very important to share and sharing in a digital world has a lot of opportunities now, because again, you can share worldwide. Now anybody could be listening to us right now. And I think sharing is ultimately, it's very good for the people around you. It Is good for, if you're working in a corporation for your own work environment, for your own business. It's also good for the society. We all share what we know, is it going to be a better place. But this is very good for you because when you share, you prepare yourself, you get talented, you learn new perspective because you get talented. And It helps you to become this expert.

So, in the book we share like how to share, which format, how to share in the company, how to build your social media presence. Like usually, if, for example, we take LinkedIn as an example, there are very few people who actually create content. Like very, very few. Most of the people are like commenting, or some emailing, or even just reading. So those are the facts that we share in the book.

Brian Ardinger: What I like about the book is it's a very practical guide. It walks you through and helps you think about, well, how can I reinvent myself based on the new trends, and everything else. And what I particularly like about it is because you can use this over and over again. So, you can almost start the sprint a second time or a third time in your lifetime as the world changes and as we know it's going to change.

It gives you an opportunity to re-look at where are your skills. Where is your curiosity changing? What are the outside market forces that are changing and allows you to then adapt to that in a more systematic way, I suppose, then just waiting for the next truck to hit you?

Nahia Orduna: No, exactly. If you have a new area of interest, go through the same sprint, the same blueprint, and then you get it. And it works like I've been doing this in the last years. And I know many people who successfully become recognized like experts in that their digital fields.

Brian Ardinger: You've been in the corporate space too, in this innovation space, helping people understand new trends and new technologies and that. How can companies start looking or using some of these types of skillsets and that to reinvent themselves? Have you thought about that? Or have you seen examples of companies trying to use a similar methodology or similar skillsets to help reinvent themselves?

Nahia Orduna: If reading my article from The World Economic Forum, I know, goes around this. When we talk about the future of work, it can be like one of these movies, like you don't know what can be catastrophic or can be upbeat and lovely. If you read now, one of the main concerns that there are is that the terms of digital inclusion. If corporations don't have the employees with skills, with digital skills they are losing a big part of success.

So, I think there's like a responsibility from the companies to offer like learnings and get the people up-to-date and skill and so on. And there is also the individual responsibility of each of us to understand that our jobs have changed in many ways. And we have to get reskilled.

So, when the companies get their workforce upskill and they give like communications, webinars, trainings to get more digital savvy so they know more of what is coming and how their jobs are evolving. That's a way to make the best of their own workforce and succeed is a very important factor.

One way of getting into that could be helping the people, their workforce, to find out like where the direction is going, how their job is going to evolve, and then they will understand what are their current needs, how can they prepare for that?

Brian Ardinger: Yes. I mean, this whole idea of innovation is being democratized. Like everybody's going to have to be much more innovative. They're going to have to have these types of skillsets to effectively help the organization transform and grow and change as the world changes as well. So, I thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and telling us a little bit about this. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Nahia Orduna: My website is NahiaOrduna.Com and my book is in any market in Amazon, Your Digital Reinvention. In my website, they can download the Journey Journal for free. So some of those exercises like the template to feel while they are doing the books.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well Nahia, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing this with us today. Look forward to continuing the journey and continuing the conversation in the future and appreciate your time.

Nahia Orduna: Thank you.

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Your digital reinvention: A practical guide for discovering new job opportunities and finding YOUR place in the Future of Work

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we speak with Diana Wu David, Author of Future Proof: Reinventing Work in the Age of Acceleration. We talked about the changing landscape of work, how you can better prepare for a 100-year career, and the opportunities that can be found in remote online communities. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends and collaborative innovation.

Interview Transcript with Diana Wu David

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Diana Wu David she's the author of the new book Future Proof: Reinventing Work in the Age of Acceleration. Welcome Diana.

Diana Wu David: Thanks so much great to be here, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Actually, we're doing this from Hong Kong, one of my favorite cities in the world. You actually teach as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, E-MBA Global Asia. You're a former Financial Times executive. You worked with clients like Mandarin Oriental, World Bank, Expedia, Credit, Suisse, and your career is long and amazing.

You actually started your career working with Henry Kissinger. I wanted to have you on the show because you've got a book out. And you actually wrote this book futureproof before the pandemic and now we're post pandemic. What are your thoughts of where we sit now versus when you wrote the book then?

Diana Wu David: When I wrote the book, it was to convince people that we were going into this new world where things would be globalized and lot more remote and virtual and more flexible, and that fundamentally companies needed to change.

And the hypothesis really was that people were going to have to change. Individuals would have to take agency over their own careers and change because companies weren't moving fast enough. Fast forward to, I think February I did a podcast and we were talking about China's largest work from home experiment, and now it's become the entire world's largest work from home experiment.

So, yeah, I think right now it's not a hard sell to say that we're going to be working virtually. It's not a hard sell to say that we're going to have to be more flexible and companies have actually massively accelerated to accommodate this. So, the landscape has changed quite a bit.

Brian Ardinger: Totally agree. And you, and I've worked in the space of innovation in that for a while. And sometimes it felt five years ago, like you're pushing this rock up the hill, like no, really this disruption thing's coming. And I think, you know, with the pandemic, it really has accelerated, and people are now fundamentally understanding what that means.

I don't think we're at the point where they fundamentally understand what to do about it yet. So that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show to talk about the specific steps and the way to approach this idea that you're going to have to reinvent yourself. And especially in, I think you wrote in the book that, you know, we're having longer careers, you know, there's a a hundred-year career kind of things. Let's dive into the book a little bit and talk about some of the skillsets and the mindsets and the tool sets that you recommend for understanding this new world of acceleration we're living in.

Diana Wu David: Absolutely. I had so many people that I met that when I was at Financial Times, we were doing the board director program and I launched that as an internal entrepreneur, and they were all talking about what's next. You know, they were, I would say 45, 55, 65 and really could see that they would have this massive amount of time where they could continue working and continue learning.

And yet company lifespans are predicted by a firm like Innosight to be averaging 12 years. Yeah. In a couple of decades. So, people are waking up to the idea and certainly now with COVID and companies being under even more pressure, everybody's waking up to the idea that I'm going to have to re-invent no longer can I learn everything go work and retire.

It's very much going to be sort of looping model of I'm going to work a little bit. I'm going to learn on the job. Then I'm going to take a break and learn some more and upscale and rescale and pivot and have to go get a new job. And I shouldn't say half to get a new job. I have the opportunity to do something completely new. So, I think it's really exciting.

Brian Ardinger: I guess there's core things. First thing you have to probably do is recognize like I'm in a new world, I'm okay with that. And then you probably start thinking about, well, how do I apply my old skills to this new environment? And so maybe talk through that early stage process of really understanding and thinking through what should I do next?

Diana Wu David: First of all, I found that a lot of leaders in particular, weren't thinking about themselves. And I think this applies across all different people in organizations where they're thinking about the business future of work, but not thinking about, gosh, what does that mean for me and my career and how it needs to change?

What do I need to proactively do? So that awareness is important. The idea that it's up to me, that I'm the captain of my own ship, as something that some people need to go through a process. And then there's four real actionable chapters in the middle of the book. And that is looking at experiment, reinvent, collaborate, and focus.

And those are really the four skills I felt we're super important in the future of work, that frankly has always been a bit the now of work. And really going into deep dives about what does that mean? I guess the first one experiment is really about getting out of our comfort zone, right? So the day that you decided, you know what I'm going to do, not only I'm going to do all the things I do, but I'm going to do a podcast, you know, that sort of.

If I want to experiment with that, not everybody does a podcast and you're like in 250 episodes or something by now, God, I can't believe it. But everybody has to take the first step. So, starting to get that muscle going of how do I do that? How do I take small steps in small and perfect actions that will test my assumptions? Give me feedback and allow me to move forward and out of my comfort zone.

Brian Ardinger: But one of the great things about where we are living, if you flip the chaos and disruption on the positive side is the opportunities are there for the individual. We talk about kind of the democratization of innovation, where everybody can be an innovator now because they're new tool sets. There’re new skillsets out there that are accessible to everyone. I'd like to get your opinion on some of the new tools sets that you see out there, things like no code or your ability to spin up a podcast or take some risks or do some experiments. Have you seen anything out there that's interesting or exciting when it comes to the tools and the things that you can do to spin up and take advantage of this?

Diana Wu David: I believe that video is one of them. I know that I started doing more video and when I launched my book and just before got more equipment and now, I see that seems to be the biggest one because everybody now is more comfortable in video. There was a time when, you know, you couldn't get most of the people I know on to do a short video or even a video call.

And now we're having board meetings where, you know, now in Hong Kong, we're transitioning to in-person and half the people said, Oh, I didn't know we were going to do in person. I, you know, that they're surprised they had to actually be there. But so many people they've got practice cause they had to, they have often and times much better equipment than they did in February.

We've seen these months where whatever it is, the Ring Light has been sold. Never you shop in your neighborhood. And I think that's going to have an explosion of people generating content, which is nothing new per se, user-generated content is something that's been something people who really were interested in it could do. But now I feel like people who never wanted to do it now can go and that has broken down the entry barriers, which were mostly psychological to putting yourself out there to do different content.

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The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Sponsor Voice 2: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private nonpartisan foundation, that works together with communities in education and entrepreneurship. To increase opportunities that allow all people to learn, to take risks, and to own their success. The Kauffman Foundation is based in Kansas City, Missouri and uses its $2 billion in assets to collaboratively help people be self-sufficient productive citizens. For more information, visit www.kauffman.org. That's www.kauffman.org.

Brian Ardinger: The other thing that's interesting about this whole thing is that when you talk about the new tools and that again, a lot of times just taking that first step and saying, we're going to try something new. We're going to see if it works. When we first started the podcast five years ago, it was an experiment to have some friends on and talk about some of the things that we were seeing.

And, you know, over the years, it expanded and changed, and continuing to work. We're actually, Susan and I were talking yesterday about how we're going to plan for 2021 and what are we going to do? And, you know, quite frankly, we need to change it because again, now there's new worlds of things out there.

The other thing you talk about in the book is, so we talked about reinvention and another core tenet I think is this whole idea of collaboration. You know, innovation and that is not a solo game anymore. And we have access to people and places that we've never had access to before. So maybe talk a little bit about this whole concept of collaboration and why that's so important.

Diana Wu David: So, in the book, I talked about how companies were going to transform from these behemoth hierarchies to much looser collaborations with work being more modular and with all of us being more gig economy but putting together portfolios of work. So, if you need one particular set of expertise, for example, I'm working with somebody who's setting up a fund and they need help setting up their board. They don't need that. They don't need to hire me forever. They just need that expertise for a certain amount of time and maybe some other people around it. And then from there, they'll go on their way.

So, I think that that coming together to do interesting projects and then going off and recombining with other teams will definitely become more the norm. And the other thing I talked about in my book was the rise of semi-private networks, SWAT teams and community gardens. So that we can find the people A that we work with well, which AI is doing an amazing job of putting teachers and students together. And I think in the future, putting whole teams of people and leaders together, if we even need a leader for some teams.

I wrote about that for Fast Company and, and I think that that's really the wave of the future, where we have to come together we have to form fast trust and norms for working together. We have to get stuff done and then figure out how to break apart and maintain whatever it was we did and go on to the next gig or the next opportunity.

Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples or case studies of folks that have done that well or somethings maybe in your own career that you've done to build that network and go beyond what your normal collaboration efforts are.

Diana Wu David: Yeah, I actually see it happening more and more. It's fascinating. So, something that's fairly traditional, but sort of fits the mold is becoming a part of the Future Work Forum, which is based in the UK. And it's a loose collection. It's a think tank, but it's a loose collection of people where they have curated different people from people who work with boards and senior execs, people who work with organizational development, people who are working on innovation ecosystems, because they're head of a whole number of business parks and people from all over the world.

Those people all have their own practices, but we come together to co-author articles for management journals. We're talking about actually collaborating on different work together. And that I think is something whereby you really can start to build those relationships and use them in the future. So, I see that here, there's something called the neon collective and it's all chief marketing officers and it's basically fractional leadership.

I know that they have these in the U.S. As well, and they will go and work on a client project and maybe they'll go and actually work with that client. But then when they're not working full time for a client, then they will go back to this kind of loose cooperative of chief marketing officers. There are so many guilds and interesting confederations of like-minded people that are banding together to do great work.

Brian Ardinger: And that's one of the things, there's some things about online communities and the fact that we're based in Lincoln, Nebraska, and a lot of people ask me why we're based in Lincoln, Nebraska, but it's like we can do work anywhere. The ability to reach out to communities. And we just got off our Inside Outside Innovation Summit, and I was talking to some folks and we were talking about the fact that some of the speakers I had met, I literally had met on Twitter or an online chat room of some sort and said, Hey, this is kind of interesting.

Here's what we're doing. And to build those networks from the center of the United States and being able to communicate with folks like you in Hong Kong or any, any tech field around the world, that's quite exciting. And I think that's only going to accelerate as we're getting more comfortable with this whole process.

Diana Wu David: As you create this group of people in the insideoutside.io community, do you think people can have relationships and trust without ever meeting physically?

Brian Ardinger: It's definitely a different beast. So again, this is our first year that we did a virtual conference the first three years. One of the primary benefits, I think, for like the speakers to come into our own town. It's like they got to see a different take on innovation and innovation happening anywhere. And I think that's one of the reasons they would be willing to come to a conference like this as they could actually come to the conference and spend a couple of days outside of the traditional tech hubs and that and get a different feel for innovation and people.

And obviously that's changed in this particular world. Can you build trust? Absolutely. I mean, there are some people that I have never met physically, but I've had on the podcast and we continue conversations and I think it's possible. It changes the dynamic. You've got to be more intentional, I think. And you have to give reasons to continually connect.

It's something that's very easy to fall off your network and you know, what can you do to continually remain in people's faces, so to speak and saying, Hey, here's how I can add value or here's what we're doing. So, the things like our newsletter, we're trying to consistently talk with that community so that they're engaged and give them opportunities then to connect as well.

Diana Wu David: That's great.

Brian Ardinger: How do you go about from going from your traditional career to a portfolio career. This idea of everyone's going to have a slash and their thing. So, I'm a director of innovation here slash podcast slash entrepreneur slash investor. This idea that everyone's going to have these slashes of different skillsets in that. Any recommendations for rebalancing that portfolio of career and, and taking the next steps towards future proof?

Diana Wu David: Diversification across the portfolio is certain a way of futureproofing. And I see that not as something whereby you get the perfect six things or three slashes that you need, because it's constantly evolving. And usually when the people I work with in the futureproof course come together, which is based on the book. They are senior executives. They have spent their entire lives really focused. So, we have one person who's been basically in central banking, all across the world. We have chief marketing officers. We have people who have certain things and have had to focus on scaling the ladder of success, because that's what you did in that moment, but they're smart enough to realize that they're going to have to diversify.

And generally, it's about experimenting. So, it's about knowing themselves well enough. To be able to break down all the things that made them successful and figure out how to recombine them like a kaleidoscope. Why was I such a great central banker? What are my true values and interests and how can I apply the skills and characteristics for board work or podcast or whatever it is that really is interesting to me, that is a value to the world?

And once they go through that reflection, it's the, what is that one little adjacent thing that you can do? Sometimes for people it's just writing a LinkedIn article about their experience. A lot of people are like, I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't put myself out there. And for other people, it's just getting the clarity to figure out the focus of, for instance, one of the guys Watson Jordan started the Resilience Initiative and it's basically an initiative to help people become resilient and include financial literacy in Eastern North Carolina.

And everybody's got different ideas of how to take it forward, but it's usually how do I start that little seed of my project. And some people go, Oh, you know what, that wasn't at all the project I wanted to do. Right. I hated that. And that's great. And then you go, okay, how else could I recombine to find a new way to combine my personal assets to make a difference?

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. That ability to learn and unlearn and quite frankly, just take action and move at some kind of pace that gets you moving and gets you an opportunity to see what's actually out there.

Diana Wu David: Intentional learning. That's what I think is the sort of commonality between everybody. They're really good at just showing up and continuing to test.

For More Information

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's fascinating stuff. We're living in a fascinating world. I encourage people to pick up the book Futureproof. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that.

Diana Wu David: My website is www.DianaWuDavid.com and the Future Proof checklist I can put Into your show notes, but it's at Bit.ly/prepareforfuture. And it's 11 questions to get you started on the path to seeing if you are prepared for the future and where you might start.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Diana, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation and can't wait to get back out to Hong Kong and say hi in the real world.

Diana Wu David: Oh, that would be great. Can't wait to have you here, Brian. Thanks so much for having me.

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Future Proof: Reinventing Work in the Age of Acceleration

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Steve Glaveski, Author of Time Rich: Do your Best Work, Live Your Best Life. Steve and I talk about the power of time management and what individuals and organizations can do to become smarter and more productive. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption each week. We'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation.

Interview Transcript with Steve Glaveski

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Steve Glaveski. He's the author of the new book Time Rich: Do your Best Work, Live Your Best Life. You may have seen and heard of Steve. He's been on the show before. He came out to the IO Summit a couple of years ago. And so we're super excited to have him back. All the way from down under, welcome back.

Steve Glaveski: It's an absolute pleasure to be back on the program, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Well, we're excited to have you back. You have become a prolific writer since last we've spoken. I think you've come out with a couple different books. Today we wanted to highlight the new one that you've got coming out called Time Rich. Before we get started, why don't you give the audience a little bit of background of what you've been doing the last couple of years, from starting Collective Campus and Division Accelerator, and now author of a couple different books.

Steve Glaveski: I think that's been somewhat part of the catalyst for writing this particular book, is that I did establish Collective Campus. That was about five years ago now. And we've gone on to incubate over a 100 startups that collectively raised about $30 million in that time. I've spun off a kid's entrepreneurship program called Lemonade Stand, which was initially a two-day workshop.

It is now a SAAS platform. So we've got clients in Singapore, in Honduras, Australia obviously, all over the world. And during the pandemic actually spun out a company called No Filter Media, which is effectively a podcast network, but also has articles and all that sort of stuff. I keep busy, but despite the fact that I have so many things going on, I tend to work maybe five to six hours a day, tops on average.

Now there are days where you go beyond that, but then there are also days where it might just be two or three hours. And given all the time that I've spent in the corporate world, working with large organizations, as well as entrepreneurs and startups, I did see a disconnect between how they were going about making decisions, how they were going about using their time, and the way I was doing things.

I figured that there was a book in this because the article I wrote for Harvard Business Review called the Case for the Six Hour Workday a couple of years ago, just absolutely blew up. And then my publisher came knocking as well and said, Hey, is there a book in this?

Brian Ardinger: That's a good place to start. There's plenty of books out there about time management. And why do you think people are still getting tripped up when it comes to managing their time effectively?

Steve Glaveski: I think a lot of it goes back to evolutionary biases, Brian. As human beings, we've basically evolved to conserve energy. At least our brains have, because tens of thousands of years ago on the African Savannah, you don't know when you're going to eat.

It was all about the three F's, you know, fight, flee, fornication. And you needed to conserve energy and that helped us back then, but now the way it shows up is actually detrimental to our work because we might sit down to our desks in the morning, and it's so much easier for us to do the easiest thing, which is jump onto LinkedIn, check out comments, get onto Twitter, check out email.

Get to inbox zero. Do anything on everything except the hard work, you know, commit to another meeting. What happens is you can fill your entire day, your entire week, your entire month with non-consequential activities, which make you feel quote unquote busy, but come the end of the day, you didn't really have anything to show for it.

So a big part of it is not the fact that people don't have access to tools. It's more so it starts with us and overriding some of that evolutionary programming. And the other side of the coin is really, the organizations that we work for. Because we can control certain things. But then there are certain things that we're bound to that we perhaps can only try and influence, and that can get in the way between us and our best selves.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's an interesting world we're living in, obviously with COVID and everything else. Overnight organizations had to adapt to the brand new world of remote work and things like that. I'd love to get your take on some of the trends that you're seeing or what you saw maybe six months ago, versus what you're seeing now and how organizations have maybe adapted a new thought process on time and work management.

Steve Glaveski: Yeah, definitely. I think the pandemic, obviously as difficult as it has been for a lot of people has also been a reset switch, and it's forced us to reflect on our personal lives in ways we perhaps didn't previously, as well as our professional lives. When the pandemic hit and organizations of all shapes and sizes went remote, it seemed to be a matter of just taking what we did in the office and trying to replicate that online.

So instead of 50 to 60 physical interruptions a day. It was 50 to 60 interruptions on Slack, if not more, or Microsoft teams. And instead of having back to back meetings all day, it was back-to-back zoom calls. So we were effectively at what Matt Mullenweg call's level two in his five levels of remote work, just recreating the office online.

Whereas now I think the more progressive forward thinking late is out there and starting to actually think about how can we use this medium to our advantage, to get the most out of people and to also help the organization move forward. They're realizing that if we do move away from organizations built around real-time communication, towards more asynchronous communication, well, that has all sorts of benefits.

Like if our organization is about responding, when it suits us, providing it in a timely basis, that then frees people up to cultivate more time for flow, because they're not constantly whacking moles all day, responding to Microsoft Teams messages in an instant emails within five minutes and all that sorts of stuff.

That also means that because they can cultivate more flow state, they can also design days as it best suits them, which helps them in terms of their work-life balance. Some people might have young kids, some people might have other things they want to commit to during the day, and they can do that with an asynchronous shift.

And the third piece is also that when you run that type of environment, you can tap into the global talent pool. In a way that perhaps you wouldn't have been able to previously, because you're not bound by everybody being online at the same time. You're bound by an effective way of work that optimizes for outcomes, as opposed to presence and hours, which is a throwback back to the industrial revolution and the way a lot of organizations have run up until very recently.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's interesting to point to that, the ability to work everywhere and even existing organizations. So my company, as Director of Innovation at Nelnet. We took 6,000 people on to remote work pretty much overnight at the beginning of March. And we have different offices in Denver and Madison and Nebraska and such, and it created different ways for the employees to work together.

And it was interesting just to see the leveling of the playing field, because we are all remote, versus like here's the headquarters working with the people in a conference room and having two people on the remote screen. When everybody was on the remote screen, it changed the dynamic and change the opportunity for everybody to participate in a equal playing field. And the same thing would hold true you would think as we move to whether you're living and working in India or Australia or someplace else, as long as you have access to that team and access to the ability to contribute. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Steve Glaveski: Definitely. And, and that's been one of the concerns with remote work, where you have some people working remotely on a large contingent working onsite. And the fear is then that the people who are participating in that face to face contact on a daily basis develop deeper relationships and therefore tap into the growth opportunity as a promotion opportunities that perhaps people working remotely don't. But when you do have that level playing field, that kind of takes away that fear as well.

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Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into the book a little bit. I know the book covers a lot about the psychology of work. Talk a little bit about the modern workforce and that. What do you expect the reader is supposed to get out of this particular book that's different maybe than other financial books they've seen out there.

Steve Glaveski: In terms of what leaders can do at organizations. That's something that I really try to double click on in this book, because many time management books out there will talk about, you know, certain types of techniques and then the Pomodoro technique, automate and outsource, which I do, you know, cover in the book as well. But more so from an organizational perspective.

Like, I wrote an article recently, which I wrote ingest, most companies run like crap. Or why most companies run like crap. And that was effectively a visual mnemonic, which empowered me to use the Poo emoji, Brian. But effectively what CRAP stood for was consensus, aching, hyper-responsiveness, hyper-availability, and process paralysis. So it doesn't matter how on top of getting into the flow state I am. If I need to see consensus for decisions great and small, that's obviously going to slow things down too. A snail pace and we're not going to be able to get things done.

And what happens then is you have these really long feedback loops or nothing gets done. That then feeds back into my motivation to show up, because I'm not fulfilled. And if I am hiring people, if I'm paying people, say six figures to do a job, I'm paying them to think. I'm not paying them to sit there and be a cog in a machine, particularly in today's environment where it's all about cognitive capital. It's not about putting widgets into boxes.

So that consensus seeking piece is something that Jeff Bezos has obviously talked about quite strongly with his Type One B Type Two decision-making. Where he warns that as an organization gets larger and larger tends to treat all decisions as type one decisions, which are big, hairy, audacious, irreversible costly decisions, but most decisions are type two decisions. Reversible, not very costly, in fact it's worth...there is utility to making those decisions and being wrong because you learn something from them.

So the faster you do that, the faster you learn, the faster you get to where you need to go. R the hyper-responsiveness pace. We've already touched on that. A hyper availability. Saying yes to all sorts of requests and your time. That's something that we double-click on in the book and backside two millennia, to the Roman Statesman Seneca, who said that people are frugal when it comes to guarding their personal property, their money. But not so when it comes their time, which is perhaps the one thing it's right to be stingy with.

And so if we are hyper available, we say yes to all sorts of nonsensical requests on our time, then we quickly find that our day is empty and at what is full but empty for what we need to get done. On this particular point, Dominic Price, who is the Head Work Futurist at Atlassian. He basically came out and said that he was doing the same thing. He fell into these traps of anchoring to the past and just attending meetings all day long, because we tend to conflate that with work and being busy and productive, but he started to push back.

He said, look, I'm going to run an experiment. I'm going to start saying no to all these meeting invites. And what he found was that the meetings were either boomerangs or sticks. So he would say, no, they would come back. And that would be a boomerang or they wouldn't come back and that would effectively be a stick. He threw it, it didn't come back. Now he found that two thirds of those meeting invites, we;re sticks, not boomerangs. And just by saying no, he freed up about 15 hours a week of time that he could invest into high value activities.

And then the final piece in that is the process paralysis, which I suppose dovetails off consensus seeking to a degree, but we have certain processes and policies and our organizations such as say, delegations of authority. For example, if it's a choice around where to deploy a thousand dollars worth of capital, I mean, does that really require two or three signatures or can that be one person? And if that's the case, then people can make those types of decisions, whether it's a financial decision or not, much faster, and keep moving much further as a result of that.

So. There is an entire section of the book that looks at how organizations inhibit our productivity and how to get around that. But then there is also because one of the questions I've been getting on these podcasts tour is well, what do you suggest people start with? And I always say delineate between what you can and can't control to start with, you know, make like a stoic and focus on the stuff that you can control to start with and then try and influence the organizational policies and procedures that effectively slow things down.

Brian Ardinger: And so from that personal perspective, how can a person become time rich, individually? Are there particular techniques that you found helpful or examples that you can talk to that. Again, you can start that process or people can start using and get minutes or hours every week.

Steve Glaveski: Aside from the obvious, nowadays there's no excuse not to be say automating or outsourcing rudimentary process oriented tasks. Whether it's marketing sales, customer support, administrative tasks, like most things can be done for under $20 a month. There are so many tools out there and sometimes people will push back and say, well, I haven't got time or money for that, but firstly, if you haven't got time for it, that's kind of ironic because if you do that stuff, it frees up time.

And secondly, if you haven't got money for it, but you say your hourly rate is $100 an hour and you can get someone to do these tasks for you for 10, $15 an hour. Then you're effectively losing money every time you invest time doing those things yourself. But aside from that, another mnemonic I came up with just to make it easy for people to remember is that when all carrying around "spare tyres" that slow down our productivity, that it put a lid on our productivity. And tyres essentially stands for a task switching, being every time we switch tasks, it can take us up to 23 minutes to get back into the zone. Now, the reason why this is important, Brian is because we can only really get into the flow state for about four hours a day.

And when we're into that space of flow, deep work, where we're totally immersed in one task in the rest of the world seems to just fade away. You know, we can find that writing an article. We can find that surfing a wave, we can find that on the Cornhusker Football field. We can find it anyway, but because we, are checking email for about three hours the day on average, the average executive checks email 72 times a day. Once every six minutes on average. Gets interrupted 50 to 60 times a day, spends about four hours a day, looking at their phone, which is equivalent to about eight weeks a year and has about 46 notifications pop up either on their phone or on their desktop. We are unable to cultivate that flow state for five minutes.

So we're constantly in that shallow level workspace. So doing away with task switching and cultivating the ability to focus on one thing for extended periods of time, I think is key. Now that is challenging for a lot of people. One way around that is to use momentum. So if I need to write a 1000 word article like that, staring at that blank page seems like a Herculean effort, but just commuting to say 50 words of poor quality, right. Once I've done that. It's so much easier to keep going.

And this goes back to a Isaac Newton's first law of motion that an object in motion stays in motion. So the amount of energy required to keep going is much less than what is required to get started in the first place. And sometimes that energy is purely cognitive. So it's kind of like you're in lockdown and you've got nothing else to do. You've probably watched a lot of Netflix, but maybe you should read a book, but books seems like, Oh man, I read a book. I'll just watch Tiger King or something. But just commit to one page and reading the rest of the chapter so much easier.

The other thing task switching is also environment design. So if you find yourself switching tasks all day long, close those browser windows, you know, put your phone away, turn off those notifications, focus on the one thing in front of you. And initially this can be difficult, but like any habit, the more you do it, you know, start with 10 minutes. Build your way up to maybe 30 or 40 or minutes or an hour of, of deep work where you're uninterrupted and the more you cultivate the ability to start your day doing that day after day after day, the compounding effect is absolutely huge.

The Y in spare tyre is effectively saying yes to everything. So we've already touched on that, but one thing I would just highlight there is that people say, Oh, but it's good to say yes to things. You create space for serendipity. And I believe that is true to a certain degree, but after a while, you know, it's intuition, you kind of have a feel for what's worth saying yes to, because there might be something there. It's important not to get into the trap of saying yes to everything, because you might be saying yes to that one thing, but by virtue of you saying yes to that, you're saying no to everything else.

And that could include your priorities, your goals, your objectives. So if you find yourself saying yes to everything, For an extended period of time, but not getting any closer to your own goals, time to stop and reflect as Mark Twain would have wanted us to do

Brian Ardinger: From that perspective, you might actually be able to time box that yes capabilities. Like for the next two weeks, I'll say yes to encourage that serendipity and then go back down into my more hunkered down mode. But there's definite ways to manage that opportunity as well, create it as an opportunity and treat it as such.

Steve Glaveski: I mean, you can obviously, timebox say I might be two or three hours in your week, every week for those yes opportunities so that they don't get out of hand. So you've put a cap on them as any good financial investor will tell, you cap the downside. Don't go beyond what you are willing to lose. So you definitely can do that. And you can use tools like Calendly as well to help you with that, especially when it comes to meetings and just having people's schedules say 15 minutes in your calendar.

Now, perhaps in the afternoon, if you find yourself doing your best work in the morning, So the R in the spare tyre, Brian refers to the residual work. I mentioned the Cornhuskers earlier. I'm reminded of Forrest Gump. When he's running on the football field, he's trying to score a touchdown. He gets there, he gets to the end zone, but he just keeps on running right into the change rooms.

And I think he takes out one of the band members on his way there. So this is like us working on a sales presentation. We might put it together in four hours, but that evolutionary programming kicks in. It's comfortable, it's familiar, and we'll spend another four or five hours kind of just waking it instead of moving on to start another task. Because like I said, an object in motion stays in motion. An object at rest stays at rest. It's much harder to start on that new task, but high-performers have a really good relationship with that point of diminishing return. So when they get to the end zone, they spike the ball and they get back into position.

Right. That's effectively what we need to be getting better at doing when it comes to our own work. And this can show up in myriad ways across the entire value chain of tasks, and then E is that path of least effort that we alluded to earlier and cultivating the ability to not take the path of least effort, but to, as they say, eat that green frog first thing in the morning.

If you are a morning person, one thing I unpacked in my book is that about 50% of the population are actually night owls. Which means they are more productive 10 hours after waking up. And they actually saw from a form of social jet lag. If you try to get them to the office at 9:00 AM and over extended periods of time, this can predispose them to anxiety, to depression, to all sorts of things, which again is why asynchronous communication and building organizational cultures around that can effectively help to free the night owls, if you will, and help them perform their best without compromising their mental health.

Brian Ardinger: What are you seeing from a standpoint of the world has kind of changed, obviously there's a lot of new things going on out there. Are there new trends, new tools, new tactics that you're seeing that have changed based on the fact that we're living in this new world.

Steve Glaveski: Obviously he does all of the online collaboration, I think is experiencing a bit of a peak. Putting aside the obvious, you know, Zoom and Teams and things like that. I think there is a tendency to seek out collaboration tools like your Assanas of the world, but now people are moving slowly towards tools like P2 as well, which is something that automatic put together.

And the thing about automatic is they've got 3,100 employees across 75 countries, no central office. And they've got this remote work thing down pat. They're worth over a billion dollars, they power over 30% of the internet. But what they find is with certain collaboration tools, it's easy to get lost, particularly with things like Slack. Like if you miss a day of Slack, like you've missed like 90% of the communication. Whereas with P2, what you find is neested communication, which just makes it easier to stay on top of things. Even if you're out of the office for a week, you come back, you can kind of do a quick scan and be on top of things.

So we're seeing more focus on those collaboration tools that can help people to operate asynchronously. Because if I want to know how you're doing with that task, Brian, it's not a matter of emailing you or messaging you. I can just jump into that tool. I can see your Kanban. I can see where you're at. It's moved from backlog to doing. I see that happened yesterday and you've got an ETA that it will be done in two days. I don't need to bother you. You can continue to do your work. But if I notice that deadline is two days overdue, then I can reach out. So that's the kind of thing that those tools really support.

And I think that's more important than any of these sorts of quote unquote, hacks that you can apply. There's benefit in say the Freedom App and blocking certain apps and whatnot, if they are distracting to you. But collectively I think you can do all these things, but if you, one thing that really comes back to you is overriding those evolutionary biases that hold us back, not just when it comes to our work, but to all thoughts of pursuits in our lives. And I think getting on top of that in terms of getting comfortable, being uncomfortable is really what it all comes back to.

More Information

Brian Ardinger: In your title Time Rich, making sure that, you know, as an individual, like my time is important and paying attention to that. And knowing that that's where my end other things come from. Your time is so valuable. So I appreciate you coming on and talking, it's always a pleasure to have you, and we're excited for the next book I'm sure that you'll eventually write whatever that topic may be, but look forward to continuing the conversation. If they want to find out more about yourself or the book. What's the best way to do that Steve?

Steve Glaveski: Sure. So it's been an absolute pleasure to be back on the program, Brian. People can find the book at timerichbook.com. They can download the first chapter for free there as well as the 30 page PDF on all sorts of time rich tools. And if they want to learn more about me and my work, they can do so over at SteveGlavesky, G L A V E S K i.com.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Steve, appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation again. Look forward to continuing the conversation.

Steve Glaveski: Thank you, Brian. All the best.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Erin Stadler. She's the managing partner at Boomtown Accelerators. Erin and I talk about the evolution of accelerators, how corporations are tackling the space, and how the impact of COVID is impacting innovation. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview with Erin Stadler, Boomtown

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Erin Stadler. She is the managing partner at Boomtown accelerators. Welcome Erin.

Erin Stadler: Thank you.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. You and I have crossed paths a couple different times in the accelerator space. Let's talk a little bit about what is Boomtown accelerators.

Erin Stadler: That is a great question, because we're actually going through a phase where we're just seeing so many things shift out in the industry. There's a lot of questions about what is an accelerator and where do we want to go with the industry. But right now, Boomtown at its core, we're a company that's been focusing on entrepreneurship and how to elevate the entrepreneur to get their idea out there. And right now, we're doing that by partnering with some really amazing corporate partners. The main one right now being Comcast and the sports tech accelerator that we're about to create.

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on the show, because again, you've been in the space of accelerators. You and I both started early days, eight plus years ago, I guess, in this space and accelerators have changed quite a bit. And so, I wanted to have you on the show, partly to talk about that evolution of accelerators and what have you seen that's been good, bad, and indifferent, and where you see it going. Let's start with the history of how Boomtown accelerators got started and what you've seen over the last decade or so of how accelerators have changed.

Erin Stadler: Boomtown got started like a lot of companies in a new emerging marketplace, so we're actually almost eight years old now. So, we were one of the first accelerators in Colorado. We actually did start in the backyard of some other famous accelerators. But at the time, it was definitely during that stage where a lot of people were starting accelerators. There was a bit of a me too, if you could build a mentor community, and you could get some investors, and could attract some startups., Tada! You had your accelerator. But what we've learned over the last few years and many iterations, one of my founders will say we are probably the biggest skeptics when it comes to accelerators, which makes us want to just continually to evolve and adapt.

And we've gone through a lot of different stages with the help of some amazing partners. Along that journey, we realized that it has a lot more to do with helping the founder be prepared in launching that startup. While connections are important and they're great. What can you do that is really impactful? And frankly, that is a much, much harder job than setting up a demo day and setting up some mentor meetings. I hope we see other accelerators do that, but it's the thing we've tried to do is challenge what truly is impactful for a company at its early stage. And we found that there's just a very different model to make that successful.

Brian Ardinger: Let's unpack that a little bit. I think back in the days when accelerators got started, it was more of a deal flow thing for VCs or the community to kind of see what was out there and invest at early stages at a low valuation and kind of see what happens from that perspective. And like you said, it probably wasn't always, or at least depending on the accelerator, wasn't always set up to support the founder. What did you learn in that early stage that made you think, okay, well, we can do this differently or support founders in a different way?

Erin Stadler: You know, it was the founders themselves. So, a little bit of like the customer doesn't know what they want. So, and this is still true today, you know, when we're talking to startups, you know, startups are attracted by the names of the partners. They're attracted by the names of people in your mentor pool. Right? It's all about if I can just meet that right person, right? Unfortunately, it's a little bit how the social construct or the myths around what basis successful startup has been formed, but what's really happened is at the end of working with us, we'll go back to the startups and say, Hey, what was actually the most impactful?

And that's actually where we got most of our learnings and our insights from, and the sort of things we heard, it was sitting down with someone, working through them with the strategy, helping them understand if they have the right mindset. As a friend of ours would say, how to unlearn some bad habits. And set them up for success. And while that included great connections, it was less about the star power we'll say, and a lot more about how, and that continues to evolve into, like I said, for the sports tech accelerator, instead of just having a name stamped on there, you know, Hey, you know, you'll get an intro to the CTO at XYZ company.

We've worked very closely with each of the partners and each of the people involved in our accelerator to go, Hey, if you're involved in this, this isn't just for fun. Like this is about making an impact and let's get serious about caring and honest about the time that we have and be transparent about whether we're on board to make an impact, and then let's actually do that. So, everyone leaves feeling like, Oh, people were authentic and honest, and we're here to do great businesses, you know, not just make an investment and make a bet.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about that pivot from, and we've saw the evolution of accelerators being primarily designed to help create early stage companies. And then you saw this wave of corporations kind of raising their hand and saying, Hey, this is interesting. We want to get involved in this. And I think he saw a lot of bad habits in that stage, too. A lot of corporations seem to look at it more as innovation theater, as a way to pretend they are involved in the startup scene and that, but not necessarily really understanding how to impact both the founders as well as the company themselves with this. So, talk about that evolution to the corporate accelerator side of the world. And what have you seen there?

Erin Stadler: The first evolution, like you said, it was a bit of me too, again, I think it was fashionable, may still be in some places to have your own health tech accelerator or your own financial one or something powered by this group. The problem with that is one, the corporation only has so much time to work and partner with a startup. It's like how many FinTech companies can you really help, or can you really impact? And so then what we saw and why we actually never had an accelerator that was a full accelerator, like only focused on one, we'll say narrow vertical, sports tech is huge, but in a narrow vertical, because then even within that set of companies, they're competing against each other.

And so then even in that sense, right, you start getting the favorites, you start getting some negative repercussions. When those startups should be helping each other, and the corporation should be helping each other. It goes back to again, what's the better deal. Who's the better founder. And so now it's kind of a rat race again. And then also again, the corporations still have their own business to run and they have stuff to do. And while this is a part of a wider strategy, you are getting the 20% time from people inside those corporations. And all of a sudden, it sounds fun and shiny to help a bunch of startups. But again, if you're not honest about how you can help it's going to fall away and you're going to go actually, maybe we'll only help those two that looked like the best bets.

It doesn't feel great to everyone. And then honestly, the other thing we've seen is a corporation, because if it's only that kind of surface level, like deal flow aspect of it, the corporation ends up spinning that work inside anyway, and cutting off that external operations of it, which means, again, they've missed that ultimate opportunity to partner with an entity that is focused on a very different type of partnership and different support of that entrepreneur. They've let it fall back into the VC mindset.

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Brian Ardinger: Have you seen an evolution in that thinking from the corporate perspective of how they want to engage with startups in general? Is it still thought of as those transformational things that we're not going to be able to do inside? Or is it more close to the core stuff that they're looking for?

Erin Stadler: It should be yes to all of those things. When we're working with a corporation that really looks at their larger strategy. Again, it's not just, we need an accelerator too. It's a larger strategy, right? If you think about it, an accelerator incubator studio, any of that work can be applied at any idea stage, right. At any of those kinds of exploration stages.

And so, we've seen is the really smart folks will have an idea stage accelerator, right? How do we really help early entrepreneurs, earlier founders? We actually did that in Atlanta with a program called The Farm. Where it was about people with an idea, how do we help them get to a stage? But there was never an expectation that all of a sudden at the end, they were going to go out and raise a million dollars or raise their Series A. If anything, if there was a company at that stage, they weren't prepared for that.

But what we loved is when Comcast decided to actually power up, they powered it in their space as a part of an offering to the community. Obviously, that created a huge number of synergies just within the entrepreneurial community, you know, with support. And even for the organization to go, Hey, we're doing this to help just the whole industry and the ecosystem to kind of thrive and no later down the road that'll help us.

What we're seeing now is a lot of those companies, while Comcast is not like a primary customer, that's the other thing they did is like, Hey, we just want to support entrepreneurs and ideas, those companies, because they've been a part of the guidance of those groups, they're now impacting business units are part of what's going on.

So like we had a company that came through that was helping diversify grants that were going into an organization. You know, they found that most grants weren't as diversified as they should be. And so that was their mission to help with that. That group was just picked as like a great idea, but then all of a sudden, it's like, wow, there's actually an opportunity to have us. You know, we have an effort like that inside of our organization. But the other key thing there is Comcast wasn't just like, well, we only want to invest in companies that help us. It was great, you can help us.

But what success also means is you're set up to help a bunch of other organizations because that company is not going to thrive with one key customer. They're going to thrive because they maybe have a key pilot customer. That helps them out and gives them a chance, but that they also have a customer in a market that's beyond that single corporate client. Though it's a little bit of kind of that corporate responsibility. Maybe when they look at how are we accelerating companies and what are we looking at it?

And then the second part of your question, yes. Then there's always a strategy to bring in an accelerator that's focused in on innovation challenges. So, like I mentioned before, the sports tech accelerator that we're looking at is it's a wide thesis of eight innovation areas, but each of the partners go well when it comes to sports tech where currently our innovation challenges, it's no surprise with COVID. They're looking at when we bring the sports, what do we do around our venue security? What do we do around fan engagement? Where do we do so? Right. A lot of the startups we're looking at are focused in on those innovation priorities, but again, they have an opportunity to work with more than just the original corporate partner.

Brian Ardinger: I like that approach. And I've seen similar approaches, even in our own backyard. We used to run these Jumpstart Challenges where we'd go to the local community and find a corporation that would be willing to support it. And we found the best ones that were a good match for that type of environment were the ones that thought broader about their own industry and broader about hey, this may be great for us.

And yeah, we'll have a inside track to having some inside information and maybe we'll get to use this before our competitors, but having that more global mindset around it seemed to both energize the founder because they knew they weren't going to be just developing a custom solution for XYZ corporation. But also, that it was that first proving ground first beta tester things along those lines that could allow them to then gain traction and learnings as they built out something that could impact the entire industry.

Erin Stadler: So, I'd say our newest adaptation is building out this consortium. So instead of it just being NBC Sports saying, let's go invest in sports tech. They said, well, heck we work with all these other groups. We work with Olympic groups. We work with NASCAR. We work with Sky Sports and soccer teams like e-sports groups. How do we do this together? But also cross pollinate the challenges we're having across that. So, we're seeing, even through this process of like selecting startups to work with, you're getting all of a sudden NASCAR talking to cycling, going, Oh, the way you're approaching this, that's actually very similar to how we're approaching it.

And you wouldn't think that. We're just at the forefront of this, but we're just seeing some really interesting opportunities. Even within that consortium, again, that myopic view of like, okay, let's go and change, you know, this sport. They're like, well, what are innovations that could cross over?

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit more about the sports tech accelerator you've got going on. I think, applications are open right now. Walk a person through what that program looks like. Maybe how did it start? And then what's going to happen once you actually pick companies and move them forward.

Erin Stadler: First of all, with COVID, it's always a bummer. We want to see people in person, our program is in February, but we don't know right now. Actually, we're in the selections process at this point, we're getting down to the last few companies. So that's getting very exciting, but a part of that process for those folks that went through it, and we'll be doing this again next year. Is first, right, we look at all the innovation areas, the challenges, the things that all of our consortium partners are facing. So far, the startups that have come through, they've gone through our normal kind of vetting process.

They get to speak with us. We get to explore what they're doing with their company and where they want to go. But then each of them they've already had the opportunity to actually pitch their company to a set of partners that we knew matched up. And we actually specifically look at what is the opportunity for them to impact one or more actually, we like to look for two or more of those partners. Because again, instead of just going, Oh, well you have a fit for one and you might get one, right. We want to maximize that opportunity to maximize that impact for everybody. And just the learning for that startup and for the partners.

Once a company joins the accelerator, we do a lot of early strategy work with them. That's where we're about to go through. Cause right, we're about to pick companies. Now we have four months to the beginning of our accelerator, but we like to roll up our sleeves and get to know them as much as possible. We don't wait for day one. It's like, what could we do now? What are meetings? Right? Our partners are already like chomping at like how do we get things started with them? And there's a lot of expectations about spinning up pilots and POCs with those potential startups too.

Once our program starts, we really focus on shifting the approach and the mindset that the founder is using to build that company. So, our goal specifically with the program is to design something where it's not about building the perfect plan or building the perfect pitch deck or building a one-off thing. It's about actually testing and adapting their own entrepreneurial skills or business building skills, finding the gaps, tearing some stuff down, building it back up again. So, by the time they leave, our hope is they have multiple opportunities with partners. We've been guiding them through those pilots and POCs as well as helping them approach the learning in a really effective way.

So that's something, I think that's a little different. It's not just, Hey, here's your introduction to NASCAR. Good luck with that POC. You know, we're going to be hands-on partners to help these startups, because if they've never worked with a corporation that size, or maybe they have, it's a different industry. We get to be that coach on both sides actually. So we'll also be coaching our partners on how to work with the startups and vice versa.

So, we really get to sit in the middle and be that we'll say trusted partner for both the startups and the partners. So that by the end of this, hopefully we've again impacted the industry, the partners, the startups, and we see really cool stuff happening.

Brian Ardinger: I think it's a very important piece of the puzzle that Sherpa in the middle, really, because corporations don't necessarily know how to impact or work with startups. If they're not doing it on a regular basis. Startups don't necessarily know how to work and navigate a big corporate giant and the politics and everything else that goes along with that. So having somebody who both knows both sides of the table, so to speak is a huge opportunity for folks that are looking at accelerators. And why would I want to go to a corporate accelerator type of program versus trying to do it on my own?

Erin Stadler: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, here's the thing we know this is our first round with this awesome kind of consortium model. And we know we get to do it a couple more times at the very least. And we always adapt. We listen to our startups, right. We listen to our partners like any good organization we focus on what's the experience of all of our stakeholders. We should be making a huge impact on that startup. A positive way to make sure that it increases the likelihood that they're going to make the impact that they want to have.

Brian Ardinger: So, the last core topic we're living in a COVID world that changes pretty much everything. Every business model has to be reevaluated or looked at. What are you seeing both from your business, from an accelerator perspective, what are you seeing from founders? How are they approaching the new COVID world and what are you seeing from the corporate world? What are some of the things that are really, changing the way we're thinking about these things?

Erin Stadler: You know, it's interesting because one of the things we like to do with our consortium is we actually do these things called Spark Sessions, where we try to look at timely topics and how things are shifting. And so COVID continues to come up. And the reason I'm hesitating answering this question is because I think there's still so much unknown. And actually, when I listen to people talk about COVID, I'm like, how do you know that? Like, how do you know that's how people are going to react? I think everyone's on their edge of their seat to see how things will continue to progress and how will things continue to adapt.

So, I'll speak for us. From a Boomtown perspective it challenged our model of we've always preferred to have people in person. We want to work side by side. We believe in the water cooler moments. You know, I always had an open desk policy where I never had an office. I just sit at a desk. If I was at my desk, you could interrupt me.

Those things aren't possible in the COVID world. And so, we're going to spend a lot of time of how do we design in those micro moments and micro interactions that actually build the relationships we need to have. And that's true with our partners too. I'd say that while we see the relationships still getting built, it's just not quite the same.

So, we hope, and we're crossing our fingers that we'll have an opportunity to bring everyone together in these cohorts are partners, togethers with startups. As soon as we're allowed to, we'll be the first ones going, who's willing to buy a plane ticket and we'll try to make those things happen. But we know that there's unfortunately, in my opinion, probably a low likelihood that we'll get to do that.

Other than that, interestingly, I'm actually surprised how much work hasn't changed when it comes to just, you know, sports continue. I mean, that's kind of where our focus obviously. And, you know, and the Olympics are going to now happen next summer, obviously that got pushed out and that'll be a big component for us. So, people still have timelines in mind and deadlines that they need to meet. And startups are still trying to create technologies and they still believe in the impact they're going to make. We see that continue forward.

The thing that has surprised us is we thought when COVID started that people's innovation strategies would just shut down. We thought that people would go, right? Cause what's the first thing people think, we don't have the budget. Right. You think, Oh, everyone's going to cut the innovation budget. We've actually seen interest in the work we're doing go up.

And here's the reason is at least for Boomtown, I wouldn't say up in accelerators. That's why, when you asked me like, what is Boomtown, it has a lot more to do with. Who can our trusted partners be to help us shift our innovation strategies that are out there, adapting their models that are out there looking and bringing in the research and bringing me the information I need and being a trusted partner in adopting that strategy, which always includes our external world.

How do you continue to bring those external things to me, especially now that there's not Collision Conference to go to or South by Southwest to go to? Right. How do I get the opportunity to see all the innovations going out there? That was a surprise to us that there's actually uncertainty with how do I continue innovation and continue discovering new innovations, when I can't just go to the event anymore?

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely.

Erin Stadler: And I think that's true for the startups too, right? It used to be, you go to a pitch competition. You would go to something locally. So how do we find each other? So, I'd say more than ever having people that act like Sherpas.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. The curators. Yeah. The folks that can bring those different, the ties and the t-shirts together.

Erin Stadler: Yeah. But I think it's less around curating events. It's curating the relationships. It's being a matchmaker. It's doing some of the early due diligence to go. I think there's something here. I think this is worth your time. That's more specialized than it's ever been before.

Brian Ardinger: Erin, I appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation to give your insights. And I'd love to have you back on, as we talk about the world and how it is evolving and thanks again for being part of this.

Erin Stadler: No, I really enjoyed it. And yes, as I said, we always have experiments running as you heard from some of my answers and would be happy to do a part two to let you know how it actually ends up.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Shannon Lucas, co-author of the book, Move Fast, Break Shit, Burnout: The Catalyst Guide to Working Well. Shannon and I talk about the characteristics, roles and challenges that catalysts face in driving innovation within companies and how organizations can better identify and support these new change agents. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consultant services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview with Shannon Lucas

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Shannon Lucas. Shannon is the coauthor of Move Fast, Break Shit, Burnout: The Catalyst Guide to Working Well. Welcome Shannon.

Shannon Lucas: Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Not only are you a new author, the book's coming out I believe tomorrow. You have been in the innovation space for a while. You've worked for great companies like Erickson and Cisco's Hyper Innovation Living Lab and Vodafone. So, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about some of the things that you're seeing and some of the great things that you put in your new book.

Shannon Lucas: Thanks. You have some great guests. So, I'm excited to be part of the crew.

Brian Ardinger: What made you decide to write another innovation book? What's different about this take on it?

Shannon Lucas: It's a great question, because there are so many books about how to do innovation better and innovation processes and change management. But there's very few books that actually talk directly to the change agents themselves, about how to do that sustainably and more effectively. Based on personal experience of going through these very catalyst cycles of the intense mania when you start first sinking your teeth into a wicked problem. All the way through trying to orchestrate across an ecosystem or an organization hitting resistance, and more often than not hitting some kind of burnout.

I wanted to help other catalysts and other change agents see that they didn't have to have the intensity of those cycles and how to do it more effectively. I think we need wicked change agents now more than ever. There's a lot of positive change that we need to create in the world, but we need to make sure that they're not doing that at the expense of themselves.

Brian Ardinger: What is a catalyst and how does that differ from a traditional employee?

Shannon Lucas: My co-author Tracy is a ethnographer researcher and the distinction, the categorization of catalyst comes from a lot of research that she did. And it's basically people who take in lots of information from lots of sources from that they will see emergent new possibilities. They then sort of create a specific vision about something that needs to change and how they want to see the world be better. And importantly, they move into action and they move into action fast. Hence the name of the book.

And they're often perceived as risk takers even though to them, it often doesn't feel risky because they have internalized and synthesize so much of the data. Why it was really interesting for me is I had been spending all of this time creating intrapreneur circles within Vodafone, sort of externally as a support group. And I kept seeing that they didn't all show up the same way.

We had grown the innovation champion program we called it at Vodafone from ragtag group of eight positive troublemakers to this CEO sponsored, gamified, rewarded all these things. We had over a hundred people, but it was often like the same 10 or 15% that showed up over and over, that would lean in so hard that we were like, Oh, hold on, we'll get some of those barriers out of your way for you before you really break a lot of shit. And so it was important for me because it really helped me contextualize who these wicked change agents are. And then of course, how we could help them better.

Brian Ardinger: So, with that can you give some examples of the type of people that you've seen, or some examples of how catalysts change the organization or move it forward.

Shannon Lucas: First important note is that a lot of catalysts will go in and out of organizations. You'll see on their resumes. Once you start to see the patterns, you'll start to be able to see them on LinkedIn. They'll stay in a role for a couple of years because they've moved on to the next big problem and they're looking for new ways to do it.

They often are more comfortable than the average person moving into startups, starting their own ventures and then going back into the corporate world. It's like for them, the question is wherever I can create the next change that I need to create and whatever tools are the best tools to get that done, is where they will go.

It's interesting, actually, in one of the interviews recently, one of the catalysts said, you know, when people used to ask me where I'm going to be in five years, I never knew the answer to that. Cause he's like, I never know what problem I'm going to be solving next. And he said, so now my answer is I'm going to be a catalyst that much I know. And whatever that looks like I can't tell you.

Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. And I imagine a lot of the listeners that we have on this podcast are now light bulbs or, you know, shooting off in their heads saying, Oh, I think I'm one of those people. Is that curious and restless, we'd call it in our organization that we're trying to find those folks that see things a little bit differently and willing to take action on that. Not everybody's a catalyst. How can you as an organization, if you want to lean into the innovation and try to identify these catalysts and cultivate that, what are some ways that you can first, as an organization, identify who in your organization are these catalysts?

Shannon Lucas: Tracy and I sat with this question for a long time, as we've been creating our community and doing the research for the book, do we want to be the arbiters of who is a catalyst and who isn't? We have the data, so we can work with organizations to create the quizzes and do the identification of the personality types. What's more important though we found, is that people actually self-identify as catalysts.

We talk about patterns, not templates like showing what some of these patterns look like, and then letting people to your point, it's like the light bulbs will go off when a catalyst starts to see and hear us talk about it. There's this deep resonance and really like this thrill because they're finally being seen and understood in a way that they really haven't been before. Most organizations in fact, we haven't found an organization yet that doesn't have catalysts. So I would encourage all of the HR people and leaders out there to find them.

There's often a strong overlap with sort of high potential programs as well, because it's like, there's a go getter-ness to it. They're leaning in, like, as you said, hard with curiosity and wanting to make positive change. And then I think it's important to create a cohort of the catalyst in your organization because catalysts get a lot of energy being connected to the other catalysts because it's really frictionless.

In the rest of the organization, there's always friction because they're moving too fast and really hitting that resistance. And so, there's this 10 X factor when catalysts are connected to each other. And then of course there's a lot of support and training and development they can offer that we help organizations with.

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Brian Ardinger: I like that idea of letting it organically identify those people within the organization. One of the things we do at Nelnet is a monthly event called Spark. And the idea is to put a entrepreneur, catalyst, somebody on stage talking about some of the new things that they're building. And we find that that is a magnet for other catalysts when the organization to identify themselves as the person on stage and say, I can be on that stage talking about my project next month, things along those lines.

And we found it really has been a catalyst to finding other folks within that organization that raise our hand and say, Hey, I think I can do some different things within the organization and drive innovation. So...

Shannon Lucas: I think that's right. And I would just say that usually when we go into an organization, it's either a catalyst or someone who, who is trying to cultivate this, like an HR person, but they know the next like four or five people once we talk to them about who a catalyst is. And like, that's what we did at Vodafone as well. We started with those eight positive troublemakers. And then to your point, there is a big marketing component to sort of building out these catalyst programs, just to do the evangelization of what this looks like and how do you connect with them. But growing organic plays a really strong sell.

Brian Ardinger: Once an organization maybe has identified some of these catalysts and that, what can they do to support this type of behavior and type of individual?

Shannon Lucas: Well, we talked about the first one, which is connecting the catalyst and important in that is giving them closed, safe space. Catalysts are unafraid, or they're more comfortable with an iterative process. Let me say that. So they move from vision and action and iteration as an innate way of being in the world. What that looks like to the outside world would be that's comfortable with failure. Although catalysts wouldn't necessarily describe it that way. Right?

So, by having that safe space, they can talk about the things that they've tried and what the lessons learned were and get the collective wisdom of the group and catalysts will encourage each other to dream bigger and be really supportive. Beyond that we actually talk about some very specific tools.

So, in a catalyst journey, when they move from first trying to solve the problem, they're really good at connecting the dots and creating the vision. Where a lot of catalysts fall down or don't love even if maybe they're good at it is the orchestration part. How do you get the executives to understand or your team to understand what the vision is?

We often feel like, well, we said it once you've nodded, don't you get it. And really we talk about needing to repeat it over and over and over again, so that people are really internalizing it and understanding how to support the vision. We talk about building network maps so that you can identify who the natural supporters are and who the resistors are in create a game plan. There's a lot of sort of tools and tips and tricks that can help catalyst be more effective and in doing so. They also, as I said earlier, minimize the burnout because we've taken away some of the resistance.

Brian Ardinger: What are your thoughts as far as creating these connections between catalysts within the organization, but what about outside the organization? What's your thought on this inside outside play?

Shannon Lucas: I'm a big fan. And actually, so we have an online global community called the Galaxy, which is exactly for that reason. So, we can create closed user groups for an organization's internal team of catalysts. But then by definition, they have access to catalysts from Amazon and Google and Facebook and Steelcase and Hitachi.

The cross pollination is really important. I mean, if you go back in terms of all of the innovation work that I've done within the last 10 plus years, I really started very early focusing on ecosystem innovation, because I don't think that most companies can. create the positive change that we need to see in the world by themselves.

But the brilliance is if you then connect these wicked change agents who have their finger on the pulse of what's going on in these highly innovative companies, again, it becomes probably a hundred X accelerator at that point,

Brian Ardinger: A lot of our listeners would probably fall in this catalyst category and what can they do better to foster themselves and grow as a catalyst within the organizations?

Shannon Lucas: Well, so I talked about some of the organizational tools and the book is really dedicated to that. Once you do the self-identification, the rest of it really is tools to be a more effective catalyst inside the organization. Although it's also applicable for entrepreneurs. The thing that I would like to share though, is it's hard being a catalyst.

And when catalysts first connect with the community, often, almost every week, we have someone sort of breaking down in tears or having this sigh of relief because while we wear the badge of disruptor in troublemaker as a badge of honor. It's not always intended that way when it's originally given to us.

And what we've found is that catalyst can be really hard on themselves and they can internalize that feedback. I mean, we can become the lightning bolt or the lightning rod for resistance in an organization. So, with it, they're attacking our idea, which is sometimes like a little extension of ourselves or sometimes just attacking us directly.

It can be really hard, can be actual trauma. That's part of the catalyst experience. And so, what I would love to encourage all catalysts to do is to think about developing some of the resiliency skills to create the space to not let those things impact you as intensely as they might. And what we focus on our practices around mindfulness and self-compassion, because actually we interviewed a trauma specialist and that was her go to, which was very reassuring for me because that's been the journey that I've been on.

Brian Ardinger: The catalyst is probably more likely to be working in ambiguity and uncertainty at a consistent pace. And that alone causes additional stressors than I guess, a traditional employee that knows that this is the thing that I need to do to optimize my place in the world versus create something new. Are there particular tactics or skillsets or other tactical things that a person can be doing to manage that burnout?

Shannon Lucas: You hit on something really important is getting clarity as quickly as possible in terms of what the expectations are of your organization. If I had to go back and do anything over, that was always, you cannot over dimension enough on getting clarity, making sure that your team below the executives above you at least have some sense of buy in because to your point usually the KPIs, the incentive models, the goals aren't aligned to what you're doing, because it's net new. And so, if you don't have enough, buy-in, that's when the resistance will come. Even if it's the right thing to do for the organization. Tied to that is going on what we call first listening tours and then co-creation and then feedback tours.

So, when you're starting to do something going around the organization and essentially speaking with as many people as relevant. I don't want to say as possible, deeply understand what's emerging in the organization. And what you will get then is something that is tied to both the corporate strategy and everyone else's KPIs and goals and incentives, which will then give you a lot of momentum behind you as you start to move that forward.

And then as we talked about, once you have that vision creating models and visual models a lot. The repetition and the clarity. It's just all about clarity, you know, repetition and clarity. This is what we talked about. How do you feel about this now? This is the next iteration based on your feedback. How do you feel about that now?

And then as we talked about making sure that you understand the lay of the land from a network perspective, like who do you absolutely have to have on board and who can sit on the fence and who are the detractors that you might want to avoid until the end or ever.

Brian Ardinger: And that iterative approach is so important, not only for creating new ideas, but again, managing that expectation as you move the idea forward. Quite interesting. You've been in this innovation space for a long time and that. What are some of the changes that you've seen in the practice of innovation? You know, what's been some of the good things that you've seen or some of the bad things that people have latched onto that shouldn't be used nowadays, or what are the trends and that, that you're seeing in the innovation space?

Shannon Lucas: For better or worse innovation theater is still very real meaning companies like to talk about the shiny objects that they're doing, but it's not making any actual transformation in the organization. I think some of the good trends are data and data as part of the process for that sort of action, the vision, action, iteration that most teams go through.

I mean, that's Design Thinking, that's Lean Startup, that's everything. And just making sure when you're iterating that you're doing that based on real data. So I will say even compared with 10 years ago, the amount of people who are actually going out and talking to customers or talking to stakeholders, sort of breaking down the fourth wall, that's become much more comfortable. And we started that at Vodafone. The salespeople were like, you cannot talk to my customer about things that you don't know about. Like that's not okay.

And I think that Design Thinking has become so prevalent in the world that even the salespeople are on board with that. The intrapreneur sort of innovation champion thing, like finding the people across the organization, instead of setting up these ivory towers of innovation, I see that as an important pivot too. And I think combined with those two things are actual learning journeys. So not just going out and talking to the customer, but going out into the real world, I mean, obviously that's harder this year than it has been before and seeing how people are interacting in the ecosystem.

And I guess the final piece, which is exciting is the ecosystem. Innovation piece. Like it used to just be that companies would try and solve their own problems by themselves. Right. And the recognition that we need more sustainable systemic solutions across the board and that they can't do that in isolation. So that sort of, co-creation trying to figure out the IP, like there's a lot of challenges behind that type of stuff, but just the recognition that we need it now more than ever. Well,

Brian Ardinger: I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation about all the things innovation, and I'm excited to dig into the book when it comes out this week. And what's the best way to do that?

Shannon Lucas: Yeah, the book is called Move Fast, Break Shit, Burnout: The Catalyst Guide to Working Well. You can get it on Amazon. And of course, you can find out more about myself and the company at catalystconstellations.com.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Shannon, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Shannon Lucas: Me too. Thanks.

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Move Fast. Break Shit. Burn Out.: The Catalyst's Guide to Working Well

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kate Leto, Author of Hiring Product Managers Using Product EQ to Go Beyond Culture and Skills. Kate and I talk about some of the trends and tactics needed for hiring the best product managers and why there needs to be more of a balance between technical and human skills in the process. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consultant services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you you're a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Kate Leto

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me we have Kate Leto. She's the author of Hiring Product Managers Using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills. Welcome to the show Kate.

Kate Leto: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. Our mutual friend Jeff Gothelf suggested we talk, and you're based in the UK. Is that correct?

Kate Leto: I am. Yeah, just outside of London.

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to talk more about all this concept of product managers and some of the new things that you're seeing out there. Tell us a little bit about that. How you got involved in product management at the very first

Kate Leto: Probably like the majority of product managers, I didn't intend to get into product management. Didn't even know what it was. When I started out over 20 years ago, it was still very much a new and developing area and profession. And I fell into it really just before I joined Yahoo, but I was actually working in Chicago at the time at a startup. Back in the late nineties.

And actually, fell into product management, I was doing marketing, which led to product marketing, which led to product management. And went to grad school at Northwestern University and ended up at Yahoo directly after that, again, working with product marketing and slowly made this transition into product management. So, it was trial and error and it was by accident just as it is with many of us in product management.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about some of the changes that you've seen over the last 20 years in product management. And, you know, it seems to actually have become quote unquote profession now, and people actually know what that means, but maybe what are some of the big highlights that you've seen over the years that have really changed how people think about product?

Kate Leto: Number one is product has more credibility and a bit more clarity around what it is. I think a lot of that's come from the different communities that have sprung up around the product world over the last 10 plus years. Groups like mind the product have been really powerful globally and encouraging, creating a space for product people to come together and talk about what is product management?

What is it? How do we do it? How do we do it? Well, like many product people. Still within my friends and family group, people have no idea what product management is. My partner just tells everybody that I'm a spy because he doesn't quite understand it. So, we just roll with that. I think one of the best things that I've seen over the last 20 plus years within product, is amongst ourselves more clarity around what it is that we do. And to create a support system, really in a support structure to help us have a place to go to learn, to vent, to talk about what's challenging us what our tensions are and how to do that in a different way.

And one of the things that I really latched on to I'd say over the last five plus years is the movement of product management from just being something that's about what I call technical skills, which are the things that we focus quite a bit on, you know, the fundamentals of product management, how to build a roadmap, maybe how to do a strategy statement or a vision statement for our team or a product or an organization, how to put in KPIs or OKRs and while all those are essential and those are things that we've really talked about quite a bit as a community over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, I've noticed this trend within product that we are starting to talk more outside of that set into more kind of a human aspect of being a product manager, because we are people, right?

Products are built by people for people. For the most part, bringing the concept of what I call human skills into the product management space is something that I've noticed a big trend in the last five, six, seven years. And I'm happy to say that's something that I'm involved in and I'm happy. I'm really enjoying talking to people about things like self-awareness and resilience and adaptability and all of these great things that are just as essential to how we build a product as a roadmap structure or building OKR out for our organization.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, you mentioned that most people tend to think about the technical side of product management and product development. Your new book called Hiring Product Managers tries to talk about the move from the focus on technical to this balance between technical and human skills. Tell us a little bit about the book and how it came to be and what it's all about.

Kate Leto: The book Hiring Product Managers using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills just started to come about probably five, six, seven years ago, as I started to look outside of the technical side of product management. So outside of the skills that we talk about, and I was coaching a lot of people on and working with organizations on things like how to have a better road mapping process or how to actually introduce OKR as into our organization or how to run design sprints, and integrate that into our product development processes.

And to be honest, I kind of got tired of thinking and just talking about those things. And I took a coaching course, something to help me help people I was working with beyond just these technical skills, because it was very interesting. I'd go into conversations with teams or with leaders about specific mastery of technical skills, and suddenly it would drop a bit further into an area of personal need.

I don't think my team likes me or why can't I get a promotion or why does this stakeholder, will they not have a meeting with me? Can I not get anywhere with them? I started to really focus on this area of what I now call product EQ, which is bringing in human skills into the conversation and helping people feel like they have the confidence to talk, talk about things like self-awareness and resilience and leadership and collaboration, and even how to deal with conflict. And giving them some words and tools to do that.

So, from that over the past 10, 20 years, I've done a lot of hiring within product management. And it seems like a very natural evolution to how can we actually build better teams and better organizations is to look at our hiring processes. Why are they working for some groups? Why are they not working for others? And applying this filter of product EQ and encouraging people to think about more than technical skills when we are hiring new people just kind of came together very nicely. And I started doing writing and blogging about it. And wouldn't you know a book comes out of that.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Husch Blackwell

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's kind of interesting because you think about really good product designers that are very empathetic to the customer. And it's interesting to see how they're not always the same when they think about their teams and how you put that together. What's your take on that?

Kate Leto: Yeah, I think that's fascinating. We talk so much about human-centered design human-centered product development, but we don't often extend the same conversation and the same view towards people we work with. We talk about having empathy towards our customers, and we really focus on that. You know, we, in a way grade ourselves on how in touch we are with our customer needs, yet the conversation doesn't extend to being empathetic to my teammates or to people that I'm managing or to colleagues or people within the design group or whatever it might be.

I find that quite ironic, but I think it goes back to some of how we really do focus on technical skills. One of the technical skills, and one of the areas we've really tried to develop is customer interviews and keeping in touch with customers and understanding their needs. So, we do focus on that aspect and having empathy towards customers, but we don't focus on bringing that internally. So, yeah, I think that's fascinating.

There's a lot of research out there that shows that organizations that do focus on building self-awareness within teams, and building self-awareness broader within their organizations, are higher performing, they're better at innovating, and they do better with their products overall.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some of the tactics and that you uncover and unleash in the book, one of them being this idea of creating a role canvas. And what's the role that you're trying to hire for in that? Talk us through some of the tactics in the book that you want to highlight.

Kate Leto: So, what I try to do in the book is to give some practical activities and tools that people can take away and work with on their teams right away, to actually help them hire for human skills as much as we hire for technical skills. And one of those tools is something called a role canvas. And it's based around this tension that I've noticed of product people.

And this isn't just product people. This is pretty widely based. That, when we think about hiring someone, you know, when we get that head count announcement, you've got head count, you can go hire. Our knee jerk reaction is often to put together a job description. And that job description is usually based on cutting and pasting different pieces of job descriptions from industry leaders. I've done this before.

And actually, I saw a survey recently that said, well, 80% of hiring managers think that job descriptions are important. About 50% of us actually cut and paste that job description. So, we're not giving it a lot of thoughts. It's not coming from a place of consideration and collaboration.

So, with the role canvas, it's something that asks four simple questions. One, what’s the purpose of the role and by purpose, I mean, going beyond going a level deeper than just the title to what's actually the reason for having this role. Then what are the accountabilities that this role will be working towards?

And that could be OKRs. It could be KPIs, whatever it is, within your organization and then asking what are the human skills that this role will need to actually achieve the accountabilities and what are the technical skills? So, within the role canvas, It actually forces the people who are developing it to understand more about human skills.

So, this is a trick, a little bit by design. You can find a copy of the role canvas on my website. What we're actually asking people do within the human skill section is to list out the skills that they actually will need in order to achieve these accountabilities. So, things like if there's been a lot of conflict within the team lately, or there's a lot of challenges with stakeholders, Maybe you need to find somebody with conflict resolution skills, or if there is a challenging stakeholder, maybe you need somebody with good social influencing skills.

Perhaps it's self-awareness, perhaps it's self-management, whatever they are. But I ask and challenge people to do when they're filling out the section on the role canvas is to actually list out the skills they need and prioritize them just as you would for technical skills. So that's one of the tools that I relay in, into, in the book and offers some additional information about how you can do this role canvas on your own, perhaps of your hiring manager, but then bring it to a workshop setting, actually, something you can even do virtually with the rest of your team, including recruiters, including stakeholders, whoever it might be to actually have a collaborative session on thinking through what is this role before we put together a job description.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that is interesting to me is like trying to understand what are those human skills. And I think we have a pretty good idea of what makes a good Adobe Photoshop Designer or things along those lines. But what are the human skills that I guess make a good product manager? Or are there any kind of superpowers that have stood out that you've seen over the years make good product teams and good product people?

Kate Leto: Yeah, I think there are a couple and actually what I've been working on recently is creating a human skills wheel, actually, that identify as some of the popular human skills that I've seen within product managers. The baseline is self-awareness. Self-awareness itself is something that helps us have a moral compass in a way. It helps feed whether or not the decisions we're making per perhaps are good for us or good for our team or a good for our organization, are good for our product.

Self-awareness as a baseline that a lot of people think they have and they're like, Oh yeah, I'm self-aware. I get myself. But it's actually something that it's really challenging because the way I think of self-awareness is it's not just understanding my own emotions and my own reactions, but it's how others see me as well and how I'm impacting others and how that has a greater impact on the world.

So, I'd say as a baseline, self-awareness, it's something that if you want to start somewhere, that's like the Meta skill or focusing on building some self-awareness. And then for product people also, I do think things like conflict resolution skills are super important because we're always going to run into tension and conflict. Be it putting together a roadmap or having a conversation about prioritization.

I do think when it comes to something, even as basic as building a roadmap that is so fundamental to baseline product work, it does require things like having self-awareness, having conflict resolution skills, having social awareness skills, and leadership skills to bring our team along with us on whatever that roadmap might be.

The more I dig into the human skills that are important for product management, the more I see how many of them are. Because it is such a complex role to have within an organization. And many of them build upon each other. They're compounding.

Brian Ardinger: Is it something where you need a diversity of skillsets, human skill sets as well as technical skill sets within that team? Or should you be looking at hiring well, this person's great at conflict resolution, but I need to hire somebody else that has a different human skill or what are your thoughts on that?

Kate Leto: Yeah, I think it's a balance. When it comes to building teams be a human skills or skills, I think we need to be careful that we're not just replicating what we already have. You know, and this leads to a conversation around diversity within teams, diversity in thought diversity in background, diversity and experience. I think that applies to human skills just as much as technical skills and realizing what we often do when we hire product people or even outside product people is, we kind of create a stack.

If you think if there's puzzle pieces, right. What I often see is that people are just kind of, they're hiring people that look like them, that act like them, that talk like them that think like them and you create a stack. Whereas what we really need to do is to actually have the variety of pieces so we can put together a jigsaw puzzle. Adobe uses, or they used to use that kind of thinking and metaphor and coming up with what they're actually looking for within their teams overall. You don't want to build a stack. You want to build a puzzle, which means you've got to have people with different ways of connecting and different ways of coming together.

Brian Ardinger: So, you understand, and you put together your technical skills, you've thought about your human skills and that now you've got to actually go out and find those types of people. Do you have any recommendations or in the book or otherwise about how do you go about finding these skillsets and the interviewing process and tips are along those lines?

Kate Leto: The interviewing is something people are starting to become more aware of that we do need interview look beyond technical skills. So, one of the, the things that I talk about it in the book is behavior based interviewing. And that's actually asking people about how they have behaved in the past, in certain scenario, a certain type of work situation. And understanding if they're going to behave the same way going forward, or if perhaps they'd be looking to make some changes in their behavior.

Let me give an example. If we go back to the idea of conflict resolution, and let's say your team is looking for somebody who has this skill, who is good at figuring out how to move a team forward in the midst of conflict intention. So, you could ask them about how they have handled a tense situation or somebody who's pushed back on some of their suggestions or some of their thinking in the past. Really simple questions, like tell me about a time when somebody disagreed with what you had said. Really baseline behavioral question around conflict resolution.

And as the interviewer, your job is to listen to what the person is saying, of course, and the narrative that they're sharing with you, and to be able to identify what are the patterns within their story, that's telling you how maybe they have behaved in the past and if put in the same situation again, if they'll continue to behave that way in the future, or maybe they decided last time I did that, I was so frustrated when somebody pushed back on me I shrugged my shoulders and I just walked away, which is not the way I'd like behave going forward. This is how I'd like to change my behavior. This is how I'd live to do it differently.

The onus on asking that type of question is really on the interviewer to be able to nudge and prompt and go into thinking, you know, thinking of our customer interviewing skills to follow up, to get to some level that makes conflict resolution, such an intangible thing. Make it more tangible, you know, to understand how would somebody react? Do they engage with conflict or they just walk away? If they do engage, how do they engage? And do they want to make sure everybody feels like they've won coming out of this tense situation? Or do they want a winner and loser? And then it's just going back to what you know, your team is looking for and needs to perhaps move and deal with conflict in a different way.

My goal is to help organizations start to think of behavior-based interview questions versus what we traditionally do. What I used to do when I was a product person and that's to go online and find some really good brain teaser questions from like a Google or an Amazon or a Yahoo in the day and make somebody really squirm in an interview. Which Isn't going to tell you much at all.

Brian Ardinger: I think one of the things that's coming out of the book and otherwise is you got to develop your hiring process and everything for you and your company and what you want to accomplish, not what Amazon's doing or what Google is doing or something along those lines. It's very much an important decision in the life of a company is making these particular hiring decisions. And so, they treat it as if it's important decision and make it personal to what you're trying to build.

Kate Leto: And treat it as we do our products, you know building products as a product person, it's never a linear experience. Right. We all know we go in a lot of loops and we're continuously looking back and learning as we go along and we're changing direction based on what we've learned and we're iterating. And the same could be said for thinking about our hiring processes. So, in my mind, and the way I talk about it in the book is it's a learning loop.

Just like anything else we do in product. So, I think it's really important and I encourage organizations to actually put retrospectives into their hiring process. To actually build in time between rounds of interviews, or maybe even after you put a job description together before you start interviewing to be able to bring your hiring team together and take a look back and say, how are we doing?

What are the things we need to change to create a space for reflection, because there's also research out there that shows that teams that actually stop and reflect will do a better job and actually make decisions better, coordinate their work better and have less tension because there's more communication. There's more collaboration and there's more alignment going forward.

Brian Ardinger: So last topic is, we've talked a lot about the past of product management and design and that. What are some of your thoughts on the future? What are you seeing out there?

Kate Leto: Well, I think the focus on human skills, again, is a trend that I'm hoping to take forward, it's something that the reading that I do from the World Economic Forum and some broader industry leading organizations shows us that, while the technology that we're building and products is interesting and it's complex and it's challenging, it also very quickly becomes ubiquitous. The challenge that we have before is that as organizations, our competitive edge is really coming from our people and it's the way they think and the way they behave. And it's their emotional intelligence around that. It's their adaptability and their ability to be resilient and be creative and innovate all these great things that you talk about all the time on your show.

The trend that I am hoping we continue to take forward is focusing on human skills and is coming from various directions on how we can talk about it in a very safe space. And make it something that's not awkward. That's not weird. It's actually more of a human focus type of product development with the human focus actually being on ourselves and the people we work with and the organization that we're creating.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Kate, I thank you very much for being inside outside innovation, to share this with us. If people want to find out more about yourself or your book, what's the best way to do that.

Kate Leto: Go to my website, kateleto.com and you'll find all sorts of information.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Kate, thanks again for coming on the show today. I wish you well, and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Kate Leto: Great. Thanks very much, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Marguerite Johnson, author of Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation, 21st Century New Growth Engines. Marguerite and I talk about the evolution of disruptive innovation theory and how legacy companies can embrace digital transformation and open innovation. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas and compete of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Marguerite Johnson

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Marguerite Johnson. She is the author of a new book called Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation: 21st Century New Growth Engines. Welcome to the show.

Marguerite Johnson: Thanks Brian for inviting me and thank you to your Inside Outside audience for listening.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because you've got a new book and it's all about disruption and we are clearly in that particular pathway. That train is hitting us full force. Why don't we talk about how you got involved in innovation space? Give us a little bit background about your career and why this is so important to you.

Marguerite Johnson: I've been in innovation as a practitioner for just over 20 years and my career. Initially started in market research in the big dot com era where anyone, everyone with a website could make money.

It evolved from there into doing a lot of scientific research on cardiovascular blood pathogens for Bristol Myers. And so, moving the large context of digital and how digital was basically burst onto the scene with a lot of companies in this kind of new, exciting way. All the way to how large established companies like pharma was using science and research to touch patients who were experiencing either the need for, the drug at that time was Plavix a blood thinner, primarily used to help patients after a cardiovascular event or primarily a stent. And so my background in innovation was very much a convergence of technology becoming a key player in the role of business. And the larger companies that we're learning to navigate to use it in unique ways and spaces that touch people's lives.

And then it evolved into mostly industrial businesses. So, your large-scale engines, fracking, air motors, industrial pumps, and mixers, and mixing systems and conveyors, and all the way to automotive and electronics and seating systems and safety systems. And so, I've gone through the full gamut, starting with the digital.com era and then evolving into a lot of other what we call nonnative digital, traditional big businesses.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Those legacy industries that are facing that disruption and may be in a little different position than some of the new startup technology companies that we're seeing today. Tell me a little bit about why you decided to write this book.

Marguerite Johnson: Like so many other people right now, we're looking around and we're trying to understand and interpret this system environment that we're in. In the past, digital and these large traditional companies were basically separate and apart from one another, they were playing in their own space.

And now we're seeing this drive to bring these competencies together. And when you look at big traditional legacy companies and you look at your native digital, such as your Apples, your Amazons, and Googles, and you see this apex or this inflection point where everyone is moving it into creating more value with digital. And the traditional innovation literature was not ready for this.

When you do any type of research on disruptive innovation and you look at all of the practices around, where do you find new growth in these new spaces? They were all around B2B enterprises and B2B enterprises positioned themselves to defend against new market entrance. And that was primarily focused around a new market entrant coming in with a cheaper, more simple, maybe a less functionality product, and then grabbing additional functionalities and moving up market and taking bigger share.

And so that was the conversation. It did not include digital at all. In fact, Christensen later on came back to explain the reason why the iPhone wasn't included in his original assumptions about disruption. It was more related to the evolution of the laptop, which I challenged that in the book. And, you know, I want to make clear to the audience that my desire is not to rewrite the history or up end the history of disruptive innovation, as it pertains to Christensen's original theory.

I build on his theory. I pride myself in taking all of the published works from many, many authors and researchers in the past and using it to evolve my own knowledge. And that is a reason why I wrote the book as well is, I wanted other people to live their evolution on disruptive innovation through me, as other authors have given me the benefit to live it through them.

That's very, very important to me. I did not want to keep all this knowledge to myself and be the little wizard behind the scenes and say, aha, I have the secret sauce. Knowledge should be shared. And with the accumulation of knowledge, I think we all grow as a society and we all benefit. That was very important to me.

So, understanding the context of disruptive innovation in the past, making sure it was relevant to today, looking around at the science and the research and, and understanding that it wasn't there. And then building on what others have done to bring us to the point where we can have this discussion and move forward as a society and innovation.

Brian Ardinger: So legacy companies obviously need to embrace digital a lot more than they have in the past and that. Why is it so difficult for them to do so, or what's been holding them back?

Marguerite Johnson: If you've spent a century building talent, assets, operations skills, supply chains, and your entire profit model is built around those assets. It's very hard. I mean, it's literally throwing the baby out with the bath water. I mean, that's what it seems like. Okay. So that's absolutely not what it is, but that's how it could sound.

You come to some of these conferences and digital is presented as a disruptor. Digital itself is not a disruptor, how it changes innovation, product services and business models can be a disruptor, but it's not a competency and a capability that's out of the scope of knowledge and abilities of a big company.

You have the customers; you have the biggest part of digital that you need. You can learn to add value to the products and services you're already delivering to them by enabling it with technology. By providing additional value through some connectivity. So traditional companies shouldn't feel like they're the underdog in this race.

And I want to be clear about that because most of my career is in industrial businesses. I have absolutely affinity for the likes of Amazon and Google and Microsoft. And I cover them and Netflix, in my book. Right. I don't leave them out. But I also include Siemens, Walmart Volkswagen, Magna Seating, Proctor & Gamble. I don't leave anyone out of the conversation. I should say when it comes to digital, because it impacts everyone, and everyone should be prepared to engage across the board.

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Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into the book a little bit. What are some examples or some things that you've researched or seen that are good examples of how companies are adapting to the new changes in the world?

Marguerite Johnson: There's an interview with the CEO of Duke Energy, with MIT Sloan, and it's available online. And Ms. Good talks about how Duke energy had to learn to talk to customers that they've never had direct contact with before. Their conversations were with the meter on your house. So they knew more about the meter and your house and your energy usage and you know, your peak hours and all of that than they knew about the occupants of the house.

And she talks about the need to move toward mobile communications, such that users can get analytics and data and usage and make lifestyle changes for themselves as it impacts their energy, as well as a lot of users are using renewable energy, either backup power or solar power, and they're building their own micro grids.

She recognizes the fact that in the past the conversation that Duke was having was not with the customer who they were delivering the value to, and they need to shift that. I'm outside of Detroit and one of the Northern suburbs in Bloomfield Hills, but I grew up most of my childhood in Detroit. So, I have a deep passion for the innovators and the grit that comes out of that city.

And I would be remiss to leave out an example. That's automotive related here. Anyone who's been driving a car, owned a car, or been a passenger in a car has seen the evolution of technology in the vehicle. There’re millions of lines of code there's millions of sensors. You know, it's literally a computer, a supercomputer in some instances, on the road and that discussion of how the vehicle has been impacted by disruptive innovation I take the reader through that in a very simple way. Right. So, I don't talk about the hundred years of the internal combustion engine and how that evolved. I assume everyone's got that. I assume everyone couldn't digest all of the dependable aspects with brakes and airbags and safety systems, you know, check. We all have that.

So, where I opened the conversation about automotive is in the business model shifts that are happening and not in the traditional context, Brian, of where everyone's talking about how Uber and Lyft and the likes of ride sharing will just completely destroy automotive. But I talk about it in the context of when you're innovating in this disruptive theory that I designed in this book, the key point you want to make sure that you keep in front of you is that as the product or service is evolving, as It's being disrupted, if you want to capture and create value around that product, it has to be stable first.

That means the customer expectations for the thing that you're building and creating value for has to be at least in a position where you can identify what that value is in order to build a business model around it. And so, in that sense, I say, leave the conversation open. Don't completely write the obituary for automotive to this point because there's a lot of fights still left. I believe in the city and we are the comeback kids. And I think we still got one more in us.

Brian Ardinger: And you make a good point that at the end of the day, it's all about customers. And how do you create that value for the customer? And there's a lot of different ways you can do that, whether it's through technology, whether it's through a business model, whether it's through, you know, even partnerships and that. And I think, you know, a lot of legacy companies are not only hamstrung from the fact that they've been doing it the same way, but they've created a network of suppliers and partners that have been doing it for the same way. And it's, it's hard to change that ship or move that ship when there's so many different components that have been doing it the old way.

Can you give us any recommendations or things that you've seen out there for companies that are being able to create that change? What are some kind of low hanging fruits that companies can, if they want to focus on the disruption and better understand and better position themselves for the new way, what are some of the things they should be doing right away to put them in the best position?

Marguerite Johnson: To your point. I mean, a lot of the mindset of the organization was built around that established understanding of the environment. Who their customers are, who their competitors are, where they played, what markets they were in, in the industry standards and elements around you.

So, a lot of the mindset of the organization has to be pried open. And the way that you would do that very simply is start to engage in some of these innovation ecosystems around you. Start bringing in not only ideas around the problems and solutions that you're aware of, but ideas around problems and solutions that are completely foreign to you.

And you know, a lot of that mindset breeds ideas that are similar. When you go internally to your organization and you ask your engineers and your product developers and marketers, and you say, give me ideas. Don't be surprised that those ideas that they're giving you replicate or very close to the ideas that are already in existence in your industry, in with your competitors. The way to bring in ideas from the outside, I love the title of this podcast Inside Outside because that's exactly what you want to do. You want to go to the outside and you want to ask yourself, what can't I see from my vantage point?

So, there's three questions that I would ask any product marketer or innovator when you're approaching a problem or a solution you ask yourself, what do I know? And those are the things that can be verified and then ask yourself what are things I don't know, but I have access to. Which means I can ask a customer, a supplier, a partner. And then the third group is what do I know that I can't know from my vantage. Those are the ones that typically get filled in, glossed over with assumptions.

And if you're empowered with those three categories of questions, you can start to understand where are some of the places that you need to look to find additional ideas and be inspired by other solutions and problems that are not close to you. I would say the mindset is something that you can instantly do that has absolutely nothing to do with the technology, is doing some of that work, that internal work to shift the mindset.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I like where you're going with that too, because it also then helps companies understand what role does startups play in this disruption? It's not only the fact that they could be potential competitors in the future and that, but they also could be potential partners potential eye-openers as far as new ideas and new roles, and that companies need to be much more adaptable and flexible at looking outside of their existing walls to figure out what they can do to create new value in the new world.

Marguerite Johnson: Yeah. I cover open innovation, collaboration, ecosystems in the book as well. This book is content heavy. It's highly organized, but it peels back all of the layers. If you were to think of innovation practices as this magic box, this glowing box, and you know, the likes of Steve jobs and other innovators, like, you know, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, they, they walk up to the box and magic comes out.

Right. Everyone thinks of this, but I take that box and I segment that box. I explain why certain elements in the box are the most important, which is the aspects from the customer expectations, and the need to understand those expectations that drive your future. Drive the value that you'll create through business model services and products.

And then how to use that customer knowledge to create a data strategies, customer loyalty programs, how to interpret the digital channels that customers are communicating with, how to organize your internal resources, such that you're moving from that ad hoc position of innovation, where you're being whipped lashed by all the things coming out, to something that's a lot more portfolio driven. All the way to open innovation and platforms and how to network those systems.

And so one of the things I think is a strong play for businesses is not only dealing with startups but understanding that most startups don't have the resources that a big company has. And when you come to them and you're asking them for all of these very detailed technical specifications and drawings and tests, and you want them to go out there and put tens of thousands of dollars behind a prototype, that that's just not available to them.

And that from that standpoint, as an organization, if you have your house in order your innovation house in order, you can do a better job of bringing that startup in and making them a partner of equal value, particularly around a project.

Brian Ardinger: And being able to co-develop or work together towards an end goal that will help both the startup and the company. So, I had a chance to get a preview copy of the book it's coming out here in a couple of weeks. And I was impressed with all the research that you had done. What's your research process and how do you go about learning and keeping up to date with all the things that are going on, especially in an environment and a topic that's so changing, like innovation.

Marguerite Johnson: I read a lot. This mindset that I have dates back to undergrad. My undergrad is in public policy, and so I read a lot. And I found myself having trouble keeping up with all of the approaches, every scientist, political, or otherwise, every framework strategy has a, this or that, that's nuanced about it. And I struggle with that and I recognize that.

So I said to myself, I need a way to like package all this stuff, because I can't possibly know what they're saying different than what I'm thinking. I'm not kind of getting this cross pollination in my mind is being whiplash. So, I came up with this acronym, Brian, that is very simple. T L C. Thought, what's the original thought? What are they trying to tell me? Logic. What's the framework they're using? How are they trying to prove this to me? And can it be tested. And then Clarity, because not all things stop when you have a thought and you have a logical framework. Sometimes there's clarifying context around it that different that makes it special, make it unique, make it broken.

And so, I read a lot and I've kept that mindset discipline throughout my life. And I read a lot of innovation, but I also read a lot of topics that are not in my field. One of the topics that is very inspiring to me at this point is I'm trying to read as many biographies. I'm not a fan of fiction. I've never been attracted to fiction. I'm finding that I'm liking biographies. And so, my son and I we're trying to read style and together. Probably not the best one to start with...

Brian Ardinger: Well, the good thing is there's a lot of them out there.

Marguerite Johnson: Exactly. Exactly. I engage myself with a lot of different people. I challenged myself to think differently. Where did my thoughts come from? Can I justify them still being there? So, a lot of that.

Brian Ardinger: Because obviously we're in the coronavirus age and a lot of things have changed dramatically. A lot of companies and that are realizing, Oh yeah, this disruption thing. I get it now. What are you hopeful for coming out of this new change in this new disruption around the world? Are there things or trends that you're seeing that make you hopeful?

Marguerite Johnson: Yes. A lot of customers are starting to solve their own problems and that should terrify big companies, but it also should give them some hope that these things that seem magnanimous. So, we have this pandemic, you know, when really understood how it was affecting everyone. And we were in this, you know, everyone's feeling around in the dark trying to figure out what, what should we do? What should we stop doing? You know, a lot of customers are figuring out a lot of things. They're putting gardens in their yards. They're completely transforming their homes so that they can live in them, basically in a quarantine state and not lose their minds.

My son is in virtual school right now. He attended virtual school at the end of the last academic year, and it was more difficult for him. But now he has worked out the glitches. The school system has worked out the glitches. He's in there. He has a zoom light. He knows how to pause the audio and shut off the video.

You know, customers, they're learning to solve some of these problems on their own, and that should inspire companies, but it also should terrify them because by the time we come out on the other side of this, if you are a company who lost focus and who didn't have the customer at the center, and you were understanding their expectations, your customer may have moved by the time you come out of this. And that's a deep concern I have for a lot of companies.

And, you know, you hear a lot about small businesses and how they weren't ready. They weren't digitized, they weren't connected. They had no ability to take in orders through apps and that just this whole host of things. And I think a lot of big traditional companies were also scrambling. They just weren't on the news for it. So, when you come out on the other side of this, your customer is going to be different. And if you're not accustomed to communicating with customers directly, it's going to be a challenge.

Brian Ardinger: Well, we can continue this conversation for years I'm sure. And we probably will as things evolve, but I want to get people an opportunity to find out a little bit more about yourself in the book. What's the best way to do that?

Marguerite Johnson: The best way to do that is businessexpertpress.com. That's my publisher. You can search by my last name. J O H N S O N. I am the only Marguerite Johnson on the list in the author group there. And my book is Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation: 21st Century New Growth Engines.

Brian Ardinger: Well Marguerite, thanks for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Marguerite Johnson: Thank you for the invitation and have a good day.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Regine Gilbert, author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Regine and I talk about what inclusive design is and how teams and companies can build accessibility into their processes and the impact of future technologies in the space. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that helps innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Regine Gilbert

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is Regine Gilbert. Regine is a user experience designer, educator, international public speaker, and author of the book Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Welcome to the show, Regine.

Regine Gilbert: Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Not only for the fact that we're going to talk about your book and all the things that you are an expert in when it comes to design, but you're also going to be at the IO2020 Summit here, coming up next week. And we're excited to have you to talk to our audience a little bit more there, but we wanted to jump into it and get a little sneak preview of some of the things they're going to be seeing at the event and hearing from you. So, thanks for coming on. Maybe to start, what is inclusive design?

Regine Gilbert: Well, that is the million-dollar question. You could ask five different people. They'll tell you five different things, when it comes to inclusion and what inclusion means. I like to take a chapter out of Kat Holmes's book. Kat Holmes says that we don't really know what inclusion is. She wrote the book Mismatch Design. But she says, we do know what exclusion is. We do know what it's like to be left out of something.

And so that's what I think about when I think about inclusion. I actually think about exclusion and I think about who are we leaving out when we create products? When we create services, when just this morning, I was talking to one of my friends who's a makeup artist. She's a professional makeup artist. And she's like, Oh, you would really like, forget the pop stars name, but she has a condition that makes it hard for her to like open things. And she's like, Oh, she has a new makeup line. And the way to open it is so easy. You should really look into it. And she's like, I thought of you when I saw the packaging.

And I said, yeah, that's the kind of thing. I think about packaging now, you know, and things that are hard to open and I'm in my forties. And as we get older, our dexterity changes and it doesn't improve. I mean, it doesn't, you know, everything is relative to our bodies and whatever happens, but when I find something hard to open, I'm like, WHY!!!

Brian Ardinger: Exactly Or hard to read.

Regine Gilbert: Yes. Or hard to read.

Brian Ardinger: Can we get rid of the eight-point font please.

Regine Gilbert: Yeah. I mean, at this point, you know, most people are looking at screens all day. We're, most of us are engaged with some sort of technology at all times, especially during this pandemic and with that, we're getting fatigued. Right. And so, we don't need things that are cumbersome or hard to see. Yeah. That's a whole thing.

Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm not a designer, why should I really care or pay attention to this trend? What are some of the reasons why everyone should be really caring about accessible design?

Regine Gilbert: I think of it this way, that everyone is temporarily able bodied. If you wear glasses, you may not think of yourself as someone with a disability, but if you take off those glasses, are you still able to see? And if you're not, then that is a disability, right? So those glasses are an assisted technology, that help you function in this world. And that's basically what we need to be doing throughout our society is providing the glasses or providing whatever assistive technology that is needed to help people do what they need to do.

Brian Ardinger: Personally, we've gone through that particular journey. My daughter here's what cochlear implants. And so, having that assistive technology to be able to access the hearing world. It has been a game changer for us and has led me personally, try to figure out how do people talk to each other and how do they interact with each other. And can you talk about the design process and where accessible design fits into that process? Is it something that happens at the beginning of the end or where can people go wrong with it?

Regine Gilbert: The classic answer when it comes to design, is it depends. And it truly does depend. For me in my classes. I teach accessibility from the beginning, right? The first readings I have for my students to do and the first couple of weeks of classes are on inclusion and accessibility. And what are these things and what do they mean? And how do you incorporate those into the research plans for what you're about to do?

When it comes to the corporate side of things a lot of times it's not thought about in the beginning, it's only thought about when a company has been sued, right? They've been sued because their website isn't accessible to people with disabilities. And then, Oh, no then everybody's in a panic. We need to fix the website. We need trainings. Oh, and you know what? We'll just settle. We're not even going to fix it. We'll just leave that to the side.

I mean, there's so many different things. I mean, just, I think it was just last year where Domino's Pizza was sued because their website wasn't accessible and then they took it up to the Supreme court and the Supreme court was like, you got to make the site accessible. It's part of the American with Disabilities Act. Now, technically speaking, the American with Disabilities Act came out in the early nineties before we have the internet that we have today. So, them applying this old statute to something new was quite eye opening and people were like, yes, this means like, make it accessible.

And why not? In the United States, I like to throw this stat out. In the year 2035, which is 15 years from now, which is not a long time, we're going to have more old people in this country and old, I mean like 65. I won't be old when I'm that age. Cause I'm not that far from it. You know, we'll have more people who are over the age of 65 than under the age of 65. I am trying to plant little seeds with my students to like start making stuff for your older self now, because when you reach that age, it's too late.

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Brian Ardinger: When I think about also the fact that a lot of companies look at accessibility and that, and they designed for the customers with that in mind sometimes, but they don't also design for their employees or their internal systems and that. And so, I think that's another big trend that we're going to see is more and more folks start recognizing and seeing how beneficial accessible design is as your customer will start demanding it in their workspace as well. And other places that you'll see that.

Regine Gilbert: Even though the recent pandemic people were allowed to work from home. And there were companies that would tell people with disabilities, we're sorry, we can't hire you because you have to work from home. And now it's like, Oh, but now you let your employees work from home. So there really isn't an excuse. People can work from home, which means that more people with disabilities who may or may not be able to leave their home can actually get into the workforce. And so, there are opportunities for people if, if they're accessible, if they're available.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about the book. Can you give some examples or case studies that you point out there about folks that are doing accessibility design well, or what have you learned in the book writing process?

Regine Gilbert: The book is Inclusive Design for Digital World, and it came out in late 2019. And I wrote it with kind of myself in mind, but also a lot of my students who had questions. And I was like, sometimes I know the answer. Sometimes I had to look up the answer. Sometimes I had to provide a case study. So that's the way I designed the book.

And I start off the book with asking the question, have you ever wanted to go somewhere and couldn't get in? And how did that make you feel? Because that's what we do when we don't make things accessible. People have told me I felt sad or frustrated or angry. I'm like, well, that's how people feel when they're not able to access things.

I think Google has done a pretty good job of accessibility, especially when it comes to deaf and hard of hearing with Google Meet and Google slides. One of my friends who is deaf and has the cochlear implant, she wanted to come to a talk I was giving. I said, Oh yeah, come check it out, whatever. And she said, Oh, are you using Google slides because my battery died and I'm not going to be able to hear you. And I was like, Oh shoot. I am not. I am actually using Keynote.

And so, I quickly changed my slides over to Google slides because Google slides use machine learning for closed captioning. It is not perfect. However, it is pretty good. And so, I ended up doing this presentation, which was on accessibility and she didn't show up.

Brian Ardinger: I think PowerPoint might have that feature as well. And we're going through that now with our daughter going to school, Zoom remoting, and that whole aspect of how do you capture things? How do you get them access to different things? Personally, we watch TV with captioning all the time, and I don't think...I can't go back to it now without...you kind of pick up a lot more than you realize.

Regine Gilbert: If captions are not on, I have a hard time.

Brian Ardinger: So, tell us a little about how does global culture and other factors play into accessible design? So, when you think you're developing, like for the United States audience or whatever, are there different things that people should be thinking about when they're designing for a global audience?

Regine Gilbert: Yeah, there are things that are standard cross culturally, right? You want to make sure our contrast is high enough to see, but then there are things that are different. When thinking about, for example, I worked e-commerce for a lot of years for a global brand and we would have these headlines at the very top and sometimes it would be really long. And we'd have to think about when that gets translated to German.

That is. Going to rap over that image and it's not going to look the same. So, it's really taking into consideration the context of that particular culture. We tend to have a very Western lens, especially being from the United States, but there's a whole world out there and people see things differently. And I think that it's just having that awareness of how people are going to be experiencing your service and product in which contexts are experiencing that too.

Brian Ardinger: Are there any tools or tactics that you could recommend for folks trying to dabble in this or understand this better, or make it a part of their product design experience?

Regine Gilbert: I would recommend my book of course, Inclusive Design for a Digital World, but I would also, I mean if you have interest in accessibility, I highly recommend web aim.org. They have a lot of great articles and resources. If you're just interested in accessibility in general. Equal Entry has a great blog site, so they have a lot of blog posts. There's so, so much out there. Deque University is a great place to learn about accessibility and that's D E Q U E and. There's so many that come to mind.

Brian Ardinger: That's a great list. Some of the questions that I think pop up when people, especially product design, folks that I talked to, they often ask, well, you know, we want to develop to be accessible, but how do we test, how do we get people to actually use it correctly or give us insight into what they're feeling, what they're seeing, what they're doing with our product. Are there recommendations for how people can test to make their product more accessible?

Regine Gilbert: Everybody knows somebody or know somebody that knows somebody. And what I say is don't wait till the last minute, if you can incorporate participatory or co-design with folks so that you're getting that input early and you're getting that input from the source, right? You're not just like it's hearsay. Oh, I think this person needs this. Get people into like test early and involve them in the process. Don't wait till the last minute.

Brian Ardinger: So, the last topic I want to talk about, we talk about innovation and obviously the technology is changing rapidly every day. How do you see the wave of new technologies like AR and VR and voice in that playing into making the world more accessible for folks?

Regine Gilbert: You're speaking to my heart. These are areas that like now I'm focusing on researching accessible, augmented reality experiences. I think voice is the future for a lot of things. And I think virtual reality for those who can experience it, because not everyone can, there's going to be a lot coming. I think more on the augmented reality front, but there's a lot of potential around the applications.

Again, making those things accessible and making the tools themselves accessible because they're oftentimes not. That make the things. So, there's Thomas Logan, who actually is the CEO of Equal Entry. It's a consulting firm for accessibility. He has a meetup for it's called A11YVR and A11Y is a numeronym for accessibility.

So, there's 11 characters between the and the Y. Right. And he's been exploring accessible virtual reality. He does a monthly meetup and it is on YouTube available. And it's really cool to just hear, like, think about experiencing captions right in virtual reality. And what does that mean? And even last semester, I taught a course called looking forward with Beth Chalkius and Beth is blind. And we have the students think about if there were a 360 experience, how would you provide audio descriptions? Like audio descriptions are provided on Netflix, right, for movies. So, if you were in a 360 experience and somebody is looking around, how could you describe it? Right. And these are things to think about, you know, as we move forward.

Brian Ardinger: I love the fact that you're bringing highlights and insights to folks that maybe haven't thought about this in the past. And so, I'm excited to have you at IO2020 to talk more about this, but in the interim before the show, if people want to find out more about yourself or the book ahead of time. What's the best way to do that?

Regine Gilbert: You can go to my website, Reginegilbert.com or find me on Twitter. I'm pretty active @REG_INEE.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Regine, I look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks and thanks very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation and look forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Regine Gilbert: Thank you, Brian.

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Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind (Design Thinking)

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Scott Anthony. Scott is a senior partner at Innosight and co-author of the new book called Eat, Sleep, Innovate. Scott and I talk about the challenges of creating a culture of innovation, as well as some of the behaviors and actions required to drive innovation success. Let's get started.

Inside Outside innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends and collaborative innovation.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Coming to us all the way from Singapore today is Scott Anthony. Scott is a senior partner at Innosight and co-author of the new book called Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to make creativity an everyday habit inside your organization. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Anthony: Brian, it is a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on the show. You are a prolific author, speaker, consultant, in this world of innovation. So, it's really nice to sit down virtually across the ocean and talk to you more about some of the new stuff that you're working on. I always like to ask folks who've been in this space a long time, and you've written a lot of books and talked about this particular topic. Why did you decide to write another book on innovation and why this book now?

Scott Anthony: The origin story of this book really traces back about five, six years ago. So just by background, our organization Innosight was co-founded by the late great Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christianson. So, for the last 20 years, we've been trying to empower forward thinking organizations to navigate disruptive change and own the future.

And most of the work that we've done is focused on helping businesses, identify and launch new disruptive products, come up with board facing growth strategies, build deep organizational capabilities and so on. So, it's been, you know, pretty big picture, strategic stuff. Then about five years ago, I was doing a session with a big logistics company. And the CEO said, I've read all the books. I understand what I have to do separate organization, but we've done all that. We've got 28,000 other people. What do we do with them?

And I thought that's a really good question and we didn't really have a really good answer to it. So, over the last few years, we've had a chance to just probate it through various client projects. And now I think we've got a pretty good answer to that question. And that's why we wrote the book

Brian Ardinger: it's called Eat, Sleep, Innovate, and it really talks about almost the behavioral things that you need to put in place to make innovation a competency within an organization. So, talk a little bit about the overall framework and what people can expect to get out of the book.

Scott Anthony: Yeah. So, we start the book with definitions. We're trying to enable people to create a culture of innovation. So, you got to define that. We define innovation as something different that creates value. Intentionally broad to remind this is not just about technology. We then say there are five behaviors that enable innovation success. You gotta be curious, customer obsessed, collaborative, adept, and ambiguity, and empowered. And then argue that a culture of innovation is one in which these behaviors come naturally.

We start with the definitions and then we introduce a puzzle, which is those behaviors, sound pretty straightforward. I've got four kids. I don't have to teach them to do those things. They just are that way naturally, because that's what humans do. Yet organizations, we all know really struggle with innovation. And what we highlight in the book is the key problem is essentially the existing habits of the organization, institutionalized inertia that allows you to keep doing what you're currently doing but stops you from doing something different and that's innovation.

And then we talk about what do you do to break and reform habits, to overcome those barriers, to really make innovation of repeatable habit. And we've got some specific tools and techniques about how to do it. So that's the basic arc of the book.

Brian Ardinger: It does a great job of a lot of case studies, a lot of insight into some specifics on how you can make this happen. But the thing I keep coming back to as I work with companies and I talk to other innovators like yourself, innovation is a team sport, but at the end of the day, it's like, who helps drive that bus. So, a lot of the stuff that you talk about, right, are behavioral changes and that. Does this have to happen from the top of the organization or is this something that you roll out division by division, person to person? Talk a little bit about that.

Scott Anthony: The answer is of course, yes. Which means that both are true. So, it really depends on what you're trying to do. Ideally, if you're trying to create enterprise level culture of innovation, if you're trying to really have it be something that scales across a multi-divisional whatever. Yes, of course, you need to have the topic leadership actively involved because there's a lot of work that needs to get done.

But that doesn't mean that if you're a manager inside a large established organization, that's not doing this, that you have no hope because you can, within your team, group or department, create essentially a microculture subculture, whatever you want to call it, that enables those innovative behaviors to happen at a very local level.

And we have an example in the book, chapter four of the book talks about the HR function within a large organization in Singapore. Singtel, the biggest telecommunications company in the region. So that was not an enterprise wide effort. It's really the HR community saying that we want to do this. We had another recent client where it was the supply chain community. It said we're getting a lot of pressure to do different things. We need to up our innovation game and we can't wait for the enterprise to do it. So yeah, ideally, you've got top down, but there's also plenty of room to have things happen in pockets that could have lots of impact.

Brian Ardinger: And I imagine that allows for that creativity and the uniqueness within the division or within that particular group, the specifics of how that culture is addressed, the specific rewards, et cetera, are probably different based on what's required to move that team forward.

Scott Anthony: A lot of this in our view is not about how you change how people are rewarded. You know, money is sometimes the worst way to try and change behavior. Cause it's really hard to get right and all that. It really is trying to create an environment where people are encouraged to follow the behaviors and they're supported when they do it. And that it means they're supported when good things happen. But also, when they go and run an experiment and it doesn't work, which in many organizations feels like a failure that gets punished. Exactly off with their heads.

There is an environment where we say, if we did that in the right way, sort of way, this is a good and not bad thing, and we can encourage it. So, a lot of this is about people just feeling like they're able to practice and do different things and getting the intrinsic enjoyment that comes from that. So, it's not just about how they're getting paid. It's about really bringing the humanity back to organizations.

Because again, my basic argument, and my kids are 14, 12, nine, and four, is that the things that we try to tell our clients to do are things that my 4, 9, 12, they just do it naturally. So, when you get the chance to do that at work, you can play around with stuff. You can see the impact from the things that you do. You can collaborate with cool colleagues, you can go try stuff in an environment that supports you doing it, and it helps you win. It helps you function better. It helps you be more engaged. That's awesome. I mean, that's rewarded and of itself.

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Brian Ardinger: Companies are not necessarily good at innovation. They have their existing business models, and their existing practices that have gotten them where they're at. And so, it's very difficult for them to change those particular habits because everything's been set up to optimize that existing process and the methodology and that. So how can companies overcome that barrier and that natural hesitancy to not want to do things different because that's what they're rewarded and that's what they've been designed to do? What are some of the things that you've seen that work to break that chain and get people moving in the right direction?

Scott Anthony: At a micro level, and this is what we go into in chapter three of the book, which really is the big chapter that talks about the tool that's offered, because there's a lot written about culture change. You've got to walk the talk and have a great start off that you got to do that. But the tool that we add to the arsenal is this tool that we call a BEAN. A BEAN is a behavior, enabler, artifact, and nut.

The idea is ripped exactly straight out of the behavioral change literature that says it's hard for human beings to change habits. So, what we need to do is start with the behavior, your enabler, where you give people a sense actually step by step guidance about what you want them to do. Daniel Kottemanwould say that you're activating system two, the rational logical part of your brain. And you're giving people the help, the community, the coaches to support to do it.

The artifacts and nudges go after system one, the part of your brain that makes quick decisions and like the name suggests you have the invisible stuff that directs you in a particular way. It might be an image that subtly reminds you of something. It might be getting a leaderboard to show, Oh, I'm not doing this thing as well as my colleagues, so I want to do better at it. It might be changing office design at times where we could be in offices to encourage you to do different things. And the combination of a behavior enabler with artifacts and nudges enables you to overcome blockers and barriers and create new habits.

Both we've got 101 of them that offer practical guidance for how you do everything from being that much more curious to empowering your employees. Some of them come from well-known organizations like Amazon.com. Some of them come from smaller organizations that people have never heard of before to show the ubiquity of the idea.

Brian Ardinger: So, what are some of the best Beans out there? Give us a case study or example of some of these things that really resonate.

Scott Anthony: A few of the ones that I found really do resonate with people. If I start with Amazon.com, the empty chair ritual, where you say we want to be a customer-focused organization. So, we're going to make sure what we have physical meetings. There's always an empty chair there to remind us that the most important person, the customer is not in the room. And then you couple that at Amazon with doing what they call, press releases from the future. So, when you're working on a new product, it's not lots of PowerPoint slides. You write a future, press release.

Of for when the product will be launched, obviously it has happened and you're imagining it, but the customer and the benefits you're giving the customers are front and center. So those sorts of things are things that people relate to. I love the Adobe Kickbox program, that the software company, where if you're a participant in it, you open up this kit that you receive, and you get all these step by step guides for how you can go and experiment.

And you get a prepaid debit card with $1000 US dollars on it that you can spend without anyone's approval, which is a very clear nudge that you are meant to go and do things. And then finally I love the ritual that Supercell, the Finnish gaming company has. We call it cheers to failure. Whenever they have a gaming effort that doesn't work, they admit defeat. They all come together, and they pop open a bottle of Champaign, to show everybody number one, a good, not bad thing has happened. And number two, we're not working on this anymore because one of the big things that can cause innovation to struggle inside large organizations, is nothing ever gets shut down.

So, you have all these zombie projects that are lingering on and the cheers to failure Bean, make sure that that doesn't happen. And again, there's a bunch more, but those are some of my favorite ones.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about how this is playing out. And obviously the world's changed quite a bit in the last six to eight months with the COVID pandemic and everything else. Are you seeing in your work, the move towards companies and leaders saying, I've got to figure this out now. We've been talking about disruption for a long time, but now I kind of get it. So, what are you seeing as far as trends and changes in the marketplace?

Scott Anthony: It's a great question. You know, one of my colleagues, Patrick Viguerie, the observation that he has is people talked about the different letter shapes that a recovery could ultimately follow. But what we're seeing now is very strong evidence of what you would call a K shape, where there's some parts that are going up, you know, like thinking about zoom, the other parts that are going down, think about airlines. So, I think you see the same thing as it relates to the innovation. There are some people who say, this is the moment the deck of cards has been thrown in the air. I can completely redo it. I'm going to double down. I'm going to really aggressively move.

There's a professional services company that we've worked with in the region that's really trying to fuse together traditional delivery with new technology, AI enabled services and changing very traditional profession. And this has dramatically accelerated what they're trying to do. So, you see some of that. You also see some organizations that are just fighting for the day to day. And, you know, I understand that to a degree, but ultimately history shows those that see the opportunity, those that sees the opportunities, create the next 10 years for themselves. So, put yourself on the right part of the K that's the short answer to it.

Brian Ardinger: So, are there particular mega trends or things that you're seeing that most organizations out there should be paying particular attention to?

Scott Anthony: As soon as the pandemic started, we went and launched. When we do consulting projects one of the first things we do is what are the fundamental trends affecting an industry over the next 5 or 10 years? And we went early in the pandemic to say, which of these are being accelerated, which of these are being dislocated. And very clearly digital adoption has been catalyzed, accelerated, things that would happen at 10 years of half a day, 10 weeks in some cases. And that is true in just about every industry.

The other thing that we noticed is that we had made calls about healthcare being fundamentally transformed. You know, our founder Clayton Christianson wrote a book 12 years ago, the Innovator's Prescription, that said the disruption of healthcare will bring care from centralized to decentralized locations. Will allow individuals do things themselves. That was already happening.

But as people reconfigure healthcare systems after the pandemic, that too will be dramatically accelerated through video conferencing, telemedicine through wearables and other sorts of things. I think the thing that is interesting is starting to think about what are the second quarter of facts. So, you know, at the beginning of any big event, the first order effects are pretty clear. Like we need more ventilators, we need more masks. It's the knock-on effects that you begin to think about. So, for example, there's one consumer packaged goods company that I was talking to, where they see a huge emerging need around products that have immunity benefit. It doesn’t really exist in the market now, but that's kind of a knock-on effect pandemic.

And just like the global financial crisis led to asset sharing platforms. Uber, Airbnb were born in the middle of the global financial crisis, the great recession. You're going to see the same sort of thing here, where there are second order of facts where people think about wellness, where people think about how do we work in a more hybrid world, because I think that is the future world. I don't think we're all going to be sitting in our home offices. I don't think we're all going to be going to offices. It will be in between the two. Those, they figure out those new emerging opportunities are really well positioned to drive growth.

Brian Ardinger: Well, we are definitely living in fascinating times. I would like to give people the opportunity to find out more about the book or about Innosight or about yourself. What's the best way to do that?

Scott Anthony: Yeah. So, we've got EatSleepInnovate.com is the URL for the book and Innosight.com is the URL for the organization. I'm out there lurking on social media. LinkedIn is the platform I use the most, but I hop on to Twitter on occasion as well. And, you know, if you ever find yourself on Tong Sen Road in Singapore, you can come knock on the door, not too easy to get into the country right now, but, uh, you know, this too will change.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Scott, I do appreciate you coming and being part of Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights. I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Scott Anthony: Brian it has been great. Thank you so much.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Christian Busch, author of the new book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Good Luck. Christian and I talk about how you can expand your surface area of luck and flex your serendipity muscles, both as an individual and an organization. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption each week. We'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Dr. Christian Busch. He is the author of the new book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Good Luck.

Christian Busch: Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Christian, I am so excited to have you on the show for a number of different reasons. We can get into the details in a minute, but to give our audience a little bit of background about who you are and that. You teach entrepreneurship innovation and leadership at New York University and the London School of Economics; you direct the Center for Global Affairs and Global Economy Program. I think you've co-directed the London School of Economics Innovation and Co-creation Lab, and you've been in this space of innovation and entrepreneurship for a while.

So, I'm excited to have you on board. And I think I'll start off by talking about how we actually met. You have a book out called The Serendipity Mindset and you have a new article that just came out in Harvard Business Review about how do you create your own career luck? And I was fascinated. I was reading through the article. I said, Oh, this is a perfect person to talk to, to have on the show and talk about this idea of how do you create luck? You know, we talk about invention and creation of new innovations and that. And so many times you hear people talk about, well, it was just luck. And so, I want to get your take on what got you interested in researching and studying the art and science of good luck.

Christian Busch: Yeah, that's a great question because I've had an experience early on in life, a car crash that made me realize how quickly life can be over. And so, its instilled kind of urgency and search for meaning. And, you know, I started reading this Victor Frankel book around man's search for meaning and really dove deep into what is meaningful to me. I realized that what I enjoy the most is connecting people, connecting ideas, seeing how dots connect. And so, over the last years I've been part of building communities, companies, and then doing a lot of research on what makes companies successful, not successful. What makes individuals successful purpose-driven or not successful, purpose-driven.

And one of the things that I found fascinating is when I looked at that kind of whole spectrum, the most joyful, you know, successful people seem to have something in common, which was that they all somehow intuitively cultivated serendipity. They intuitively saw something the unexpected, whenever it happens, they connect dots. They somehow create their own smart luck. And you know, these kinds of people where people around them would say, well, they're just a bit luckier than others. Since I got really fascinated by this question. And I delve deeper into the signs of it, but also then inspiring stories and try to identify what is the science base pattern behind this and how can we make it happen by exercises and other things.

Brian Ardinger: So how would you define the difference between blind luck versus smart luck?

Christian Busch: Yeah, it's really, I mean, if you look at the blind, like this kind of being born into a loving family, or, you know, things that just happen to you without you doing anything versus the kind of smart luck, which is really the active luck, which is about saying it's not just something that happens to us, but it's a process of seeing something and doing something with it.

So for example, you know, picture this quintessential situation of you're in a coffee shop. And if you have erratic hand movements, as I do, you might spill a coffee more often than not. And you know, you spill that coffee. And there's this person next to you and you sense, there's a kind of connection, you know, you just feel, Oh, this could be interesting. And you know, you now have two options, right? Option number one is, you're just saying, I'm so sorry. Here's a napkin. And that's it. You leave it at that option. Option number two is you strike a conversation. You see some potential overlaps and it might grow into a potential love relationship or become a cofounder, whatever it is.

And then obviously this really bad feeling when you had option number one happen. You walk outside, you're like, ah, I should have talked with this person. Right. And so that is serendipity missed, and that is smart luck missed. So, what we're seeing here is that it's really about what is our proactive decision that we make in the moment when the serendipitous or when that kind of unexpectedness happens. And so, in a way, serendipity is all about making accidents more meaningful, but also making more meaningful accidents happen.

I think in the business context, I guess you have a lot of people also who are running businesses in the audience. And so, one of my favorite examples is a company in China. They produce washing machines and other white goods. And, you know, they had farmers call them up and saying, Hey, look. We're trying to wash our potatoes and it always breaks down this machine whenever we try to wash out potatoes and what would we usually do when something unexpected like this happens, we would say, well, look, this is a washing machine for clothes. Don't wash your potatoes in the washing machine. Right.

But you know, they did the opposite. They said, you know what? This is unexpected, but there's a lot of farmers in China who might have the same problem, but actually they want to have their potatoes washed. So, they added the dirt filter and made it a potato washing machine. The point here is that when they look back now, they're Oh, it was just lucky that we learned from farmers X, Y, Z. Yeah, but you work for it. You did something about it. You saw something in the unexpected. And that's the same with everything from Viagra to how we met the love of our lives, all these different things. They were practice decisions rather than just happening to us. We had to do something about it.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about that. In the article that you wrote in Harvard Business Review, you talk a little bit about how you can expand that surface area of luck. And you talk about specific practices that people can do as far as one of them being setting hooks. So maybe let's talk a little bit about what does it mean to set a hook for serendipity.

Christian Busch: Yeah, that's one of my favorites. So essentially, it's something that I've learned from entrepreneurial Ali Barrett, who's a wonderful education entrepreneur in London. And so, you know this dreaded question, what do you do, that we always get asked and we might ask it ourselves. We might usually just answer something like, Oh, I'm in education or I'm X, Y, Z entrepreneur, whatever. But what he does is he says, okay, you asked me this question. I will give you hooks. He would say something like, okay, I'm in education. But I recently started reading into the philosophy of science, but what I'm really excited about is playing the piano.

So, what he does is here, he gives you three potential hooks where you could be like, Oh my God, such a coincidence. I just started hosting piano matinees, come to our next one. Whatever it is, in a way, he is seeding potential dots that the other person could connect for him. And so, the point really is that a lot of times serendipity happens because another person connects the dots for us, and we need to give them the opportunity to do that.

To your point, we need to increase that potential surface area that has all these potential dots that could be connected. And so, by setting hooks, that's one way, the other way around also, you can do the same, right? In the way you ask questions, like instead of asking, what do you do? It could be more questions around, you know, what was interesting for you during this presentation or whatever it is that is more about the motivation of the other person that tells us more about the interests of the other person that we could then really connect with.

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point because you know, one of the things we're trying to do with our IO Summit, we're having to move to virtual environment and we're very much actively trying to figure out how do we engage audiences in a virtual world and change it from just a typical Zoom webinar. And how do you create those ability to engage and connect in that.

We're looking at technology platforms, we're looking at different ways to prime the audience, like you said, providing them prompts to help the audience engage with each other, engage with the speakers as well. And I'm excited to announce that you're going to be actually coming to IO2020 and speaking as well about your book and some of these topics too. So, I encourage people to go to IO2020.Live, to grab a ticket and register, and we can continue the discussion on that.

The other area you talked about in the article, not only setting hooks, but planting bombs, being that different ways to connect those particular dots and make them more impactful and taking action on that. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Christian Busch: Yeah, absolutely. And that's really a lot about the question of how do we essentially put out stuff there that other people could pick up on in some way or the other. One way for example, you know, I deal a lot moment with students who had their careers fall through. Everything was laid out in a way and now everything's going down the drain. And so, the question is how do you still put yourself on the radar? How do you still make sure that there's something out there that you develop a minefield for the lack of a better word? Where essentially in a way there's something there that you're putting out there.

And so, one way that I've seen work pretty well, especially with young professionals is to send more speculative emails to people we admire. For example, the LinkedIn has the email function where. You essentially can send a message to every second-degree contact, which is essentially it's millions of people, if you have a couple of contacts. And so it’s this idea of saying, Hey, look like if I put myself on the radar by maybe observing what they've been doing, telling them, Hey, look, I've been super inspired by you, would love your advice at some point. Whatever it is, just something that in a way, puts yourself on the radar of that person in a non-pitchy way.

And what it does is when you do that with like 10, 20 people, one of them usually goes back and says, my God, such a coincidence. I've just been looking for someone who could work with me on X, Y, Z. So, the thing is we can't know that from just following the Twitter or Facebook, like what they really are thinking about at the moment. Right. We can and see their themes, but that's it. But if we're putting a bit out there, we can actually have something there. And I think there's a lot of ways and variations of this.

I've been particularly interested in the question of. How do we also do that in contexts where we might not have the networks yet where we, in a way have to put ourselves out there without any big networks. One of the things I've been doing is I've been working with kids from tough backgrounds, you know, who come out of prison or other kind of really tough settings, where in a way, you don't have a lot to "show" at that point. And so, the idea there is, yeah, you don't have a big network, but you know what? You can still put out a lot of potential bombs there.

So for example, one practice is to say, if there's a big event, like let's say there's a public events, virtual or offline at a big university, where you have an inspiring speaker come in and CEO, whatever and essentially you are the one who's asking the first question. Like if it's an offline event, you energetically stand up so that they can't ignore you. If it's an online event, you try to sneak in a couple of questions and just put like a couple of questions in, so again they can't ignore you. And then the way you asked the question is to say, Thank you so much for this inspiring speech.

You make it all about the speaker. It's not about you. It's about the speaker. So, thank you so much. As someone who just went through X, Y, Z, period. So, whatever I feel comfortable sharing. That could help people relate with me in some way. I was interested in your advice. Can you give me some advice on X, Y, Z? The point here is the middle sentence about putting something out there about oneself, because what usually happens now is in an audience of 400 people, there will always be 5 to 10 people who will come to you afterwards saying, my God, such a coincidence. My brother just went through this period and they are hiring someone or such a coincidence, X, Y, Z.

And so, what we're doing here is we're leveraging the audience of someone else in a very non-intrusive way. And by doing this, essentially, we are putting something out there that other people can connect to us.

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Brian Ardinger: It's an interesting topic. Is this something that extroverts have a natural advantage to be able to do this? Or is this something like an introvert can get better at and take action?

Christian Busch: That's a great question. As a closet introvert myself, you know, I have spikes of extroversion, but then I also need a lot of alone time and introvert Sundays and these kinds of things. So, there's two interesting things here. The one is that extroverted people, a lot of times need someone who makes sense with them out of it. And introverts are really good at this, right? You see that a lot of times with couples where one person might be extremely extroverted and out there, and then their kind of introvert partner helps them make sense out of what they learned. And so, with serendipity, one of the beautiful things is all of us probably have these Eureka moments in the shower where like, oh my God, like this idea just came up whatever.

And this is because serendipity has an incubation time. It's usually not just me running into you at a conference and we talk about something. It necessarily happens at the moment. It's about a lot of times that I go home, kind of my subconscious maybe works a bit on edge. Like there's something happening. I talk it through with a couple of people and then it comes up so introverts can help filter extroverts to come to better serendipitous outcomes.

And also, there's a lot of ways for introverts to themselves, you know? If you think about what serendipity is about, it's about connecting dots. And so it's not only about connecting dots with someone I speak with, but it's about when I read the book or when I see something on the shelf or if I go another street down next time and see another kind of coffee shop, whatever it is. But by the way, how I react to new information that could come from any place, not only people, I can do very similar things in a way.

A lot of times when you ask people, how did you get to that opportunity? It will not necessarily be that they say, Oh, I talked with X, Y, Z, but it might be, Oh, I coincidentally read in the New York times, X, Y, Z, and then I did X, Y, Z. And so, introverts is also, it's really about being open minded about all the information that could potentially be out there and making sense out of it in one way or the other.

Brian Ardinger: It seems to be hard to track serendipity or like measure it, I suppose. Is there a way to better measure if you're getting better at it, or if you are getting the value out of these types of tactics?

Christian Busch: Absolutely. So, one thing that we've developed is a serendipity scorecard. So essentially the idea is that you have a couple of questions that are about either creating more meaningful accidents. In a way, creating more of these potential interactions that could happen. And the other one more around, like, how do I train myself to connect dots?

And so, when you kind of go through this, like, let's say you do, ideally you do a serendipity journal where you say, okay, I kind of think through these questions, you know, how do I ask questions? How do I, when I order a coffee, do I briefly use this moment, to also have a conversation, whatever it is, all these different things we could do and, you know, serendipity journal, then it's really about saying what were the opportunities today for potential serendipity that I might've missed, right? Because every conversation potentially is an opportunity for serendipity, every conversation.

Every interaction, every walkthrough another street, like there's always potential serendipity. And so, once we start thinking more about, okay, was there something maybe that I could have done with this? We put ourselves into that mindset of connecting the dots and then it starts happening all the time. I've always, I found that so joyful because a lot of my work in the past has been about social impact and impact measurement and so on. And it takes a long time. Right. You work on a project and after five years you get the results.

Versus with serendipity, no, you do a workshop on the Wednesday. And then on a Sunday you get an email from someone saying, Oh my God, serendipity happens all the time now, because once you get into it, it gives you also this enthusiasm because you know, serendipity is so much about the things we talked about, but it's also about which kind of energy do you put out there that people actually want to help you, right?

Or it's a lot about how we look at the world, how we frame the world and so on. And so, there's a lot of experiments actually around the way we frame the world, predetermines a lot of how much serendipity we will have and one way to measure this. So again, like a lot of the research around this is qualitative. In terms of trying to understand, how did people get to a serendipitous outcome and you trace the process, but also there's a lot of work arounds counterfactuals, right? What could have happened. So, if you think about something like in science, it's like the example of these injections, like with rabbits, where two researchers, approximately at the same time, injected rabbits with Papain, the enzyme.

And it was kind of, you know, unexpected that the rabbits’ ears flopped, they just turned and, you know, both saw that unexpected thing, but only one of them actually connected the dots and said, okay, this must be around bloodstream. Okay. So maybe we can do something that paved the whole way for arthritis research, right. And like resulted in amazing outcomes around treating arthritis. The points here is that we can now trace that the same thing happens, but they react to differently to it. And so, this is why the one had a serendipitous outcome. The other one didn't.

Brian Ardinger: So, we've talked a lot about how individuals can attract serendipity. And is there something that organizations can do to either create a culture of this mindset? Or is there something that organizations can do to get better at creating these serendipitous opportunities?

Christian Busch: Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of ways for the sake of brevity. I'll focus on two that I find particularly helpful. One is really that idea of in a way developing rituals and practices that allow people to put potential dots out there. So, one example is project funerals or postmortems, where essentially what you're doing here is usually in a business when something doesn't work out, an idea or something else, we're trying to hide it, right?

Because we don't want to be the one who failed, or we don't want to be the one who carries that kind of loss project. And so, in a way we never really learned from each other because we obviously learned the most from things that don't work. If we see them as experiments, but we don't learn from them if we see them as failure, that kind of determines us.

And so what the project funeral does is to say, okay, if a project doesn't work out, take that idea and present it to people from other divisions, or from your team, whatever it is and say, Hey, look like this is why it didn't work. Okay. So, we're not celebrating failure. We're celebrating the learning from something that didn't work and it was an experiment. And so, to give you an example there, you know, they have this window frame, like a picture glass where the idea was the light wouldn't reflect. And amazing technology absorbing energy, but they didn't realize that there's not a big market for that. You wouldn't pay a lot of money for that kind of thing.

They laid it to rest in front of other people from other divisions and someone in the audience was like, Hey, Hey, but have you considered what this would mean for solar? If you take that technology and put it into a solar device. That's amazing for energy absorption. And that is how part of this whole division emerged that company. It was coincidental, but that person was in the audience. It was coincidental there was that problem, but it was cultivated in the sense that in a way you gave people the chance to connect this stuff. So that's number one in terms of really these kinds of practices, rituals that allow us to do more with it.

But the other one is really also about giving people the permission to do that in the sense of in team meetings for example, do we just ask things like, I don't know, what did you sell late last week or so something like that, or do we ask something like, what's surprised you last week? What were your assumptions that you had to rethink? And what's interesting.

There is that a lot of times, you know, if you think about something like a marketing plan, you don't want to be wrong when you have a marketing plan, right? So, you want to hope that it's the right one. You don't want to question your assumptions, but then you, a lot of times question them once it's too late and once it's very costly.

And so, the example I mentioned earlier about the potato washing machine is one of those where if we're alert to the idea, that people might react differently to our product or our services. And we're picking up on this and saying, we want to see the unexpected, and it's not a sign of failure, it's a sign of an open mind that we revise our plans.

And I've seen that we just finished a study with now it's 43 or 45 of the most successful CEOs in the world. And we try to understand what is it about them that really kind of makes them successful. And it's really that kind of ability to combine a sense of direction and like really kind of having a compass. With the ability to react to the unexpected and the humility to say this doesn't question me if something unexpected happens, because it's part of the journey. And I think this is really where it gets exciting, right? To say this kind of allowing for that tension versus like just trying to shut it down.

Brian Ardinger: And encouraging those opportunities to exist and fostering them. Well, Christian, we could talk forever, and we will continue to conversation at IO2020 and other places. But if people want to find out a little bit more about yourself with a book, what's the best way to do that.

Christian Busch: Book can be found, you know, Amazon, bookstores everywhere. It's called The Serendipity Mindset. The homepage is www.thisserendipitymindset.com and I'm @ChrisSerendip on Twitter.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, I thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck to you.

Christian Busch: Thanks so much, Brian.

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The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck

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Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that helps innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is George Brooks. George is the founder of Crema, which is a digital product agency based out of Kansas City. So right here in the Midwest, welcome to the show.

George Brooks: Thanks, Brian. Its's good to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Well I'm excited to have you on. A couple of reasons. One, you are also a podcast host like me. Your podcast is called Option Five. You talk a lot about product development and that, close to the core of all the stuff that we talk about here at Inside Outside Innovation, when it comes to what does it take to work and live in this new world of change and disruption.

George Brooks: Yeah. Thank you very much. I'm excited.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about Crema. How'd you go about forming this company and tell us a little bit about what you do.

George Brooks: My background is in design. So, I started as a design agency first, and really that was as a freelance designer going out on my own. And we talk about when sometimes entrepreneurship innovation happens because you have this dream and this vision, and sometimes you're just pushed off a cliff and you have to figure it out as you fall down. And mine was being pushed off a cliff.

My oldest daughter was in the hospital for the first seven months of her life and I couldn't be at work. I couldn't be at the agency that I was at. I needed to be there. She was super critical. And so, I left that job and started freelance design about 10 years ago. Well, actually gosh, 12 years ago now. And the story used to be 10 years, right? Time has passed.

Brian Ardinger: And Coronavirus adds another three years for this last six months.

George Brooks: I know. So true. So, I started freelance designing. I don't have any business background. So about two years into that, my best friend and I had always dreamed about doing a business together. And I said, I think I accidentally started a business. And it looks like this agency work, doing a lot of design work for other agencies, and for developers and entrepreneurs. Can you make sure that I'm actually paying my taxes and doing all the things that I should be doing? And so, he was finishing up his MBA and so Dan and I joined together about 10 years ago and Crema is about 10 and a half years old.

What we do today has changed since the beginning. We're now a full-service digital product agency. So, we do everything from user experience, design and consulting, strategic direction workshops, coaching, agile process training, all the way through. I have almost 40 full time employees now and focusing on actually providing full-stack product teams. So, design development, test engineering, product management, and we deploy those now, used to be a lot of startups and early stage companies. Almost all the work that we do now is with large enterprise innovation teams around the world. A lot of fun.

Brian Ardinger : Well, we seem to have a very similar background, 8 or 10, 12 years ago I started in the startup world and started the Nmotion startup accelerator and starting early stage teams, helping them get up and going and that, but starting these things in the Midwest is a little bit different. So, I want to talk a little bit about what has the evolution been like and what have you seen starting and building companies here in the Midwest, especially like 10 years ago versus what it's like now.

George Brooks: When I first was freelancing and going to the first startup weekend that took place in Kansas City. And I had no idea what to expect. I think I probably overdressed. I looked way too fancy for what kind of event. I had no idea. My wife didn't know that I was literally going to disappear for three solid days. And that was kind of back in the day when you tried to build a full stack of product in three days, right? It wasn't about putting together a pitch or a deck or something. It was like, we're going to build this thing. So, you just pulled all-nighters to make it happen.

And I think during those days, it was that new wave of creative thinkers and entrepreneurs, at least coming through Kansas City specifically. It felt like the next wave since the early nineties, when the Sprints of the world and the Cerners of the world started here in Kansas City. These large enterprises, and there really have been a gap where you saw new innovative companies coming up.

So, ours was spurred on by Google showing up and we got to win the Google fiber contract. And that was a big deal at the time. What are we going to do with gigabit internet? And then really what I think we saw as a quick rise, lots of activity, lots of moving around and trying to put on events and then kind of a dialing down to where you saw people...it got weeded out pretty quickly that the chaff fell through, If you will, to figure out where are the people that are going to sustain doing this work. Who's going to stick around. Who's going to actually survive the hard work it takes to start companies and sustain innovation.

And I think that's where we're on that next wave of really the companies that have stuck. Even the new companies that are starting now, now have an infrastructure of enough great of companies that have been through it the last 10 years to say, here's what it actually takes. It's not all fun and games. Let's actually get to work. And I think that's what I've seen, at least in the environment. For Crema, it's about iteration. It's about refinement.

And so, we've had to iterate on ourselves and experiment with new ideas and offer our services in a different way and use different language. And UX was like this super-hot, nobody had heard of term. There were two letters that shouldn't be next to each other. And it got us work in the beginning that doesn't get us work anymore. Right. Everyone does UX. So, we have to innovate and continue to iterate to stay relevant.

Brian Ardinger: I think the other dynamic that seems to be similar to what I've experienced and seen around the country as well is there was a lot of buzz around startups was how do these companies move so fast and create something from nothing? And that's how I got pulled into the corporate innovation front is because bigger companies were coming to me and asking those same kinds of questions.

It sounds like you have a similar type of ride from the standpoint of you were building and iterating and getting things up and going and old established companies were craving that ability to do that. So, talk me through that transition from working with startups or building brand new products, and then moving towards a more established organization.

George Brooks: One of our clients for a long time was Kauffman foundation and Kauffman was in that weird space in between, right? They're a massive organization, you know, nationwide and have influence worldwide and yet, they teach entrepreneurship education. So, they want to have this educational spirit. But they're locked inside this bureaucracy that comes with having a large foundation. And I think that was with working with them, that we said, okay, you can think entrepreneurially while still working in an unfortunately bureaucratic environment and still do incredible creative work.

It was at that point that we opened our eyes. We said, okay, well, wow, there is more opportunity here, but look at all these amazing companies around us. So, we started having conversations with some of the companies that were here in Kansas City. And for a long time, we've since pulled back from saying this, but for a long time, we used to say, we're like your startup team for hire, which was this idea of like, let us come in and think like a startup, because you don't know how to. And we would talk about the second wave, right? I mean, that idea of you've gone to the point of your business is starting to top off of its innovation curve. And how can we go through the second wave?

Now that's since changed a little bit because now it's, you have to make it part of a norm that you're iterating, you're innovating and almost every team is responsible for doing it. And so, we're seeing a lot of enterprises, it's becoming common language. We have to fight the battle of it, not being a commoditized idea. To just commoditize innovation where you can just, okay. I just know the resources I need to pull and get it done. And how do we still keep it a creative process?

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Brian Ardinger: It does seem like a lot of the terminology and methodologies have moved over from the startup realm and are being used by more internal product teams and that. The idea of a minimal viable product was that at the time, or even a business model canvas, and thinking through how business models can change and adapt and be disrupted overnight is obviously on the forefront of most people. You and I have been in the space of helping companies disrupt and be disrupted for a long time.

And in the last six months with coronavirus and that it's now syncing in. And I think for a lot of corporations that, oh yeah, that thing you were talking about...disruption...yeah. I think we need to pay attention to that more. It's a crazy world where we're seeing it. And so, I think that's only going to speed up. My thesis is that everybody's going to have these types of skillsets in their arsenal. Whether they're a startup or whether they're corporate and the more change happens, the more the mindset, the culture of adaptability and resourcefulness and the things that entrepreneurs do on a regular basis seem to be more and more valuable in the whole chain of things.

George Brooks: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And one of the things that we are seeing is we have organizations now, because they had a forced reality through going remote or having to move digital so fast, what was a three to five-year plan got done in three weeks or less? It changes your perspective of what else can we accomplish now.

Brian Ardinger: It's the same thing that happens like in a startup weekend. I think a lot of people who go through that particular process, they see what they can do in 48 hours, 72 hours. And it's like, wow, it does change the way you perceive your ability to create value or learn fast. A lot of times you can't build anything in 72 hours, but you can learn some things you know, you don't have to build or whatever. That speed and just experiencing that speed seems to do wonders for your mindset.

George Brooks: We're working on a framework right now. And I'm totally about sharing work in progress. So, this is definitely a work in progress, but one of the things that we're talking about is this idea that a product culture or an innovation culture has their postures or their mindsets, their disciplines and their activities. And then they have their structures. And structures was this area that we couldn't figure out how to define it well. But what I realized was that with the right structures in place with the right constraints, with the right guidelines, with the right direction given. It allows that creativity to just be lit on fire, because it's like the constraint of 72 hours. Man, you can create a lot.

Or the constraints of a pandemic can force you to innovate in a way that you never had to do it before. But without the constraints, we kind of let ourselves spin quite a bit. We like that idea of saying, awesome. Let's put a constraint on this. Let's put a flag in the ground saying six weeks from now, what do we want to have? What do we want to do? And then work back from there and then work in small iterative sprints to actually prove that we're getting to that value.

Brian Ardinger: Well, let's talk a little bit about that. I know from your internal perspective at Crema, you have things like Lab Fridays or what I've heard of venture labs and stuff. Can you talk a little bit more about how you go about iterating yourself and then applying that to your clients that you work with?

George Brooks: One of my favorite activities that we do, and you mentioned it there, is what we call Lab Friday, and it also has a component of it that is Venture Lab Friday. So, Lab Friday for us was originally intended to actually let us build some products. You know, every product agency wants to build their own things. And it's so hard to do that because it distracts you from the client work. And that's truly what our business model is based off of. But we want to scratch the edge. We want to be creative. We want to be innovative.

And so how can we build a space similar to the Google's 80 / 20 model? But how can we create a space where we allow people to step away from their day-to-day work, where their risk taking is measured. We can take certain risks with our clients, but we might not be wanting to take all the risks that our clients, because they are paying the bills. And so how can we allow our teams to take some risks, learn some new things, experiment in a way that they can't do it on a day to day basis.

So, the way that we play that out is every other Friday, we dial down almost all client work. There’re a few things that bleed into that, but almost all client work. And we set goals. So, in the morning each person says my goal is by the end of the day, I'll be able to demo x. And the demo might be, I read a blog post and I'm just wanting to tell you what I learned from it. Or I watched a new course online and I'm learning this new framework, or I tried out this new tool or some of our teams have actually formed together and created product teams. So, they pulled together and pitched ideas and we got down to originally five, then four, and it's kind of, it stays around four to six projects at any given time with the size of our company. And they're trying to, every other Friday, iterate on building products that either they want, or they want to use, or they think would be cool in the world.

They tend to be consumer experiences because we are mostly B2B. So, it's kind of fun to work on a consumer experience. And a few of those have taken off and we've actually got some products that are getting some traction and that feeds their creativity. So, when they go back to our clients now, not only are, are they bringing exciting stories and energy?

But they're also saying, you know, when we use this new framework, or we use this new technology called TypeScript or React back in the day and we think actually it could apply back to you. And so that innovation gets looped back into the value to the client. Now they go, Oh, cool. Let me hear about what you're going to do next Lab Friday. And so they champion it and even show up to our demos.

And so, it becomes a really great part of that not only the culture, but the potential intellectual property for Crema and the continual development of our talent.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Yeah, we do something similar at Nelnet in our PaymentSpring Division. They have something called Trydays. I think it helps with recruiting. Quite frankly, helping people understand that you are forward thinking, and it's not a day to day job that you're going to be there doing the same thing over and over and over again. It feeds into the whole overall culture aspect. I know you cover a lot of that stuff on your podcasts, and culture's a big thing in your line of work. So maybe let's talk a little bit about culture. What's the culture of innovation? What does it need to be? And what are some of the obstacles or things that you've seen that are holding culture back?

George Brooks: We've been thinking a lot about this lately. And I think partly through kind of what the world's going through on a number of different fronts. And also, just how we've seen both companies that we've worked with, organizations that we follow or what we do ourselves. What's that secret sauce. What's that thing that makes them really able to pull off work. That seems to be, I wouldn't say nearly impossible, but really at odds with reality sometimes.

And what we come back to is primarily that the teams that are able to keep an extremely open mind and adapt quickly are the ones who succeed. The second part is the ones that can really think cross disciplined. So, they're no longer working in siloed departments or in siloed verticals. Instead they're valuing making decisions faster and making decisions better by including more people in the decision-making process, through smaller decision-making iterations.

And so, I think it's really those two principles alone that can open mindedness and adaptive. And then how can we pull in perspectives and actually see through people's lenses faster? I think we see that through the way we set up our product teams that are cross-disciplined.

So, we have designers and developers and test engineers and product managers working in small collaborative teams instead of here's my dev department, here's my design department, here's my product management team. And we hand things over the walls and it'll eventually get back to a client that goes, well, this isn't what I wanted. Oh, well, funny thing, you didn't see it for the last six months.

We really think that it's primarily that. And then it's just simple disciplines when it comes back to…I was talking again about postures or those mindsets, those disciplines, and then those structures. How can you create disciplines, rhythms, ceremonies, that foster that type of work, right? So maybe it's the agile methodologies of Scrum, standups or of iterative sprints, or maybe it's something that you create on your own, like an Innovation Lab Friday, but you have to build something that's going to get to a routine or a habit.

Because people have a hard time going, why is this changing all the time? I need to adapt. I need to understand. Then the last piece with those structures. If they don't have something that gives them structure and direction and purpose and vision, they will go in any way. They'll create their own visions. That's both exciting and scary. You don't want that to happen.

So, we find that if teams have a really clear vision, they have really strong disciplines. And then they come in with really thoughtful mindsets and postures. Intentional postures. They end up executing better on anything they're doing could be product, could be innovation, could be a call center for that matter.

And the hardest part of that work that we find is getting both leadership and practitioners to buy in at the same level on what they value in each of those three areas. And that's something we're trying to hash out how to break down those walls. Aaron Dignan was on our podcast and he's the author of A Brave New Work, which I highly recommend.

And his whole mission is to destroy bureaucracy. I kind of love that, right? How can we get to a world where no longer are we working in a fear mindset that is afraid of things going wrong, is afraid of me not looking like the smartest person in the room, and making all the decisions instead valuing the perspective of others, seeing the opportunities, unlocking potential. Those are the cultures we're trying to create, foster.

Brian Ardinger: To that end, that's maybe that last topic we'll talk about, is the tools and the tactics and the ability to be able to spin up these experiments has changed dramatically over the last 10 or 15 years. So if you think about the whole no-code movement or this access to things like Airtable or Zapier or whatever, that literally allow you to piece together, experiments, try things, especially in the digital world that you couldn't do before or not quite as easily. How is that impacting a design agency like yourself, both in your ability to build products and that, and then what you're seeing out there with the ability for other folks to build stuff.

George Brooks: There's a couple of thoughts that come to mind. One is I wrote a blog post, gosh, a couple of years ago now, that was like the 38 SaaS apps that I use to run my company. And it was kind of satirical, but it's true as well. And rather than having the behemoth thing, that's supposed to solve all my problems. In order to adapt, we have to kind of keep looking for solutions that are going to fit the things that I'm dealing with right now.

And so, we do, we love Airtable and we actually replaced our CRM recently with just building our own custom Airtable solution. Or, you know, we're Asana nerds, but yet we understand that JIRA is what the industry uses. And so how do we both use the Asana for operational and then JIRA for development tasks?

And so, we're always looking for ways to pull in the right tool. Primarily it has to be something that fosters collaboration. If it's not fostering collaboration some way, oftentimes that's when we'll kill it, because it's just not going to actually work in our environment and the way we work, especially now in a remote world.

But I also think that what's really fun is that a lot of our clients will come to us and say, Hey, I actually hacked together a solution to solve this problem. And that's when we're like, yes, that's the person I want to work with because at least you're in the thinking in that mindset already. You already thought I can go take a Google doc and use it as a database with Zapier hook to pull in something from an email, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

And if you're willing to be that scrappy upfront, to solve your problem, then when we start to bring in custom solutions, whether it's a, you know, fully baked database and API and a front-end user experience for both mobile and web. Now we can still think that iterative way. You can still think about building a skateboard instead of a car. Right? And that's just a mindset. It's a posture that changes the way we, we actually approach building new products. That's exciting that we have those tools at our exposure. Now.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and hopefully you get better projects that have been, de-risked a little bit, or, you know, you get to the desirability stage a little bit quicker. A lot of times we've worked with startups and others that, you know, they bring us an idea and it's like, have you talked to anybody about this? Does it really matter if this product exists? You know, rather than build something out, let's figure this out first. So those tools obviously allowed you to do that as well. So hopefully you're further down the line, whether you're a startup or corporate using these things.

George Brooks: It's about traction, right? If you're just in a solution mindset and you're not trying to solve a problem, you're not actually finding attraction and actually hits a problem and a solution mixing together. Then how many people have I talked to and then come back a year later going, Hey, how'd that project go? I know you didn't, you know, et cetera. It's like, well, we don't have any customers, but we're still working on it. Like you're still building? Kind of hurts my soul a little bit, but also, I understand it's really hard not to solution things, but if you're focused on traction, that results are always going to be better.

Brian Ardinger: Well, George, you and I can talk for a long time, but I wanted to give a chance to tell us a little bit about Crema. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the company, what's the best way to do that?

George Brooks: Check out Crema.us. And honestly, our primary content channel is YouTube. So, if you go look at Crema or Crema Lab on YouTube, we've got about 150 plus videos there now, and our audience is growing, and we love putting out content on YouTube. And we also, like we said, we're going to have you on the Option Five podcast. Where we talk about product culture and product teams and how people can use design technology and culture to help individuals and organizations thrive. So, check us out.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, George, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

George Brooks: Thanks, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is the author of the new book, The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food. Vaughn and I talk about his well-researched account of how some of the world's top chefs and their teams approach culinary innovation and what it means for innovation teams of all kinds. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest today. We are talking to Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London, School of Management, previously worked at Google in California has a Harvard PhD and he's author of a new book called The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food. Welcome to the show, Vaughn.

Vaughn Tan: Fantastic. Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to talk about this topic of innovation in the culinary space. Restaurants have been around forever. And when you think of innovation, you don't always think restaurants and culinary space. And so I wanted to dig into this particular topic. Maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about your eclectic background.

Vaughn Tan: Absolutely. I'm from Singapore originally. And so I guess it's kind of like a trope that if you're a Singaporean, you have an unhealthy interest in food. This is more or less true. That kind of only started to show up in my research a little bit later. I think where I got interested in the questions I'm asking in the book, it actually started when I was working at Google.

When I was there, one of the most interesting things that I noticed, I was there for about three years, was that the really interesting groups that came up with really innovative ideas we're the ones that weren't sort of organized the way management, conventional wisdom, would say you should organize the innovation group. They were the ones that bubbled up from the ground up. People found each other. The goals were kind of like amorphis and shifting a lot. The themes that eventually showed up in the book.

I first noticed in an inchoate way, when I was working at Google. When I went back to get my PhD, I was interested in finding out more about how organizations could do something like what I saw at Google. Create this environment in which people and teams could self create projects that resulted in innovation. And when I was doing the research, everyone who tries to do like a research project for a PhD, you have to chose your setting. You have to choose the site that you will go look at trying to understand more about the phenomenon that you're interested in. A lot of people who study innovation, will study things like a microchip foundary or something like that.

I just sort of, I thought initially, maybe I should try something, which is a little bit weird. What I always tell people is there's tons of reasons why restaurants and food R & D are good place to study innovation. The biggest one is that if you study food R & D the cycle time for innovation is very short.

So as a researcher, what you see is you see many, many cycles that you can start to see patterns across all those cycles. But actually the true reason, which is not less good, it's just also a good reason for it is that it's just much more fun. You know, studying chefs, being in restaurants, being in a kitchen where they're coming up with new ideas and food and constantly failing is just more fun than watching people code all the time and looked at both. So I can say that.

And it's not to say that programming or hardware design is less interesting. It's just less fun to me. That's why I did it. My personal background is connected to why I decided to do this. Because I think it's an inherently interested in food and interested in how it gets made. I would not have thought about doing it in this way. But a lot of the reasons why I'm looking at food are actually the same reasons that initially drove me to do a PhD in the first place. And they were the same things I saw when I was working at Google.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about some of the examples and how you went about learning some of this stuff. So you've worked with some of the world's top chefs and their teams and looked at how they approached innovation. Did they look at it as innovation, the stuff that they were doing, or tell us a little bit about that.

Vaughn Tan: I think they absolutely thought of it as innovation, or at least they thought about it as trying to come up with new things. And I think most of them, even though they would not maybe have used the same words as I'm using, they would have thought of it as trying to come up with a new approach, either at the level of the dish, trying to come up with the new dish or in some cases in new idea of what service should be like the entire experience of going into a restaurant.

Some of these teams were interested in new ways of cooking. Some of them were interested in developing new materials in the sense of new ingredients. They were always thinking about it as innovation and thinking about innovation as something that could happen at several different levels that can be combined of course, but they were always thinking of what they were working on as trying to come up with new things.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about the book itself. It's called the Uncertainty Mindset. How does that come into play this idea of uncertainty in the innovation process and what did you learn?

Vaughn Tan: I think the big takeaway point that I want everyone to come away from the book with is that innovation is often thought of as something which companies must do in order to survive and thrive and all that other stuff. Everybody knows it. But the thing which is also true about innovation, which people sort of conveniently forget all the time, is that if you are truly going to make something which is brand new, you have no idea what that is at the beginning. Not a precise idea anyway. And you also don't have a clear idea of how you're going to get there.

Innovation as a process and as an outcome is probably the only kind of activity that we do in a corporate context that is unavoidably and inevitably inherently and uncertain activity. That's sort of the big framing for the book, which is if you're trying to do something inherently uncertain, the way you think about how you do things, what the constraints on your actions are, what the resources are that are available to you. Even what you're trying to do in the first place, like at a very fundamental level. All those things have to be appropriate for something which is uncertain and that's where the uncertainty mindset comes in.

So the uncertainty mindset is basically a way of thinking about the world and the future that does not assume that you know what it will be in the future. In fact, you sort of assume that you have no idea what's going to happen. And that assumption changes many of the things that you do in terms of hiring. In terms of how you set goals. And also in terms of how you motivate your team.

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Brian Ardinger: That really brings up an interesting point about where we are right now. So we're in the midst of the coronavirus. The restaurant industry has been devastated and now we're seeing some new things popping up and new ways of thinking around that space. What have you learned or what are some of the trends that you're seeing of how companies and people are adapting to that? Especially in the culinary space.

Vaughn Tan: There seemed to be a few clusters of response. There is one question or response to that basically is we're going to stop doing things until things go back to normal. And obviously, if you have deep pockets, like if you're funded by private equity or something, you can afford to do this.

And other cluster of responses is we're going to basically do what everyone else is doing, like pivot to delivery and not really think about whether or not that pivot, that alternative business model, really makes sense for what as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, I want out of my business, and also whether it was appropriate for the context, right like the customers that the business has. The kind of food that the business is trying to produce. That's a second cluster.

And then the third cluster, which I think is the most adaptive and healthy one is where the business owner really uses this, not just as an opportunity, but as a requirement. So really look very closely at the business model that the business runs on and try and rethink how that's changed by very different resources and constraints that Coronavirus puts on a business. I can give you an example of that. And I think this example is about a restaurant, but I think it illustrates more generally how businesses outside of the restaurant industry can think about this.

You know, if you're a restaurant and you happen to be located in a part of town, that is very much an office tourist part of it. In any major city like New York or London or Paris, there's going to be parts of the city that are largely residential and then they're going to be parts of the cities that are mostly commercial. You know, like it's like the center of town where lots of tourists come. The stores, attractions. There's lots of offices. If you're in that part of town and you're a restaurant and you immediately think I'm going to pivot to delivery. And my delivery radius is only my one mile neighborhood where nobody lives and no tourists will be for the next very, very many number of months. Essentially, what you've done is you've pivoted to a business model that does not recognize and incorporate the realities of the situation that you're currently facing.

The alternative is if you look at the constraints and the resources that you face, because you are in this part of town where no one really lives and tourist don't really come, what you may end up doing is you may end up for instance, shutting down your physical location in the center of town and hiring a dark kitchen that is closer to where your customers live. And then changing the menu that you provide through this dark kitchen to a menu that is amenable to being delivered. What that alternative represents is really looking very closely at what constraints you face. In this case, you don't have people who live close to you who are also your customers. And what resources you have in this case it might be the availability of dark kitchen resources in residential parts, of for instance, London.

And really rethinking how your business model can adapt given these resources and constraints. So that the business model is actually more likely to be viable and the people who are doing this third thing, which is to really re-examine what their business is trying to do in the light of existing resources, existing constraints, to give themselves more flexibility. Those are the ones that in my opinion, seem to be doing better and are much more likely to do better, even as the uncertainty continues. So in the US in the UK, especially. I think the uncertainty around what will happen to all businesses, but especially restaurants generally is huge and it will continue to be big. In fact, in the US unfortunately, it's going to be massive for months, and it's not clear of when, unfortunately that will go away.

Brian Ardinger: We have a local restaurant group here, that's pivoted and done a variety of innovative things. You were mentioning the dark kitchen and that they consolidated the different types of restaurants that they had. And then they've moved to subscription based model, basically for their food delivery. Every week, they have three different meals that they can deliver to you on Monday for a family. Again, not the typical stuff that they would have on their normal menu, but ties it together and provides a different way to provide food. Probably not what they were originally thinking, but it seemed to at least keep them up and going and who knows where it will go in the future, but definitely I'm seeing some local examples of that as well.

Vaughn Tan: The key thing is in a situation of great uncertainty, what you need is you need to be really flexible, but also realistic. These ideas of just continuing to do the same thing that you did before coronavirus and hoping that that will work. If you're really lucky, I guess that could be viable. But most of the time, the businesses that will succeed and thrive are the ones that are willing to change what they do in a way that is creative, but also realistic. This idea of a pragmatic imagination or a realistic imagination. I think that's really, really crucial, especially right now.

Brian Ardinger: So you've talked about some of the key characteristics of a great innovation team in that, but what are some of the other things that you've learned from your research? Fast, moving, adaptable, curious, what are some of the things that make up a team that can actually do this kind of stuff.

Vaughn Tan: Again excellent question. I think there's probably two main things which I would highlight. The first one is framing every person's role, their job role, not as being something that is static and stable, which is what generally written job descriptions tend to imply. But instead something which is changing and changeable over time. And the reason why this is important. I think not just for innovation teams, but also for teams that are facing uncertain situations like startup teams or small business teams that are facing uncertain times, like right now. Is because no matter whether you're an innovation team or just a business working in a very uncertain environment, the demands on the team are changing all the time.

You can't say this is the pattern of constraints and resources that you face for good. It's that tomorrow, you may not be able to dine in anymore and for an unpredictable time. Or the next week, two of your staff may get coronavirus and get symptoms of coronavirus and have to go on a 14 days, self isolation period, leaving you with fewer people on staff. Basically, the idea is if, as the manager or the leader of this team, you set the expectation among all your employees. That what they do, will always be the same. You're basically shooting yourself.

If instead, what you do is you say, this is what we think you'll have, but be ready for it to change over time. And not necessarily only in a bad way, right? Because what this does is it gives you freedom at the employee to say, you know, I really want to do this thing, which I'm interested in, and I think I'm good at, and this expectation of change and gives the employee the opportunity also to try and learn how to do new things that wouldn't otherwise be possible in a very stable job. So that's one thing.

The other thing I would say is there is a kind of an idea in management that you should try and like peg the project to the capabilities of the team that is doing it. Right. So you don't want to like stress them out and overexert them. I think actually in innovation teams and especially in teams that, you know, will have to deal with uncertainty a lot. What you actually want to do is you want to progressively overload these teams. You want to make them uncomfortable a little bit and progressively make them more and more uncomfortable because they're gradually building the capacity to do things that they weren't able to do before.

I think that this is something which sounds very counterintuitive because it goes against almost every principle of management that you see. It's a bit like weight training or business training in general, if you make people uncomfortable by making them do something that they don't know how to do, but if they try it, could learn how to do. You're not only giving them the ability to do this new thing when they learn how to do it, you're in a sort of a meta sense. You are giving them the experience of being comfortable with being uncomfortable, where the discomfort comes from not knowing how to do something, or not knowing where the future will go.

And that actually, that meta ability is incredibly important because most of us don't have it anymore. It's been kind of like squeezed out of us by school and society. And if, as a leader or a manager, you are training your team and individual employees on your team to do this. You're not only building a stronger team, that's more adaptable. You're also building stronger and more adaptable people.

Brian Ardinger: It makes sense for a lot of ways. The ability to ask questions, the ability to sit with failure or mistakes and be able to figure out what's the next step along the process, things like that. Can you talk about some of the examples or things that you learned or in your book that would be interesting and insightful for the audience?

Vaughn Tan: I mean, what I call like productive discomfort or desperation by design. One organization that I know quite well is called The Mad Symposium. It's well known inside the cutting edge cuisine world. They used to organize a symposium that was about every year and it would bring together all these really diverse people like chefs, scientists, policymakers, people in the sort of cutting edge food scene. And the interesting thing about that symposium is that it was originally developed by the team that ran a restaurant called Noma.

And so the year that they decided to come up with this symposium, which turned into one of the thought leadership events for the cutting edge culinary space. The year, they decided to do that. I think it was 2011. They actually had never even run any kind of conference, let alone a chef conference or a chef conference that was unique in this way. Most conferences don't have all these very diverse people attached to them. They just have chefs doing demonstrations.

This was meant to be a conference of ideas for the culinary industry, especially at the cutting edge. And so what this did, the decision to sell tickets for a conference that was happening in a few months, that they had never run before. What it did was it was an instance of desperation by design, right? Like the moment you announced to the world that you're going to do this and you start to sell tickets, you've got to do it.

So the team that was at the restaurant was like, they were obviously really stressed out. I was with them for part of this time and then I came back to help out for the actual first symposium. They were incredibly stressed out. They were not happy campers in a sense, but you know, there is a sense of exhilaration that comes from being forced to do something that you want to do, but what you would otherwise not have done, if you were not forced to do.

And some of the people on there, you know, they were chefs would learn how to become like audio producers. They were like, culinary researchers who eventually ended up becoming people who are very good at programming, a super weird set of skills that they would never have thought to acquire were on their own that they were then forced to acquire. And what that meant was they were subsequently able to do more interesting, weird conferences with every passing year.

And in fact, this capacity do things that apparently are impossible to do unless you learn how to do them. Also allowed them to go to a different country, completely jettison their existence menu, learn the cuisine and the ingredients of all new culinary culture within the space of six months, and create a new restaurant there that has the same kind of philosophical and aesthetic approach as Noma, but is actually using the food of a different country.

So all of these things, which would be very, very difficult to do. I think in my interpretation anyway, I think that they develop the ability to do that because they were able to sit with the discomfort of not knowing how to do something and not simply be paralyzed by it. But instead to say, okay, I don't know how to do this. It's slightly terrifying, but I'm going to go out and figure it out. And it's that meta ability, which is actually the real value of this approach. I think of it as desperation by design, right? Like you teach people how to be uncomfortable, but still to act. And it's the ability to be uncomfortable with not knowing how to do something and acting to figure it out that longterm creates the ability to keep learning, how to do new things that have never been done before.

Brian Ardinger: That's quite interesting. When you think about master chefs and that you think about creative genius in the kitchen who comes up with something new and drives it, and that. Is it all about that mad scientist creative leader that creates these teams? Or is it a combination of the teams learning this or is it an individual or a team, or how does that play out in real life?

Vaughn Tan: Another great question, which I'm really glad you asked, because I think very few people will ask that question. For me, I think obviously the singular creative individuals are very important in doing new things anyway, but I feel like people cover that all the time. So I tend to not focus on that. I tend to focus on the team dynamics that allow the team to do interesting creative things.

And so your question, is it about the individual or the team? Obviously it's about both. The role of the creative genius has been vastly overstated. It's a very easy story to tell, like focus on some really charismatic, persistent, interesting person and tell their story. That's easy. It's much harder to talk about the team dynamic that allow a team to collectively figure out how to do something that hasn't been done before. And then actually do it.

What's been really interesting from my perspective is understanding how very, very protidian undemonstrative practices and philospies that you put in place, can result in innovative teams. None of these teams had like a five point innovation plan. In fact, everything that I described in the book they simply did, because this is just how things were done. Which suggests to me that if you are not just in the restaurant business, but if you're trying to create an innovation team, generally, of course you should try and find the most creative people to join it.

But the other thing that you should, I would say must do. Is also put in place these very boring protidian sounding properties around hiring, around motivation, that leads the team almost automatically become more able to be creative. If you were to ask me like how I feel about that in relation to the creative genius view of innovation, I would say that it's a necessary counterweight to that. It's not one or the other it's both. And it just happens to be that for whatever reason, people have always talked about the creative genius and they've really done comparatively little about the mechanics of team. Even when the team is surrounding a creative person. So to me, this is like redressing the balance.

Brian Ardinger: It's almost about, talking about the different types of constraints that you put into different types of environments and those constraints in and of themselves helps bring out that creativity and ability to overcome them.

Vaughn Tan: Absolutely. Exactly to your point. If you think about a team as existing in a network of like constraints and resources, the way you design, those can be very much a strategic thing, right? Like if you want to design a team that is going to be likely to be creative in the future, you set up how they work so that they're more likely to be like that. You don't give them stable roles. You don't give them very clear cut goals and you don't motivate them the way you would have to motivate a team that was trying to go after a very clearly understood outcome. You have to do things different.

Brian Ardinger: Awesome. I thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit more about this. I encourage anybody to pick up the book, the Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that.

Vaughn Tan: The book has its own website, uncertaintymindset.org, and then if they want to find out more about me and the other things I'm working on they can go to my website, which is vaughntan.Org. My Vaughn only has one A in it.

Brian Ardinger: Vaughn, I appreciate you coming onto the show. Thanks very much for being a part of Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Vaughn Tan: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Pam Marmon. Pam is the CEO of Marmon Consulting and author of the new book, No One's Listening and it's Your Fault: Get Your Message Heard During Organizational Transformations. Pam and Brian discuss operational and organizational change, why change isn't hard, and what people are doing to adapt in this very fast paced change that we're experiencing now.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Pam Marmon. She is CEO of Marmon consulting, which focuses on change management and the author of the new book No One's Listening and It's Your Fault - Get your message heard during organizational transformations. Welcome to the show, Pam.

Pam Marmon: Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Well, let's get into it. One of the things I read in your book is 70% of organizational change efforts fail. Can you unpack that?

Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, a lot of research has been done on the change management front and why large initiatives fail and based on the research, when organizations and when leaders don't apply proper change management up to 70% of those efforts fail. And this is where change management as a discipline has really flourished to help leaders understand what is the role of the executive, of the leader, of the people, the managers, and then how do you weave these communication messages or the behaviors and the mindsets that have to shift within the organization so that you can have a successful outcome.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about the book and how you got to the place where you wanted to compile all this information and help people figure out this process.

Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, I started writing the book actually last May of 2019. But prior to that, I was working with leaders and I came to realize that a lot of my leaders we're afraid of change. There was just a sense of fear associated with change, whether it's fear of failure or just behaviors, or resistance that they may encounter within their organizations. And having done change management for the last decade, I felt like I was on the other side, looking in into their organizations and knowing that if they did the right things at the right time, that they wouldn't experience this resistance or nearly to the level that 70% of organization experience.

And so, I wanted to help leaders not be afraid of change, and I wanted them to be confident when they step into the roles of leading organizations through change and the most effective way to get your message heard is through writing a book. And so, I wrote the book in a way that, and easy for leaders to understand, to read. There's a model that I share in the book LESS. I walked each leader through the process of leading transformation and having the right mindset as you listen first, so that you can engage your team later. The things

Brian Ardinger: One of the things, I liked about the book is you really do set the stage of having to have that kind of mindset shift. A lot of people, when they hear the word change, they automatically think hard and difficult. And I don't want to go through this, but you twist it on its head and say that change isn't hard if you approach it in the right way and have the right mindset. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, with the proper process, change is not hard, and it does sound radical to say it out loud. But when the process that I talk about is being able to listen first. So, within your organization, as a leader, you need to be able to align to the vision. You need to be able to understand what your peers at the executive level are doing, and you need to be able to create a story that aligns well. And part of that listening is the readiness assessment. You need to understand if your organization is ready for this change and also to stage the change. So maybe there are multiple changes happening at the same time, and you have to be mindful of the resources and the people impacted.

The second part is engage. And so, part of the process I talked about your ability as a leader to engage the right people at the executive level, the managers, the change champions that you identify in your organization, and then you can actually speak. And when you do speak, you need to understand the channels, the proper messages that have to be shared, the timing of those messages, how they're going to be received by people. What's that cohesive story and that experience you want to shape for the individual that's experiencing that change.

And then the last part is measure. It's our ability to solve and that's through measuring and being able to create the dashboards and the metrics so that we can evaluate is this successful. And what is success for this particular change as we look at the behaviors and the mindsets of the people that we're shifting. And how can we measure that against the project outcomes, which is really where we measure success.

Brian Ardinger: Everybody right now is experiencing massive change with the coronavirus and recession and all the other things that are hitting companies all at once. Having a more proactive approach and measured approach to change know, listening and putting all the ducks in a row would be an important process. How do you do that when the pace of change is accelerating so much, that what you thought was going to happen is not the current case. And you've got to execute quickly.

Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, the environment that we are certainly as different than under normal circumstances, when we plan change and we have the time and the opportunity to stage things and think them through and stretch them out long. Currently, what we're seeing is the urgency of change to happen. And so, there's a lot more reaction and reactive leadership that's happening and also the need for stronger and more frequent communications that have to come out from the leaders. We're seeing a lot more communications that are more human in the nature of how they're delivered because we're seeing leaders empathize with people and whether their customers.

And so, the volume of communications that we're seeing is greater. And also the ability of leaders to kind of shift that mindset and say, I know we may have planned to do this then, you know, in three, four, five years, but here we are now and we are forced to change and we don't have another option. We have to learn to adapt. We have to have grace for one another, as we're learning through this journey and we have to test and shift as we move along because some of our assumptions will be broken and we may have to redo what we thought was the right way to do something and think outside the box.

Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. I have some personal examples where I work at Nelnet. One of the things that we did at the early stages of the coronavirus is to open up a different type of communication channel to all our associates. The executive team created a internal Q and A podcast that allowed folks to not only hear or find out what's going on in the traditional sense as, as webpages and emails and that, but also to actually hear the executives talking about the things that were going on in the environment. The associates told us that it was very powerful to hear the executive talking rather than just appearing on a page or an email. Can you think of other examples or ways that you've seen that people are adapting to this?

Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, another communication channel that I've seen that has been effective is Friday happy hours, where, you know, people come together, and they use their videos and they just share what's going on in their lives and much more casual and approachable. And I think even working remotely, when people can see your environment and they get to know your family members, because your children are coming and going and your dog is barking or whatever, it just makes us more human and makes us more relatable to one another. And it breaks that barrier that may have existed in the past and that separation that now all of a sudden, we're all in this together. Like we all have to figure it out and it's actually, a beautiful thing to see because the humanity aspect of communicating and engaging with people has really flourished here.

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Brian Ardinger: So, we've talked a lot about change from the management's perspective. What are things that the average employee can do to be more adaptable to change?

Pam Marmon: That's a great question. So, as a beginning, we have to examine ourselves and we need to understand why am I resistant to change? What are my thoughts about change? Do I like change? Do I not like change? On the spectrum of I like it, or I don't like it, where do I fall? Cause that's not always a black or white yes or no. And what's the reason behind it. Is it a financial reason that I don't like the change? Is it a control or power or influence in my organization that I may be giving up or shifting? So, once we can assess our own internal state of where we are, and what matters to us, and our values, and how we run our lives and how we operate. That's really the beginning so that we can actually adapt some other measures to change our behavior and to be more open minded about the future and what it could hold for ourselves. And for our companies

Brian Ardinger: A lot of our listeners are in the innovation space. And there's a lot of talk about innovation and most companies talk about, a good game about innovation, but a lot of it's innovation theater. The ability to get companies to think innovatively and try new ideas and launch new business models. And that it's challenging. What do you think are some of the obstacles that companies are facing and why is it so hard to innovate?

Pam Marmon: I will say incentives putting on my hat as a change leader. When I think of organizations that want to be innovative, how we incentivize people to do that and how we treat failure has a lot to do with the outcomes that we get. If we punish people for failing at innovation of creativity, then that sends a very clear message that subconsciously people are going to be mindful of. But if we look at the incentives and if we incentivize people who try to think outside the box or creatively, or come up with alternative ways of doing work, and we recognize those individuals, not just financially, but we recognize their hard work and we give them more meaningful work or ability to work wherever they want to work. Whatever's important to them, I think we will see that ability for people to come out and really be innovative.

And also, that intellectual property that needs to be stimulated in the right environment. And I'm married to an engineer, who's an innovator. And so, I've had a hard time telling him, and this week you're going to invent something. So, I had to learn in my own marriage, how do I encourage my husband, who was a very creative person to innovate at his pace, in the right space that he needs mentally to be in. And just, I think as leaders, we need to recognize that. What will empower people to be creative and what are those barriers to creativity that we may have put in place subconsciously, or built within our organizations that are preventing people from thinking outside the box or behaving in a way that we want them to behave. And how can we kind of pull the strings and unleash people with that creativity for the benefit of everybody.

Brian Ardinger: It does seem like there's that dichotomy of thought as far as like, Hey, we want you to execute on this business model and what you've been doing and optimize and build this, but also we want you to completely destroy and come up with the next thing out there as well. And it's very hard to go back and forth between those two and explore mindset.

Pam Marmon: One thing that we do in my own family, because my husband and I are both entrepreneurs. We will buy things for the sake of breaking them, because we know that there's a learning process that happens when you explore something and you undo it and then you, the curiosity that needs to be built in just the mindset of anybody who's an inventor. And so that's, we've personally taken upon ourselves and sometimes it's expensive because it doesn't always come back together.

The learning that happens, I think, is really beautiful and the mindset that we want to cultivate within innovation and creativity and out of the box thinking and removing those barriers, what society tells us, how we should behave or what our lives should be like. We want to be able to step back and say, is that the right way? Is that the only way? And the more we expose ourselves to diversity and living in different places and doing different jobs and looking at different industries, I think that's where that creativity starts to truly bubble up because you start to connect the dots and see things that other people don't see.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. And I think that skill of adaptability is going to become even more and more prevalent as the pace of change accelerates. Are there particular examples or companies that you've worked with or you've seen out there that are doing this well?

Pam Marmon: I worked with a lot of Fortune 500 clients. And at that level, the innovator, there are different scale. There are certainly departments dedicated to just innovation and creativity. And I see a lot of resources and a lot of timelines that are not as nimble as the smaller companies that are creating the technology and the innovation that we're seeing else in the marketplace. I don't know if I can answer that question. It just depends on the size of the organization. The biotech companies that I'm working with right now are very creative and innovative because of that, our current environment, and our need and our society for the product that they're designing. I'm definitely seeing speed and attention, and just shifting the organizational priorities so that the creative pieces can come together faster and removing any barriers that may have held people back or any processes that would delay that innovation to take place sooner.

Brian Ardinger: It's a fascinating topic and I'm glad you came on Inside Outside Innovation to give our audience insights into this. If people want to find out more about yourself or your book, what's the best way to do that.

Pam Marmon: The book is available on Amazon. It's called No One's Listening and It's Your Fault. People can also find me on LinkedIn. They can connect with me there and on my website, Marmonconsulting.com. We have free resources available to any leader who is interested in leading transformation well. That's Marmonconsulting.com. I welcome anybody to come and check them out.

Brian Ardinger: Pam, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Pam Marmon: Thank you, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Shapiro. Steve is the author of a new book called Invisible Solutions. He spent a number of decades speaking and writing and working with corporations all around the idea of innovation. And how companies can reframe and relook at problems to get better results.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services, that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stephen Shapiro. Stephen is a innovation instigator, hall of fame speaker, author of six books including the most recent one that I wanted to have him on the show to talk about called Invisible Solutions. So Stephen, welcome to show.

Stephen Shapiro: Hey Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Actually, we got connected, I was interviewing Thomas Wedellsborg a few weeks ago about his new book, and we serendipitously started talking about an example that you talk about all the time. This idea of how do you reframe problems. And we want to start there and give a little bit of background on how you got into this innovation space.

Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So, I started off life and I guess I still am a bit of a nerd. I loved math and physics and all that stuff. Growing up, I was in the math club, went to college, majored as an engineer, left university, went to work for Accenture, and I was doing a lot of engineering work. And in fact, in the early nineties, I was actually involved with something called Business Process Reengineering, which was basically efficiency work. We would optimize businesses. And one day discovered that the more we optimize the company's processes, the more they would downsize the workforce. And I had just had this existential meltdown in. And took a leave of absence, reinvented myself. And in 1995, 1996 timeframe, I decided to focus on growth and innovation. Wasn't a hot topic that far back, but that's what I put my hat on and I've been loving it ever since. That's all I've been doing for 25 years.

Brian Ardinger: You've had the great opportunity to see the evolution of innovation specifically in a corporate environment and how companies look at innovation, how they treat it, how they execute on it. What are some of the things that you are seeing that people are getting wrong about innovation?

Stephen Shapiro: Well, it's been interesting, like you said, having been in for 25 years, I've seen the evolution. It started off as basically R & D. And then it started sort of in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004, it started to gain some traction in terms of it being a companywide, an enterprise wide endeavor, rather than just sort of this little group. But I think the thing which I've seen most organizations get wrong is they collapse innovation with creativity. And they believe that quantity of ideas will drive value for the organization. And from my experience, you might get there eventually, but it's an extremely expensive and slow way to go about it. So that to me is the biggest mistake is a focus on ideas and quantity rather than focus on questions, opportunities, and solutions that drive the greatest level of value.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that's an interesting topic because you talk to corporations that are spinning up innovation labs, and they're putting maybe 5 or 10 ideas in a year, hoping that one of those five or 10 will end up being Uber or whatever the next thing is. And not realizing that like the startup ecosystem alone is putting out thousands of these types of ideas and Uber or Twitter or whatever it comes out of those thousands of ideas. And it's very hard for any one organization to have that lead flow or deal flow in such a way to have enough of that throughput really to make that happen. If it's not about ideas or if it's not just about ideas, you know, you have to have the idea and you execute on it. What are some of the things that corporations should be thinking about when they start about thinking about innovation?

Stephen Shapiro: It comes down to, instead of focusing on the solution, it's focusing on the question. And the thing that I found is paradoxically, the more we try to focus on the end game, the goal, the, the solution, the less likely we are to find good ones. And so what I always tell my clients to do is anytime they're chasing ideas, chasing opportunities, just push the pause button for a moment. Just say, what are we really trying to achieve here? What's the problem we're trying to solve. What's the opportunity that we're trying to take advantage of. And is there a better way to ask the question that will get us a completely different result?

Sometimes it's that simple, but it's recognizing that having the answers isn't the answer. It really is about the question. The problem, I think a lot of times as leaders feel like they have to have the answers and I think that's actually not good leadership. A good leader is somebody who asks questions, which gets the rest of the organization to ask better questions. And when you have an organization, that's actually thinking about it from the perspective of what creates the greatest value. And is there a different way we can do it. We now get more much greater throughput than we would otherwise.

Brian Ardinger: And that whole fear of failure. It makes sense from the standpoint of corporations and organizations that have figured out a business model that works, you know, the idea of killing that business model or failing at that business model is quite scary. But yet if you're going to create something new that is uncertain, and unknowable have to go through some failures to figure out that and navigate that particular process.

Stephen Shapiro: Yeah. And here's an interesting, I just want to build on something you said earlier, is I'm not sure that large corporations should be doing a lot of radical innovation. Because if you think about the way markets work, I mean, we will talk about an Uber or Lyft as sort of this breakthrough innovation, but the reality is if you think about the number of companies, small startup companies that are trying new business models and new technologies and fail. The success rate is extremely small. So, to assume that a company is going to have a high likelihood of success is a high level of egotism in some respects.

If you focus on what the real opportunity is, then you can put a separation between the opportunity and the solution. And it doesn't mean you as an organization need to find the solution. It doesn't even mean you need to invest in developing it. You could use open innovation and crowdsourcing to buy a solution elsewhere. You could do tech scouting. You could partner, you could buy another company, you can license technology from another company. But when you put that pause between the opportunity, question, challenge, whatever you want to call it and the solution, it now opens up the range of possible opportunities.

Brian Ardinger: Right. And clearly defining what innovation means to you and your company. And how does that play out in your execution of those ideas across those horizons? That's interesting.

Stephen Shapiro: And my definition of innovation is very simple. It's relevance. What you're doing, needs to keep you relevant in the minds of whether it's your current buyers, your current clients, your future clients and customers, but it's all about relevance. And if you don't adapt, evolve and change enough as an organization to be relevant, then obviously you're going to be out of business. Innovation isn't about novelty. It's not about creativity. It's not about quantity. It is about adaptability and relevance.

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Brian Ardinger: You talk about this in the book a little bit. It's almost like a process of unlearning that you have to go through. It seems like too many folks either ask the wrong questions or approach it from a lens of what they've done in the past. So, can you talk a little bit about the process of kind of unlearning and how companies should be thinking about how to ask those questions?

Stephen Shapiro: One of my beliefs is that expertise is the enemy of many forms of innovation. Not all innovation. Incremental innovation obviously is driven by a deep understanding of the domain in which you operate. But when you're looking to expand. When you're looking to shift directions, when you're looking to create something that's a little bigger than just a small incremental improvement, our past experiences limit us.

And a large part of that is because of just the number of the assumptions that we have built into everything we do. So, we assume that we have an understanding of our customers. We assume we have an understanding of our competition. We have assumption around our industry, but the reality is we knew our customers. We don't necessarily know our customers because it's trite to say it, but everything is changing super-duper fast these days. And our understanding of the market tends not to change as fast as the market is changing. And so that becomes an albatross that prevents us from being able to adapt.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about your new book. It’s called Invisible Solutions: 25 lenses that reframe and help solve difficult business problems. Tell us about what readers can expect from it.

Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So, the reason why I wrote this particular book is my previous book came out nine years ago. And when I started sending around early copies of that book, people would read it and they would say, hey, you know, this whole part about asking better questions. That's really great. It's profound. It's interesting. You talk about why we need to do it and what we need to do, but I'm still struggling. How do I do it? And so soon after the book was launched, that book is called Best Practices Are Stupid. That was back in 2011. I started working on this collection of what I call lenses and lenses are nothing more than different ways to look at a problem statement.

It's not necessarily designed to find solutions, but rather to reframe the original problem as a way of finding potentially different solutions. And so, I just started cataloging these for about a decade and one day I thought, okay, it's time to write another book. And I had 10 years of using these lenses with companies and seeing incredible breakthroughs with them. And so, I decided just to package it up and the book is really heavily focused on the tool aspect. So, it's a very much a how book rather than sort of a why or what book that was really my goal.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about some of those lenses. I know you break them down into five categories as far as, you know, reducing abstraction, increasing abstraction zeroing in on the problem. Can you talk a little bit about some of the key lenses and maybe some examples of how their used?

Stephen Shapiro: Sure. I think they're all useful in different situations. A good one. First thing is I think when we're asking questions, when we're thinking about the problems we want to solve, either it's implicit in the problem we're trying to solve. So, like a suggestion box. Hey, give us your suggestions while the implicit question is how do I improve the business? Well, that's a big, broad, abstract question. And one of the things we know is if we ask those big, broad, abstract questions on average 99.9% of the ideas that are submitted will either be bad ideas or they're low value ideas or their ideas that the organization decides not to move forward with.

And so, it just wastes so much energy. So, the reduce abstraction lenses are the ones that take something like that. Like how can we increase revenues? Which might be big, broad, abstract question. And one of the lenses is the leverage lens and the leverage lens says, what's the one factor that will have the greatest impact. Like if we get only focus on one part of this, what would give us the greatest result? So, if you're trying to focus on revenues, maybe the greatest leverage is particular customers. Instead of trying to be the best for every customer, let's figure out who our best, most profitable, valuable customers are and really up our game for them.

Or it might be geographies. Maybe there's certain geographies where we really excel, and we'll get leverage there. So that's just one of the lenses and it really depends on the nature of the question, but I find that the 25 lenses really do apply to almost any problem with a little bit of creativity.

Brian Ardinger: Do you recommend somebody in an organization systematically going through those lenses and using those lenses on a regular basis when they encounter every core problem? Or how should one execute on that?

Stephen Shapiro: I think there's a lot of different ways that I've seen companies do it. I mean, sometimes it really is as simple as here's a project we're working on. Let's just put it on hold for a moment and let's just ask what's the underlying problem we're trying to solve with this project. And then let's take a half hour. I'm not talking about days or months. I'm talking about a half hour just applying some of the lenes. And what we've seen is in 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Just going through the lenses. Somebody's going to have a light bulb, especially when you do it as a group of people.

When they're having that conversation, a light bulb will go off and they'll realize, Whoa, we were moving quickly down the wrong path. We can move in a different direction and get a better result with less. And so, it's usually a collaborative effort. I find that's the best way to do it is with a group, go through the lenses. You can choose a lens at random; you can divide and conquer and then come back together. But it's not intended to be a long laborious process. And then what will happen is after a period of time after you do it, you now start to remember the lenses. If somebody asks me a problem statement, I can usually give you 20 reframes of that problem without having to whip out the lens.

Brian Ardinger: Can you give us an example of companies that have used this or some case studies that you've seen.

Stephen Shapiro: Sure. I remember working with a big consumer goods company. And one of the things that we were looking at that was how they were structuring their IT department. And we just started to look at it. And what we realized was is that they were handling everything for almost like the worst-case scenario. So, every process was overly complicated. And so, we use the variations lens, which says, okay, like instead of designing for the exception, let's design to handle the exceptions. Even if it takes a lot longer for the exceptions, but let's design for the most likely cases. And we'll have a variety of different strategies depending on the situation.

And just by using that technique, they were able to improve throughput by 60% while reducing the number of people that took to do the work. So, it's really this mindset that let's figure out what really, we need to be focused on. What's going to give us the greatest value. So, like the reduced lens is one which I really like, because a lot of times when we're talking about innovation, we're always talking about what can we add? What features should we put into our product for working with technology? What do we do to make it more sophisticated?

But the reduced lens comes from the perspective of sometimes simplification is the best innovation. What can we do to remove just even explicitly asking that question is what can we remove to make it a better product? How can we make it more accessible? How can we make it more valuable to people? Or how can we make it more valuable to the people we needed to have it be more valuable to?

Brian Ardinger: We are living in some disruptive times over the last 12 to 14 weeks, the world has shifted dramatically. And I now think a lot of folks have understood that what disruption really does mean what are you seeing out there in the marketplace? What are the questions that companies are coming to you and asking, and what are you seeing as far as new trends?

Stephen Shapiro: Well, I think the first thing is to recognize that there's typically, anytime you have a massive disruption, like we're going through right now, there's two phases that take place. The first phase is always sort of a reactive adoption. So, one of the things that we immediately saw as soon as nobody could meet in person, the problem everybody's trying to solve is how can we meet virtually when we can't meet in person, but that's a reactive knee-jerk approach to the problem. It's why Zoom's market cap tripled in just a few months, because everybody went on to zoom. But there is a second phase, which is to me, sort of a proactive innovation, which says, okay, you know what, just simply automating what we did in the past is not necessarily the best solution.

Let's again, put the pause button step back and say, how can we do it different? How can we do it better? And so, one of the things I'm finding is when we take the question of how do we meet virtually, well, now that can spin out into a whole number of different questions. So, for example, the resequence lens is really about timing. What could we do before? What could we do after?

We seem to assume that we need to get everybody together live, but like when I'm delivering a speech, there's a percentage of what I deliver that's sort of the same stories. So why would I deliver it when people are sitting live? I now, before an event, will set up a place where people can go and watch videos. Highly produced videos of me telling those stories so that when we meet live, we maximize the value of that in person conversation. So, it's changing the conversation, changing the question, changes the way we think about the problem.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's fascinating times we're living in. I do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation here to tell us a little bit about what you're seeing and give us some insights into how to navigate this new next. If people want to find out more about your book or more about yourself, what's the best way to do that?

Stephen Shapiro: So, you find out about the book at invisiblesolutionsbook.com. It's a super easy place to go. And you'll find out about me there. Another place to go, which is just a fun story. And you sort of alluded to this in the beginning is my baggage claim story, which is one of my favorites, baggageclaimstory.com. And it's a short six-minute video of me talking about how you can take a very simple common problem and reframe it a half dozen different ways to get some very cool and interesting solutions.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Stephen, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation and have a great day.

Stephen Shapiro: Fantastic, Brian. Thanks so much.

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Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder sits down with the creator of Pictionary, Rob Angel. Rob is a speaker, author, and entrepreneur and author of the new book Game Changer: The story of Pictionary and how I turned a simple idea into the bestselling board game in the world.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Rob Angel. Rob is the creator of Pictionary. Welcome to the show, Rob,

Rob Angel: Thank you for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: You've got a new book out called Game Changer: The story of Pictionary and how I turned a simple idea into the bestselling board game in the world. I wanted to get some insights into what it was like to create something from scratch and something that's well known throughout the world. Let's start at the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey and how you took paper and pencil and created a million-dollar business. Tell us a story of how you became the creator Pictionary.

Rob Angel: It's a long story, but the ultimate was that I was always open looking for ideas. I was always an entrepreneur and just waiting for my opportunity. And that came in the form of one evening. My roommate said, you guys want to play a game. We said, sure. Why wouldn't I want to play a game? And he called it charades on paper. We just sketch words out of the dictionary to each other. I'm 22, just recently graduated from college. 22 years old. And we started playing and I stay up all night for several nights in a row. And at this point, I'm thinking this would make a good board game. And that was the genesis. That was my first shot with picture. And I didn't start working on it for another two years, but that was the genesis.

Brian Ardinger: Have you always been entrepreneurial minded or was this something this was a stroke of genius, stroke of luck that pulled things together, that you decided to start a business around

Rob Angel: A little bit of both. Most things are a lot of hard work, but I've always had the mindset that I was going to work for myself. My father got fired when I was 19. And I thought if this executive, who I looked up to, my father is my role model could get fired. I wasn't going to let anybody have control over my future. And so, at that point, 19 years old, I said, okay, I'm going to do my own thing. And that kind of put me on this path of being an entrepreneur and to take care of myself.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about starting a board game, if you've never been in the game business, or I guess any business, if you've never been in that industry and that before. How did you go about thinking, well, there's something here and how can I incrementally such that I can create a business around it?

Rob Angel: Yeah, I think that's exactly the point. I mean, how many times have any of us had this wonderful idea for something? You get it? You ever walked out of a shower and thought Oh my God, here's my million-dollar idea that never got started. I think a lot of times that's because we overthink the process. Overthinking all the different steps to get there. And that's what happened to me. Is that I started thinking of all the steps necessary to put picture in the store shelf. I mean, physically, I could, I could visualize that, but I couldn't get started because I couldn't think straight if you will, over-thought all the steps.

So, I broke it down to its first easiest step. And for me, I think for a lot of us, that's easy to digest. Digesting business plans and marketing plans and all these other things that I knew, nothing about, was too much. So, breaking it down. I said, okay, what's that step? And it's making the word list. And for me, that was pretty simple because everything I needed was right there. You know, I didn't have to overthink it again, that a paper, a pencil, and a dictionary. Went in the backyard. And I started writing down the word list.

The first word I came to was aardvark. I wrote down the word aardvark, and that was my first Pictionary word, but that's how it got started. And so when you're thinking of ideas and you're thinking of things, it's not necessary to have everything in place. I didn't. Just know that it's easy to get started. Write down a word, get a Go Daddy domain name, whatever it takes, just to take that first step. And then just get excited about that first step. And that's when it gets started.

Brian Ardinger: So, you're excited after the first step, you start moving the ball down the path, so to speak. No business gets off the ground without hitting some obstacles. Tell us about the first time you hit an obstacle and decided to keep going through it, even though it was challenging,

Rob Angel: There's always obstacles. And as I say, it wouldn't be any fun if there were no obstacles, because it just makes you tougher. It made me tough. First obstacle was to find partners for me. I started working on the game and I had somebody join me, the business side, business end, and he quit. And so, I'm back to square one and we all know our limitations. We have to acknowledge. And I had to acknowledge the fact that I didn't want to run a business. And so, when this gentleman that I thought was going to be the guy quit, I had to find somebody else.

But what I found was that I found somebody that was aligned with my vision. I mean, when you're talking, you know partners, and you're talking about business, not just finding somebody that could cross the T and dot the Is and somebody that shares your passion and your vision, and that's what I've found in my partner and that set me on the path. Kept me on the path. Shall we say.

Brian Ardinger: So how did you go about finding a partner? Did you actively start going out, looking for somebody to help co-found this with you? Or was it serendipitous or talk us through that step?

Rob Angel: I think everything is serendipitous, we chalk it up. You chalk it up to, Oh, you know, I found the right guy and I found it. But I think serendipity has a lot to do with everything. Actually, the gentleman who quit did a play test and his friend showed up, and when I met him, it was like, Oh my goodness, it's almost a visceral reaction. I knew in my gut that he was the right guy. I mean, you know, people know when the right thing is happening. You kind of get, you know, break out a little sweat maybe or your heart rate races. Has that ever happened? Of course, that's happened. Because you know what is in front of you. What is transpiring is the right thing. And that's what happened when I met Terry my business partner.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk about some of the skill sets that you developed as an entrepreneur, as you're growing the business, that you either wish you had earlier on or some of the skills that you should be cultivating if you're looking to be an entrepreneur.

Rob Angel: To be an entrepreneur, you have to be open. It's a mindset. The skill set was, I didn't know what I was doing. I looked at that as a positive and a negative. That I didn't have the necessary tools. I mean, I was a waiter and there was no internet. So, I couldn't figure out how to make things happen except for what felt right. But I had an open mind that when something went wrong, I kind of knew something was going to go wrong. So, I didn't panic.

When you panic, you know, right, it's that panic mode where, oh my goodness things aren't going exactly as I planned. Well, nothing goes exactly as you planned. It just doesn't. That's life in general. And so, having the right mindset to do that and not panic so that you can center yourself and keep moving forward. And with skillset you just got to keep moving forward and work hard.

Brian Ardinger: Were there times when you almost packed it in or decided that this wasn't going to be the right path or were you always confident in the ultimate outcome?

Rob Angel: That's the question. I didn't know what the outcome was going to be, but I was passionate about Pictionary. So, there were many times where I was exhausted. I mean, you ever been so tired where it mentally and physically, where it's just too much. And that's what happened to me, but I developed this love of the game, the love of my partners and love of what we were doing. And that came from passion.

But that took time. It was just constantly moving. It was constantly moving forward, and it built up over time. So that got me up in the morning. Because for me, passion faded, not my passion for everything, but it turned into a love of what I was doing and that kept me up and got me up.

Brian Ardinger: So, when you were building out the idea, did you do a lot of customer discovery or did you just know in your gut that there was something to this that you're building? Or how did you go from nothing to that first customer?

Rob Angel: A lot of faith, but we did a lot of play tests. So, we took the game before it was an actual game and played it with family and friends. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just the fact that I was drinking beer with my buddies that made it fun. That's the thing about business and ideas. It could be a lot of fun, but unless you really test it out and see if anybody else is going to buy it, then you may not want to proceed.

I remember saying people later on they'd come to me with a game idea. They weren't very good. And I said, well, would you buy this? They'd say no. But other people will. So yeah, you've got to have something that works. I mean, passion is great, but you also have to make sure that the product or the vision or the app or whatever it is, serves a function. Are people going to buy it?

Brian Ardinger: So, you built Pictionary. At some point you sold it to Mattel in like 2001 or whatever. What was that like selling your baby to someone else? And what was that process like?

Rob Angel: That was one of those stop moments. Good and bad in my life. I'd been with Pictionary for 20 years by then. And it was a part of my life, but it was time and I had moved on a little bit. I'd had a family. And so, my priorities changed. When the opportunity arose, I took it. You have to know when it's time. Sometimes we'll run a business longer than we should. Stay with a nonprofit longer than we should. For me, it was time. It was still tough. I mean you woke up the next day. Oh my what have I done? But it was the right move.

Brian Ardinger: So, I'm curious to get your thoughts on board games. There's a resurgence going on, whether it's COVID or I think it probably started before that. What are your thoughts on this recent resurgence move away from video games and some of the other stuff to more traditional board game environment?

Rob Angel: It was definitely happening before COVID. I think it's that the term is high-tech high touch. I mean, the more we're looking down at our phones, the more we don't want to look down at our phones. We want to tack that; we want to touch. We want to communicate. We want to do it and games gives people that opportunity to do that for not a lot of time commitment.

And I think people were heading away from full time on their phones, full time on their technology. I wanted to reconnect, and I think that's just a function of the planet right now. It's shifting a little bit, all the current problems, notwithstanding towards that. Will the pendulum go all the way back? I don't think so, but is it a nice respite to the process accelerating? Absolutely.

Brian Ardinger: So, are you seeing any new trends or anything that's exciting you about the world today in either in entrepreneurship or in the entertainment space?

Rob Angel: Oh yeah. Use the technology of the day, it's like state-of-the-art, as they say, and there's all kinds of tools that people can use now to create music, to create board games, to create movies. And so, there's all kinds of new ways to be creative and tapping into those, I think is just going to enrich everybody and enrich the opportunities that we have to engage, have fun, and to just participate.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about the book. It's called Game Changer: The story of Pictionary and how I turned a simple idea into the best-selling board game in the world. It just came out. What made you decide to write a book and what can people expect to find in it?

Rob Angel: It was time. I did Pictionary many, many years ago, and I wanted to share my story of how me as a 23-year-old waiter, I dared to create the dream, to create the biggest selling board game in the world. And the story tells the ups, the downs, the tribulations, and the obstacles, both business and personal. And so, the book just tells that really fun story. And there's a lot of business lessons in there as well.

Brian Ardinger: Well Rob, I'm excited to get ahold of it and I encourage our audience to take a look at it as well. If people want to find out more about the book or more about yourself and that, what's the best way to do that.

Rob Angel: You can find it on Amazon under Game Changer, Rob., on Amazon. Or follow me in social media, @theRobAngel on all those social media platforms and join me on the ride.

Brian Ardinger: That sounds great. Well, I appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation to share your story. I have one last question though. Have you always been a good artist?

Rob Angel: You know, uh, I like to say Mr. Pictionary, can't draw. I've got a lot of talents, a lot of skills, but having me on your team is not to your advantage.

Brian Ardinger: Well that's good to know because I'm a terrible drawer. But I do enjoy the game quite a bit. Rob, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I appreciate you coming on and talking to about what you're doing now and what you did in the past and look forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Rob Angel: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

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Game Changer: The Story of Pictionary and How I Turned a Simple Idea into the Bestselling Board Game in the World

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Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi are co-founders of the incubator, Her Product Lab. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Monica and Lina about opportunities and barriers for women in the product development space and Her Product Lab's new seven-week incubator program designed to help women launch and grow new product initiatives.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, we have two amazing guests today, Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi. They are cofounders of a new project and a new venture called Her Product Lab. Welcome to the show.

Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you so much, Brian. We're so excited to be here.

Lina Bedi: Very exciting.

Brian Ardinger: Monica, you and I met a couple of years ago. I had a chance to come up to Milwaukee for the Fall Xperiment conference last year and do some podcasts there. And I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about this new venture that you spun up. And some of the changes that you've seen over the last several months in spinning up this particular project. I know we actually had this conversation pre COVID, but we wanted to postpone it because a lot of things have changed. So, tell us about what Her Product Lab is, and then we'll go into how it came to be.

Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you for that intro. In my day job, I was organizing events for product managers. And I was in the New York office, we have a New York office and a Milwaukee office, and in the New York office there's a lot of conversation about how there really isn't a community for women in product. You see a big presence out on the West coast, Advancing Women in Product. They have done a phenomenal job of really elevating women, their career, getting them into the mid-level and leadership roles out there. And we weren't seeing so much of that even in New York City and looking into other cities like Chicago, DC, Atlanta.

Our goal, when we had started out late last year, is let's have these summits. We'll bring women together. We'll have women on the stage talking about their careers. How did they move into the director roles, how to build better products? It was really incredible because only in two or three weeks’ time, after coming up with this concept and connecting with Lina, who's also very interested in this. We had a website, tickets were live. We had something like 20 presenters right off the bat. And it was one of the easiest events I ever put together because there was so much excitement around it.

So, the date of our first summit, March 26th, New York City, same week as lock down. I actually did this really somber activity where I walked over to where our venue is. I live not too far from there. And everything's just boarded up, no people on the street in another universe, there would be 200 people in this room, and we'd all be super engaged and talking about product development. So, it was a really crazy experience for us.

But I think the other thing that we saw was that nobody was asking for a refund. Everyone wanted to know when the date was going to be changed. We had this really loyal community that wanted to be part of this. And so we were trying to think of, well, how do we keep everyone engaged without being able to have in person events. And so, we started with some of the virtual events and that led us to think of this concept of a virtual incubator, which by the way, I'll just add one thing. We wanted to do an incubator as part of our two-year roadmap. We're thinking like 2022, we'll have an incubator. It will be really cool. And it will be New York based. And now it's just virtual and global, which we're really excited about.

Brian Ardinger: It seems that coronavirus has definitely accelerated a lot of the disruption that we were already seeing in the marketplace. And this is just a perfect example of that. So, Lina, maybe can tell us about yourself and how you got involved in this project.

Lina Bedi: I was introduced to Monica through a mutual friend, and we were talking about, you know, women supporting other women. And how far women can get when they're lifted. And when we think about product management, we were looking at the overall job market growth and product management and product management was and is booming.

So, the overall job market in the past two years increased by around 6% and product management is five times that amount. And then when we dug into the data even more, we see that the majority, of women are in entry level positions. And so, our goal was to really create a network community where we can give women access to senior leaders and help mentor them.

You know, these are a lot of the things that help propel my career forward and it’s a way of paying that forward. And, you know, that was the goal. And even though what we're doing now has shifted because of COVID, that goal still remains the same. Those overarching themes of what we're trying to achieve by connecting women to these leadership roles and giving access to training. Those are still the big umbrella that we're operating within.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that's interesting about her product lab, slightly different than a lot of the other incubators or accelerators out there. It seems to be focused, not just on starting a company, so to speak, but it's really about launching a product and maybe that early stage that it turns into a startup. Can you talk about why you decided to start with that emphasis?

Monica Rozenfeld: When we have a community of product managers, they're already thinking about product ideas all of the time. And they're not necessarily looking to be entrepreneurs, start a company, hires a team, go through the whole process of all that it takes to actually launch a company. But maybe they have a concept that they either want to turn into a side hustle that they want to even pitch to their current employer. And that's very common if you're working in, for example, I work in FinTech. Maybe you have a concept that you think would be really great in that space and you can sell it to your own leadership even. So, it's a very different model. We've talked to so many women in our community who have an idea, and I'm sure as you know Brian, a lot of people sit on ideas for a very long time and sometimes you just need that nudge of a next step.

And so, our goal is really to help connect them with mentors. One-on-one. Bring in coaches each week that can help them in each stage of the process. So, by the end, they have the option of what they want to do next. None of them have to quit their day jobs. We've created this to be around their full-time schedule. And after seven weeks they might say, Hey, I really want to pitch this to a VC and turn this into a startup. I really see the vision for it. And I'm ready to commit full time to it. And then I think that would be awesome if we see some of that happening, but that's not the goal for everybody.

Sometimes people just think, I think this should exist. Nobody else has built it. I want to be the one to build it. I like that approach a lot. Lina, can you talk about this rise of no coders and ability to spin up product that you might not have been able to do a decade ago without a lot of help? It seems like individuals have a lot more say and ability to experiment and do things and they have in the past. Can you talk a little bit about how some of these new tools and that play into how you're helping people launch product?

Lina Bedi: The amount of tools that are now available at anyone's fingertips is just mind blowing. And none of that existed before. And there's so many resources out there. And when we look at our, you know, the seven-week program, these are the things that we would highlight to people going into the program. The first week would be an introduction and pitching the product. Each week would be a different module with classes once a week. And, you know, with some homework or some takeaways after the session, they each, or dive into a different area of expertise.

So, after the initial product assessment and validating the concept, we would go into design. Looking at UX design principles, how should this be marketed? How should it be designed? Another module would then be like vetting what the product would look like in the marketplace. How is it marketed? What is the price point look like? And so, we just go through the different weeks and like Monica said, ultimately by the end of it, you hopefully have something you're ready to pitch with a fully functioning website so that it can be taken to that next level.

Brian Ardinger: I understand you're trying to build out a complete mentor network and have quality speakers and that come present to the people that go through this program. Can you talk a little bit about some of the people you may have on board or some of the mentors that you're bringing in to help?

Lina Bedi: You know luckily, when we started planning out the conference, we had already built relationships with some senior women in the industry who were going to present at our conference. And so, for us, that's a great starting point. The relationships are there and we're already familiar with their area of expertise and they're already bought into the idea of Her Product Lab and the goals that it stands for. And then also we've been doing a series of office hours sessions on Fridays, where we do deep dives into topics such as influencing or how to find a job in a COVID environment.

And so the topics have been varied, but we've really furthered our network. In terms of experts in the area on different topics from those sessions as well. You know, that's a great starting point. As we look at mentors and coaches for the program, since the relationships are already there and it's already a good fit for what we're trying to do.

Monica Rozenfeld: I think the thing that's kind of surprised me from the get-go of it. And especially now that we're launching the incubator is how many people are reaching out to us? Asking how they can help, how they can promote it. I mean, I had one VC who actually created a banner for this, for social media. It's just organically spreading on its own. And when I look at the people who've already applied either to be an applicant or to be a mentor coach, I don't know any of these people and I don't know how they found out about us. And I think that is the most exciting thing that it's spreading far and wide naturally.

Brian Ardinger: What are some other trends that you're seeing, or some of the ideas that are being presented to you? What kind of excites you about the next steps for this program?

Lina Bedi: You know, one thing earlier on before we even decided to have the conferences, we had done some research with Alpha. And the feedback that we got on this topic in terms of just women wanting support from other women, women looking for mentors, women looking for training outside of the traditional like workforce, was overwhelmingly positive. And so, you know, that is what really motivates us and gets us excited because the need is there. And between Monica and myself, we have the resources to be able to pull this together and to be able to help other people that we know have voice that they're looking for, something of this sort, is really exciting.

Monica Rozenfeld: Yeah. And I think I'll just add to that, like, some of the things I'm noticing already. And it's very early on in the process. Our deadline for applications is end of the summer, August 28th, is the type of ideas that are coming in are really about helping people. And so, when you think of a product that could really be anything like coming up with another mobile game or whatever. And a lot of the concepts that are coming in are, you know, I struggled with something or somebody in my family struggled with something. I see a real problem and I want to solve it. And I feel that a lot of the stories are quite emotional.

So, in our application process, we ask questions like, tell us about yourself. How did you come up with the concept? One of the other questions we have is what's been holding you back from launching it. And so, I think the second piece of what I personally am excited about is really supporting women in a real way, because I think there's one thing to say, here's how to launch a product and another to address the things that stop us from launching it. With women specifically, and I don't mean to generalize, but it's a conversation women have quite a bit. Struggle with imposter syndrome, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of public speaking. There's all of these other things that kind of prevent us from getting to that point. And so, we really do want to focus on those areas as well, either through the mentorship or even bringing in some coaches that can address those issues as well.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I think that's an important part. And that was one of the things that intrigued me about your program is the fact that it wasn't just your standard accelerator blocking and tackling of the business side of things, but really tried to address some of the obstacles that entrepreneurs and innovators have at early stages of getting something off the ground.

If people want to find out more about the program or about yourself, and that what's the best way to do that.

Monica Rozenfeld: They can go to our website. It's Herproductlab.com. There's a tab for the incubator and if they're interested in being a coach or mentor. There's an application right there, and you can also email us at info@herproductlabs.com as well. And we will respond within 24 hours.

Lina Bedi: Thank you, Brian, for having us. This is really, really exciting and I'm happy to be a part of it.

Brian Ardinger: Monica, Lina, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation, looking forward to seeing what happens with the first batch of folks that finished the program. And we'll have you back on later.

Monica Rozenfeld: I'm looking forward to that too. Thanks, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, look forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck to you. That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jorge Arango. He's an information architect and author of the book, Living in Information. Jorge and Brian Ardinger talk about how Jorge's background and traditional architecture has affected his insights and approach to digital design. They talk about some of the trends in information architecture, and how digital environments are changing the way we work and live.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jorge Arango. He is the strategic designer and information architect and author of the book called Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places. Welcome to the show Jorge.

Jorge Arango: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about your book, but more importantly, to talk about this whole world of information architecture. If my research is correct, you started your career in traditional architecture. And so I'd like to maybe start there and talk about how did you go from the world of physical architecture to the world of digital design?

Jorge Arango: Yeah, that's right. So, I studied architecture as in the design of buildings and it's been a while now. I'm part of a generation of folks who came into the workforce at a very interesting time in history when the worldwide web was coming into focus. It was becoming a thing. And when I saw the web, I essentially left my career in architecture to start a web design studio, because it seemed to me at the time that this was a new medium that would change the world. We didn't know yet, in what ways it would change the world, but it was pretty clear that it was going to be huge.

Brian Ardinger: To give the audience of understanding of what is information architecture and how does that differ then UX design or creative and that?

Jorge Arango: Yeah, there is some overlap there in that information, architects help create the experiences that people have when they interact with software. But it's in no ways constrained by the design of software. So, information architecture is focused on helping make information easier to find and understand. So, think of something like an online store where you maybe are offering your customers, a large catalog of goods.

There are going to be ways for you to structure that information so that your customers can find what they're looking for. And so that they can do things like compare products to other products or find related products and establishing those relationships, figuring out what distinctions to enable is a big part of what information architects do.

A lot of people who are involved with the design of software-based experiences, think of design as concerned with the way that things look and how they function. And that is certainly an important component of it. But information architects are concerned with the underlying structures that inform those things. That includes things like categories, navigation systems, the way that search engine search functionality, and such a system is structured and organized. Those are all within the area of concern for information architects.

Brian Ardinger: I can see now where traditional architecture can have a major influence in how you develop digital environments. How do you think you're learning in the physical world has influenced your digital design capabilities?

Jorge Arango: That's one of the reasons that I actually jumped on the web back in the mid-nineties. It was pretty clear to me that there was a direct relationship between the stuff that I'd been studying in architecture school and what was needed for this new medium.

The main things that I often talk about are a concern for structure. A building is not just a collection of forms and spaces. It is also a series of systems that are structural systems, right? Like, and you can think in traditional architecture terms or building architecture terms, you can think of the columns and beams and other physical structural elements that hold the building up and allow it to resist the forces like gravity.

It was pretty clear to me that there were structural aspects to the web experience even fairly early on. And the other one, which I've already touched on, was the fact that these are systems. They're never freestanding elements. And when you're designing the user interface to a software-based product or service, the stuff that you see on the screen, isn't all there is to it. Oftentimes these things form part of and relate to other component. That's very much within the area of concern for building architects as well. You have to be mindful of all of the systems that make up a building when you're designing such a thing.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagine as you're building out more and more digital products and more and more people are becoming used to that, it was different back when you're just developing a website and that was a place people went typically. But now digital is involved with virtually everything. Your phone's in your pocket and your hand. Smart technologies, IOT, things along those lines are giving you data and giving you access to things that changed the physical world, as well as the digital world. How do you go about approaching a new project to start mapping out how these systems and structures interact?

Jorge Arango: Again, there's a learning there from design of buildings. So, when you're designing a building, one of the first things that you want to do is understand what is called the program. Let's say that you've been hired to work on the design of something like a dance studio. When designing a building to serve the functions of a dance studio, there are going to be certain functions that that environment is going to have to be able to accommodate. And those functions call for different types of spaces. For example, in a dance studio, you're going to want rooms for people's bodies to be able to make a series of movements. And that dictates the form of those spaces.

You're also going to want. Other types of rooms that enable people to change in and out of their street clothes so that they can get into clothes that they're more comfortable performing dance moves with. And there's a whole host of other functions that such a building must accommodate. And architects oftentimes start by thinking about the program that a building must accommodate and what types of spaces are going to have to be a part of that and how those spaces relate to each other.

And the same is true for people who are designing software-based experiences. I find that one of the things most missing in our disciplines these days is taking a step back from how things will look and function and really thinking about what functions the quote unquote place must accommodate and thinking about those different parts of the environment, relate to each other. There's a discipline called conceptual modeling that delves into this. Thinking about the experience kind of in the abstract and how the different functions must relate to each other. What components must be there.

That is usually where I start. When you're designing particularly a complex product or service. You have to start there because if you don't have a sense for the different functions that the environment or the system is going to have to provide, if you start dealing with them kind of in a piecemeal manner, you're going to miss out on opportunities to enable coherence.

Brian Ardinger: Are you going back and forth between the real world and trying to understand how that user is experiencing the real world and then mapping that and how that would play out on a screen in that environment.

Jorge Arango: The fact is that we're living in a time when the digital is increasingly becoming reality. I think that when you're saying reality, you mean our physical environment. So right now you and I are talking and having the sort of conversation that people 120 years ago, would have had to be sitting in the same physical room to be able to have. But you and I, our bodies are very distant from each other. We're in different physical environments. We're sharing this conversation. The tool that we're using to record this, I'm looking at it on a window, on my computer in front of me.

So somehow like my physical body is not in the same place than where we're having this conversation. And increasingly more and more of our interactions, kind of at every level, especially now in this time of the coronavirus pandemic, where so many of us are now, quote unquote, working from home, which essentially means working from our computers. Now, many of the things that people would do in the real world, we're now doing in these software-based environments. And the structure and design of these things is becoming ever more critical. So, for me, I go back and forth in the lessons that I bring from architecture, but my focus is squarely on the digital realm.

Brian Ardinger: You book, Living in information, has received really high praise. One of the quotes I saw was it's the single best book on user experience I've read in over 20 years. So what made you decide to write a book about information architecture and what's in the book for folks out there to learn from.

Jorge Arango: Yes. So, thank you for that. Living in information is actually the second book I've worked on. The first book, I was coauthor of the fourth edition of the information architecture book from O'Reilly, Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond. And I start there because I have been a part of the information architecture community, there's a global community around this discipline. And I have been an active member of that community for a long time. And one of the conversations that has been very active in that community, I would say over the last 15 to 20 years has been this idea that we are moving many of our key interactions to environments that are not made of bricks and steel and wood, but made of words and icons and that we experienced in screens.

So we've been talking about this for a long time, but what's happened over the last five years is that we've become more aware of what the effects are of moving large portions of our interactions, including things like civic discussions, to such environments. Particularly environments that are designed with a business model that is predicated on monetizing our attention. So that has all kind of come to a head in the last five years or so. And that was one of the things that precipitated my writing of the book.

It's the idea that if you're going to properly work on the design of an information environment, and if you're dealing with any kind of software-based experience, that is what you're doing. You can't limit yourself to thinking about the user interface of that thing. You know, the buttons and the labels and the navigation bars that people are going to be looking at on their phones or on their computers. You have to think a bit more deeply about things like the underlying structures that inform those things.

And even more deeply onto things like the business strategy of the organization that is commissioning the work. And what purposes they're looking to serve. These are things that designers oftentimes don't talk about, but they play a huge role. And if you're going to do a proper job as a designer, there's a tendency for designers to say that they're in this to serve the needs of the user and that their user centered.

The needs of the end user of the product are incredibly important. But when you're designing any kind of software-based experience, you also have to be mindful of the needs of the organization that is looking to create the thing and ideally the needs of the organization and the needs of the end user are aligned. They're in sync, they complement each other. They're working towards shared goals.

Sometimes they might be intentioned with each other and it behooves the designers to make those tensions manifest. I like to say that design is about making the possibilities tangible so that they can be tested. And that calls for designers to be aware of what the forces are that are shaping the thing that they are designing. That requires that we dive deeper than just user interfaces.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a bit about the timeline of how you go about designing these structures. Are they designed to be timeless or, you know, as the world changes so abruptly and new technologies are coming to play and that, how much of what you design needs to be relooked at or redesigned as the environment changes?

Jorge Arango: I'm glad you asked that question because it's one of the main reasons why I advocate for thinking more deeply about these structures. We are under the impression, and it's an appropriate question, that software-based experiences change very frequently. And that's because the software itself, the technologies are evolving very fast. But oftentimes, when you really look at them, especially the ones that have been around for a while, when you examine them and by them, I mean, information environments, things like websites and apps. When you stop to look at them over longer stretches of time.

And by the way, when I say longer stretches of time, this is a fairly young discipline, right? Like architecture has been around for hundreds of years. And buildings have been around for thousands of years. Software based experiences are fairly new, but if you look at the ones that have been around for a while and you to examine them on a timeline, you'll notice that the user interface, the presentation layer change in response to the changing technologies. So, for example, 20 years ago, if you were designing for the web, you had a very limited set of fonts to choose from. Web browsers weren't very good at serving up fonts. You had very limited color palettes that you could work with. Bandwidth wasn't as high as it is today. So, you can only do relatively small images. All of those things have changed over time.

So, the presentation of these things has evolved, but if you look at the structures, as they manifest in things like navigation bars, and labeling systems, and such things, you'll notice that those change more slowly. They have a tendency to stick around for longer, especially if the environment is serving the needs of the organization. One example that I point to in some of my presentations, and I think it's in the book also, is when I was working on the fourth edition of the information architecture book, I was going through and updating the examples. That's a book that first came out in the late nineties. So, it's been around for a while.

And the last edition had been written in the early two thousands. You know, I was going through it and updating the examples. And I remember seeing the example for fedex.com, which is the website of FedEx, obviously. And that's one that struck me where like, if you were to look at the screenshot side by side, and these were screenshots that were taken 10 years apart, you could tell that the UI had evolved, but the navigation labels, the things that you could do there, and the different parts of the environment were still very similar. So that part of it hadn't changed that much. So those structural distinctions tend to stand the test of time longer. So we have to be more mindful when we design those things.

Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. What are you seeing in information architecture that either excites you or scares you about the world coming?

Jorge Arango: This is a question that I would have answered differently a month ago, perhaps. And I'd say that just for the benefit of folks who might be listening to this in the future, we are recording this towards the end of March of 2020. When the world, at least those of us in the Western hemisphere are facing the full blunt of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has accelerated and intensified the processes that I wrote about in Living in Information.

That book by the way, was written in 2017. For the most part, it was three years ago. And these were tendencies, you know, this idea that we're moving to do more and more things online was something that was obviously true back then. But now it's mandatory. Like we're all having to work from home. Right. So, systems like Slack. And Microsoft teams have suddenly become more than just an important component of our work environments. For many of us they've become the work environment and this structure of those systems is somewhat open-ended.

So, if you think of a system like Slack, when you first install Slack, they have a couple of channels where you can have conversations and you are free to structure those however, you may please. And it's not an easy thing to do. You might decide when you first install Slack, for example, to create a new channel for each one of the teams in your organization.

That is a very different way of organizing it than structuring channels based on projects. It might be that you have both, but if you have both, then you might raise the question of where do I find certain things, right? Was this something that was posted in my team's channel or was it posted in the project channel?

So, there are decisions to be made that at the structural level, that have a great deal of import and affect your ability to get things done. My sense is that we are going through a period where the need for information architecture is becoming greatly accelerated and more urgent by the very nature of the fact that a much higher percentage of the working population is now being forced to work from these environments.

By the way, I expect this event, we don't know yet how it's going to change the world, but I expect that there will be an impact to this that will be felt long after the crisis has subsided. I think that there are some points that we're crossing now that will change things irrevocably. So, I'm fully expecting information architecture to become a much more prominent and more important.

Brian Ardinger: So, do you have any recommendations for the lay person out there to start thinking about some of t thing or getting up to speed on how to at least be cognizant of these choices that they're making, for example.

Jorge Arango: I'm tempted to be self-serving and to point you to some of the literature in the field, particularly the O'Reilly information architecture book. That is the book to consult if you're curious about this stuff. My book Living in Information is more about the overall balance between these forces that we've been talking about. More poignantly, to who might be doing work online these days, I would say, be mindful of how and where you're working now and how those places are structured. Right. You might find yourself having a hard time or a harder time dealing with certain work activities. And it might not be the fault of the teammates. It might be the fact that things are not structured properly.

One of the folks who is kind of a founding father of information architecture, especially for the digital environments, Peter Morville, once wrote an article where he spoke of this as the pain with no name, because people experience the challenges of not being able to find or understand things, but they don't know that there are ways of thinking about it so that you make it better. And just know that it might not be your fault. If you're having a hard time collaborating, it might be just the environment is not structured properly and that there is a way to do it so that it serves your needs and the needs of your teammates.

Brian Ardinger: I like that advice, like the idea of just being more cognizant of your surroundings, more cognizant of the problems that you're facing and documenting that if nothing else, so you can see how you potentially could solve them in the future.

Jorge Arango: If I might add an image Brian, you might have had the experience of suddenly being asked to do work in an open environment. Let's say something like a coffee shop, where, and I will say these days, I think many of us might be missing the opportunity to work at a coffee shop. You might have had the experience of trying to work in a very loud environment, right. Like a coffee shop or somewhere where you're in a shared space with a lot of people who are making a lot of noise and it becomes hard for you to focus. I think that's an example of this idea that the context where you're working impacts your ability to do the work.

Now think about the digital experiences that you're having as environments and ask yourself is the amount of noise conducive to my doing my best work. There are Slack communities where there's a very high noise to signal ratio, right. There's a lot more noise than signal coming through. And people are posting random things and it looks like a chat. So people approach it like a chat. Just be mindful of those things. You want to work in a place that makes it possible for you to focus and is not stealing your attention.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Jorge, this has been fascinating conversation. Thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation to tell us a little bit more about what's going on in this world. If people want to find out more about yourself or your books, what's the best way to do that?

Jorge Arango: The best place is my website. It's Jarango.com. So, my first initial and surname.com.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.

Jorge Arango: It was my pleasure, Brian,

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Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places

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Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest, the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Henrik Werdelin. He is an entrepreneur, author, he is best known for co-founding Bark and BarkBox. He also started the venture studio Prehype and he's author of a new book called The Acorn Method: How companies get growing again. Henrik, welcome to the show.

Henrik Werdelin: Thank you.

Brian Ardinger: Was that not a good enough intro for you?

Henrik Werdelin: Perfect. No, no, no. I appreciate it very much. I am just hot in New York. It's a very humid here. And so, I get all aware with you being able to see yourself.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because we could go 30 minutes of your introduction to the things that you've done and that. And. One of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on the show is because you epitomize the insideoutside.io world of both startups and corporate innovation.

You're a builder, a maker, a doer, investor. So, we could take this conversation in a lot of different ways and we'll see where it goes. As people come into the live show, feel free to put your questions in the Q and A we'll try to get to that as well. I thought where we could start off is how did your founder journey start? How did you get going as an entrepreneur? And how did that lead you to the path you are at today? And then we'll get into the book and some other things.

Henrik Werdelin: I mean, I don't think I've ever seen myself as a founder. I think, you know, it's a relatively new term, this idea of identifying yourself as an entrepreneur. And when I went to primary school, I was the idiot that started the school magazine. I was the one that says, Hey, we should have a radio station and so I've always just found that it was relatively easy to just do things, I guess. Like it started all the way back in the like eight or nine and just stuff like that.

I thought I wanted it to be a journalist. And then I ended up working for MTV back in the late nineties. And I was lucky enough to stumble into what later became a product role. I had the fortune / stupidity of bringing into the studio of MTV and transmit an hour live for some show that I thought was good. And luckily the people there thought it was good too. So instead of getting sued or fired, I ended up getting promoted. And so, for a good eight years or so, I got to fly around on MTVs dime and build products, you know, ranging from SpongeBob to Teddy bears to making computer games. And so that is where I always felt where the whole thing started, I guess.

Then after that I started a few startups, some that were successful and we sold, and some that was less successful in that we talk less about, but I never kind of like necessarily see myself as a founder of something. I've always seen myself as somebody who gets intrigued about problems and try to find a way to solve those problems in a scalable way.

Brian Ardinger: And that's an interesting point because I think a lot of founders or people who want to be founders, they approach it from the solution side rather than the problem side first. Yeah, I want to be a founder because Bitcoin's hot right now. So, I'm going to start a Bitcoin startup. Something along those lines versus really trying to dig into what's of interest to you, where are the problems that you can solve and then back your way into solutions and that around that.

You've got a new book out called The Acorn Method that journeys or chronicles this methodology that you've been using to help corporations and other folks spin up new ventures by themselves. So maybe talk a little bit about Prehype and then talk about how the book came about, and then we'll go from there.

Henrik Werdelin: I was fortunate enough to be part of a company that we started that ended up selling into Facebook. And I think after that, I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I think as people who have done entrepreneurial endeavors will sympathize with, you have this interesting kind of point after that you leave your startup for whatever reason.

And that is that everybody's pushing you on what do you want to do next? Like, do you want to go to corporate? Do you want to be an investor? Do you want to do a start up again? And I think the reality is often you just don't know, and you're just tired. You probably often don't want to do anything remotely associated what you did before, because you're very tired of that. And so, I kind of felt there was a need for this halfway house for second time founders that didn't really know what to do with their life. And I couldn't really call it that. So I packaged it up as Prehype and that became a network of entrepreneurs and residents that are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives and to not sound like we're in self-realization mode, we package it up a little bit nicer.

And so, on the top of that, we've built an Institute where we teach entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurial classes, and we teach at universities like Stanford. And then we have our own incubation units where we managed to build a number of relatively successful startups. Bark being one of them, but Managed by Q and Roman, other companies that come out from our building.

And then thirdly, we had a consultant arm that helped corporations build the incubation programs. And those three things allowed all us misfits to figure out where in those kind of buckets we would like to play, but also to generate a little bit of cashflow while we were figuring it out.

Brian Ardinger: It sounds like it was scratch your own itch and the scratch the itch were the folks that you had around you that were in the same mode of like, what do we build next? How do we do this? Did you have a methodology or a thought process around how you're going to do this? Or did you just kind of experiment with different things? Threw it out there to see if it would work?

Henrik Werdelin: I think both. Right. You know, I think it used two words that I love a lot, which is experimentation and methodology. Right. I do think that we as entrepreneurs. Need to become better at building from scratch in the way that we become better is not necessarily always to kind of like have a higher chance of success. It's also, how can we become better of stopping things that do not work?

I take great inspiration in my wife as a scientist who look at experimentation as a problem she's trying to solve. And then she architects a way to try to solve it and experiment. And then either it is viable or is not viable. And if data doesn't suggest her, that is viable, then it is just not like, you can't pitch a great experiment in the scientific community, you know, like even if the data doesn't support it, I think about entrepreneurship in that way.

And so, the two things that I think I've spent a lot of time on is look at entrepreneurship as an academic exercise. How do we become better at building? And the way I think we become better at building is become better of doing experimentation. We are very methodical in our approach and we are methodical because we're all very optimistic and somewhat creative people that if we don't create boundaries and discipline for ourselves, our bias will simply just make our work on something that doesn't pan out for a long time.

Brian Ardinger: Can you walk us through the methodology a little bit of how you decide what to even experiment on. Do you do that in your lab and then go out into the real world? Or is it case by case basis based on what I'm trying to build or what are you trying to learn?

Henrik Werdelin: I mean, why don't I start with kind of like the fundamentals of the book, and then I can use that because I think we can go very nitty gritty. Like we spend endless amount of time on each of our different modules and so I could talk to you probably for an hour about how we do something we call Signal Mining, which is just the concept ideation. I think you had Thomas Wedell, who wrote a book about Reframing. We are very inspired by his work and like he can spend hours talking about just that.

So, on a big level, I think for corporate incubation, which I think is different than just the entrepreneurs, individuals, building companies. The three components I'm looking at is basically what is the equipment of the acorn? And if you look at what an acorn is, basically some DNA and it's some fertilizer and it's some rules, which is basically find a place to sprout and then grow fast and up. Those are basically fundamental rules of an acorn. Now for corporations, what they tend to do when they want to build something from zero to one, is that they go to their existing infrastructure. And it's just very complicated for your standard innovation team, tech team, business development team to build something from scratch because your whole infrastructure is not set up to do that.

So the first component, I think what we have, what we thought a methodology for is how do you identify that talent and what is the structure that you create around them in order for them to give them the ability to find a place to sprout and then go up. And so that's section one, section two is like, where do you have opportunity to grow? Like where's opportunity spaces? And I think same thing like, the cool thing for an entrepreneur is that we have no rules.

I have been involved in a men's health company, a technology company for real estate and dog toys. Right. You know, and now a corporation obviously normally has like a scope that they have to kind of work with. And some have pretty limited scope of where they can work. And some have broader. A Nike can build a hotel because they have brand permission to do that. Hilton cannot build a shoe. And so, depending on the corporation and what you have, what your brand is, what patents and licenses and whatever you have as assets, gives you a different kind of opportunity scope.

The third thing I would change is one of the things that probably is most complicated is what is the interface between basically a sprout and the mother tree? Like how do you make sure that it's far enough away so that the mother tree doesn't kind of take away the water and the sunshine, but it's close enough that the mother tree can provide it with nutrients to the root system.

What is the compliance system, all those different stuff? And so, I think the talent and the organization around that, the opportunity space and the interface is probably the three components that I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out.

Brian Ardinger: I like that analogy because I think it does outline, especially in the corporate world, why a lot of things don't work. Sometimes it's too close to the core or get smushed out or things along those lines. You talk about talent as one of the core factors. How does a corporation look at either identifying or developing talent when to a large extent they've built their business on an existing business model and finding the right types of folks that are designed to optimize that existing business model and not necessarily designed to search or explore new business models.

Henrik Werdelin: I think a segment of entrepreneurial talent is really looking for autonomy and the ability to make that thing that they have, they see from their inner eye. So I think a lot of conversation very quickly goes to what's compensation, which I think is important, but back to your earlier point, a lot of us that aren't understand statistics, we do not choose an entrepreneurial path because we think it's going to make us a lot of money because we just know statistically, it probably won't. Now, we hope, and we use that as an excuse for many of the downfalls of entrepreneurship. But like we also realized that the reality is that it might not. I find that there is much more entrepreneurial talent within large organizations than most people give it credit for.

And that if you ask anybody who sits in an organization and say, Hey, do you know any of your colleagues who might leave within the next 12 months to start their own company? They probably have a name of one or two people that might do it. And it's often not defined by what team they sit with. It's more so a personality trait. It's somebody has a little bit of education. It's somebody, who's a generalist. It's somebody who has great empathy for the user. It's somebody who understand how to reframe. It's all those different things. The talent you can either attract by creating structures that allow hunters to go and hunt for opportunity within your space and not just the farmers that are very good at harvesting, kind of like the fruits of stuff that people in the past that made. Or you can find within and creating processes and structures that allow them to work in the way that you do.

A lot of time it is conflicting because you will hear corporations say we should embrace a culture of trying to fail, and you go like, okay, great. How many times do you ever give a bonus to anybody who didn't make it? Zero. Right. You know, like how many free credit card spending can somebody use on Upwork to just try something out without having, going through compliance and finance? So, we say these things, but the structures doesn't kind of like support it. And in my view, structures define the outcomes and so transferred that was long winded version of saying that I think the talent is there. And the talent is probably more there than people realize. What they do not have the tools and the freedom and autonomy to act in the way that we can act on the outside of the walls.

Brian Ardinger: It seems to me also like a lot of what you've built in your successes and that focuses also around the network and your ability to bring not only existing talent to it, but the mentors, the investors, the network that can help that new idea grow. Can you talk a little bit about how you build a network and how important that is to building a new venture?

Henrik Werdelin: I do think that a skilled entrepreneur is to have gravity. You often do not have money either because you don't have the budgets internally or because you just don't have the capital yourself. And so, you need to use endless amount of chop and wit and trickery and whatever it is to get people to work for free for you.

You know, that could be colleagues that you're trying to hire to work for options that might not be worth anything at that time. It might be customers of your business that you're trying to get to work for you in the sense of like, they'll help you kind of figure out your next feature. And they'll give you a little bit of slack when the stuff that you're doing, isn't working. It's investors, and what have you.

And gravity can come in different ways. Like you can be an outspoken red-faced guy with a Danish accent, and you can try to use that as your tool. You could be somebody who is just insanely talented and can code like the wind and use that for tools. So, it comes differently. So, I do think that figuring out, like, what is your ability to attract people is a way that I've tried create network. And so that's kind of like, what is it that you have that come easy to you that comes difficult to others?

I think for the other element is to not be too needy. Network only really works if it's two way, otherwise you're just talking at people and I do try to use empathy as a, you know, maybe it's cause I grew up with my mom, like I learned to use empathy as, as a tool to kind of figure out what people need. And then you help figuring out like, what is it in the path of you trying to succeed that what they need can be fulfilled and then you help them do that. And then together one plus one makes three.

Brian Ardinger: You've had a lot of different plates spinning at the same time. You know, whether you're running multiple different ventures or, you know, just managing different businesses at the same time, I understand you're pretty good at life hacks. And you've documented some of that stuff as well, including the fact that the, maybe how you found your wife. I've heard interesting stories around that. You want to talk a little bit about some of your life hacks and how you manage all the stresses of everything that you've built.

Henrik Werdelin: As mentioned, I like experimentation and methodology. And so I take that somewhat to the extreme. With my own life I have these eight boxes that I mentioned to a friend of mine who then wrote it off, as a post. I call it the Eight Plus One Framework. And so, I have these things, which I think holistically kind of like will make my life successful. And in short order, it's transact, which is about making money. It's about invest, which is about accumulating wealth over time. Compounding. It's about the assist about helping people, courses or individuals. It's about health, you know, keeping your mind and your body healthy. It's about learning, which is about becoming a better version of yourself. About family, it's about relationships. And it's about self-kindness.

So, I look at those eight boxes and the reason why it's called eight plus one is because they then sit down every week and I try to come up with experiments of figuring out how do I become better at each of these things? And I architect experiments for it. And so, I have a six-year-old and on the weekends we play and we sit in his playroom and a few months back, I noticed that I didn't enjoy the playing that much. And so, I would basically look at my phone and he would call me on it and he'd make me feel shitty. Right. So, you know, my next little session, I was gonna think, okay, what could be a better way of spending that hour?

And it sounds very vanilla, but like I grew up playing ping pong. And so, I found something online where you can turn your dining table into a ping pong table. And next weekend, I taught him how to play ping pong. And now we play ping pong. It's still an hour being used, but now I just have much more value kind of coming out of that. We both have much full value coming out of that hour than I did before. Now I do that with everything, and I run an Airtable database of my experience, and I constantly try to figure out like, how do I do that?

My wife, it's kind of an embarrassing story. We've been married for 10 years and are very happy so, like she doesn't mind me telling the story. I was single at the time and kind of decided that I wanted to find my future wife. And so, I read all the books I could about, I start sweating even more thinking about it. I started reading all the books I could about relationship therapy and longevity, and I studied dating algorithms and I tried to understand like what stats out there for, the properties that two people will have in order to stay together for a long time. There's a meaning of meaningful amount of research out there. And so I basically created the properties, I think about 50, and then what I couldn't figure out was chemistry because it's tough to put down on paper in a number like your chemistry.

The thesis, as I had was basically that serendipity was the best proxy for chemistry. And so I mapped everybody I've ever met who had those properties. And the thesis was that I would need to find my future wife amongst their friends. And I started to invite myself for dinner parties, with those people. And that the third dinner I ran into my wife, very methodical, not as romantic, but definitely thoughtful.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, but, but it works right. So the question I have around experiments is are you methodical about the experiments that you run from the standpoint of like, here's the hypothesis and here's what we're going to test and here's how we're gonna test it and see if we're on the right track? Or is it more from the standpoint of like, let's reframe what we're looking at and try something in this space and then move down the line. How methodical are you and the experimentation process?

Henrik Werdelin: I mean, like I'm both, I think, you know, like the outer points is where the interesting things lie. Like most things have happened when we built startups in big companies, for example, is that it's so difficult to convince anybody to allow us to do anything that it has to be pretty obvious before we get allowed to do anything. And so I try to have the outer poles where I'm pretty wild in what I will try, but I am also very disciplined of killing most of it, At Prehype we have a saying, we call the default dead is dead. And that means that we assume that it won't work. We hope that it will, but we assume that it won't. And so that's sometimes allow us to kind of be a little bit more crazy in what we allowed to do.

Now that could either be that we just come up with a thesis of how to solve the problem. Or as you were saying that we try to reframe what the problem is that we are trying to solve. And I'll give you a practical example when we did Bark, I think we always felt that our business was, how do we make dogs happy? We never designed ourselves as a business that was putting stuff in a box. And so when people were asking us, when we started to think about what should our next product be, our acorn, as it were, after the box, if we had just been a company defined itself as a stuff in a box business, I think, you know, a cat box would probably have been, makes most sense.

But we are about making dogs happy and a cat box wouldn't make dogs very happy. And so our next product was like a dental product and a membership dog park and a content division and all of these different things, so I hone very much in the relationship with the customer I'm serving and what is the problem trying to solve for them. And then I go pretty wild in what could be the thesis. And then I get very disciplined in what is the numbers say?

Brian Ardinger: Well, let's open it up for Q and A. We have some people in the audience, there's a Q and A box at the bottom of your Zoom tool that you should be able to click in there. And as people are looking at that, talk us through a little bit about maybe what's next, some of the trends that you're seeing, you again spanned a lot of different industries. How do you go about understanding what you want to do next, and resource, and finding out what that next thing is for you?

Henrik Werdelin: I mean, like, I think I have first principles, like most other people and I think at the core, I like to work with people I find inspiring and I like, and people on problems that I think it's interesting and that the world needs to solve. That doesn't have to be kind of like world changing ideas, but it doesn't have. And then I think I just have a very classic curious mind. And so often what happens is that, you know, I'll give you an example, take this data. We talk about virtual events. And one thing that I suddenly realized was, well, events are not necessarily just defined by what do you do with them? It's also what you do not do. And one of the problems with an event like this is I've gone full screen because you don't have enough discipline to not look at like all the other windows. Have I not? And I think that I share that with a lot of other people.

So, an event like this is not an event because I can hear my dog bark. I think about my next meeting. And I have like seven taps in Slack and everything else going on. Whereas if we had met on stage, I would have put my phone out next to it. I'll be in a dark room, like, you know, with lights on. Yeah. And I will be very concentrated on this conversation. And so suddenly I kind of got to, well, that will mean two things for the events that I'm involved in.

One is that I think a huge one, this is actually less of an event and it's more like live broadcast. Yes. So, we need to move more towards like, you know, making TV shows. Then we should try to kind of create like replicate being a South by Southwest. That's one route. The other route is to figure out like, how do we deprive people from other sensatory inputs. And there, I started to spend a lot of time in VR and AR. I have no insights, but my thesis is that Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook's going to come out with new devices this year. And because we're all remote and we're all lacking digital intimacy, we will try to adapt. I've started to go to all these virtual meeting rooms in VR.

And you know what? It's actually fascinating. Again, it's not there yet, but it's like, it's like dial up internet. You can see, give it a little bit longer and it will either...and so I take a mixture of being involved in a lot of things, see the problems that they face, and then just being very curious and immersive and trying to figure out what could be opportunity spaces.

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting to see how the technology will catch up. Obviously, people are using Zoom and they're using Zoom in ways that was not intended per se. You know, it was designed as a way to meet in a corporate environment. And now you're seeing the flaws of using this particular tool in other settings, whether it's a virtual happy hour or things along those lines. I saw one today, I think it was called Online Town or something where they're trying to replicate in the technology where you're in a room. And based on where your avatar is in that room, you hear different things. So, you could actually have a side conversation just like at a conference that happens based on proximity of your avatar in that.

Henrik Werdelin: And I think sometimes what we then happen to do is that we try to just kind of like extend what we did..

Brian Ardinger: And replicate the real world.

Henrik Werdelin: And it doesn't often work, you know what I mean like I find that that concert they had on like a few weeks ago where they had 17 million people show up, like, but the nice thing of that concert was that that was in a game in mind. And so suddenly like, the musician didn't have to just say, they could do all this crazy shit. Right. So, I mean like the world is not linear, right? Like it jumps in weird step functions. And so, it will be fascinating, what the next few years going to bring on that point.

Brian Ardinger: That's a good transition. So obviously the world's changed, disrupted. We saw this coming a lot of technologies in that, were on the path of disrupting the world and business models, but COVID kind of accelerated a lot of that stuff. What's uplifting or positive in the last couple months that you've seen that, how the world's changed and where you see it going?

Henrik Werdelin: I mean, like I try to see uplifting things, most places, right. It's obviously tough. Right. You know, like a lot of people are losing their jobs and a lot of people are dying. And so that is tough to be uplifting about. I do think that we were, there were structural changes happening already that I think a lot of us thought would take 5 to 10 years and I think they suddenly took five weeks. I don't think that Hertz got killed by COVID. I think Hertz got killed by Lyft and Uber and it taking two hours to get a freaking car and like endless amount of paperwork in an airport. Right. And so, I think that's like, I think people who are knowledge workers for the most of them doing just fine people who are not having a really difficult time.

And I think as a community member, that will be our problem to solve too. I don't want to sound too high hope because I think that will take a long time and that'll be very difficult. I think from, you know, being like more optimistic, you know, I think there's a lot of exciting things that are the now happening that we have to figure out. I think a lot of the digital transformation that was growing, it's just really accelerating. A lot of the direct to consumer business I'm involved in, like we see, we have a lot of problems for sure, but like demand is fine. In terms of like a silver lining, I think remote work is now suddenly not considering you taking it, which I think makes a lot of us kind of like, very curious about where we then will spend our time.

I think we're pretty efficient because you don't spend an hour just to spend an hour on Zoom. Right. And I'm like, when you're done with your conversation, you're kind of like over. And so I think there's a lot of like these interesting dynamics and I think, you know, like New York, which is a city I love a lot, like, it's obviously hurting a lot right now, but like, you know, maybe some of the grit that attract us all here. Like some of the little bit of like the quirkiness that you have to be pretty crazy today to move to New York. Right. I think some people will. And I think, you know, like that was kind of like what made New York to start within. So, I'm sure I'm like in all the misery and all this difficult stuff happening. They'll be positive things. But I think to start with, we have a society that just love difficult challenges that we have to fix.

Brian Ardinger: Well again, if anybody has any final questions, put that into the box. I guess my last question, walls around, what do you see as the, the new next skillset that people should be building? Is it entrepreneurship skills, entrepreneurial skills? What do you look for when you look for a founder, for example? What do you look for in a person that you think can build the next, the next thing, whatever it is, what are the things people should be working on?

Henrik Werdelin: Well, I do look for, I think you mentioned some of them before. So first answer to your question, yes. Totally. I think entrepreneurship is one of the only real skills that we can teach ourselves that have real longevity. And that's because in my world I see entrepreneurship as the ability to identify a problem and then build a scalable solution for it. And that is not anger to engineers sitting in San Francisco. I think that is a task that we can all use, all skills that we can all use, and that can be applied to a lot of different problems. So, in fact, I see one of the reasons why I'm still an entrepreneur is that I've been offered jobs sometimes that are very attractive, but I'm not sure that I want to compete against the 20-year-old version of myself against those jobs.

I feel that the only skill that I can really, if I can hone that, that is very difficult to replicate, is that of identifying problems and find solutions to scale them? The solving of them. And I think if you are worried about robotics and computers taking your job, which I think a lot of us probably should, that is probably one of the last things where we have to worry. And so, I think entrepreneurship is a superpower and I think that a lot of it is something people are born with, but a lot of it can be taught and we should all learn how to do that. One of the things that I'm looking for in skills, you know, we talked about gravity, we talked about empathy. We talked about being a generalist, but I think specifically the last thing is this ability to be able to do many things, specialization is really a skill for, for scaling stuff.

I find a lot of interesting stuff happen when you try to look at solving kind of like a lot of different problems. And so, one of the things that, where my needs to get scratched is when I have to start a new project and I have to learn how can I use the basics myself. And so I think if there's one skill that I would allow, that people kind of like lean more on to is instead of thinking, I want to build something, but I need an engineer and a designer and a project manager and a business developer and somebody who knows Ad words.

I mean, like, go on YouTube, watch a video about it and tinker with it. And then I'm sure that you will probably find out a better way of doing it for yourself than somebody that you hired to do it.

Brian Ardinger: That's a fantastic point from the standpoint of used to be 10 years ago, you did need to, if you want to be a technology company, you had to have a technology person behind you and that. At least to get started even, to spin up some experiments, but nowadays with the no-code tools and Airtable, you mentioned other things along those lines, it really is this age of impact for everyday individuals to quickly get up to speed. And because the world's changing so fast, you're not going to be that far behind. If you have to learn a new tool in the first place.

Henrik Werdelin: I mean, and this of course is pretty specific to non-hardcore engineering. You know, which, I mean, like, there are a lot of stuff where you just need to be very good at that, but all the stuff that I feel like BarkBox is a very large business now and it requires you to be able to like pack a top and box, right. And write Happy Holidays with two L's on 200 them, which I did in some of the first years. And that doesn't require a lot of specific skills.

Brian Ardinger: Henrik, I really do appreciate you coming and sharing your journey as an entrepreneur and as a founder and as a person who's continuing to make dents in the world. So, I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or the new book, The Acorn Method, what's the best way to do that.

Henrik Werdelin: I mean the best ones is probably go on Twitter. I'm @Werdelin and the book is available on Amazon. Just search for The Acorn Method.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside innovation, we sit down with Minnie Ingersoll. She's a partner at TenOneTen Ventures. We talk about her long time Silicon Valley product experience with Google, how she moved over into the startup realm building a company called Shift and is now on the other side of the table as a venture capitalist. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week. We'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. With me in the studio today is Minnie Ingersoll. She is a partner at TenOneTen Ventures, which is a seed stage fund out of LA. She's a long time Silicon Valley product leader and operations executive, work with Google for a number of years. Also had run as a startup founder, as she co-founded the company Shift. So welcome to the show Minnie.

Minnie Ingersoll: Thanks so much, Brian. Good to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show because we could probably spend about five or six episodes going through your career, both from the Google side, all the way to the startup side. And then finally now where you're at here on the corporate venture side. So, I know a lot of your insights will be helpful for our audience. Let's start with how you got into tech.

Minnie Ingersoll: Yeah, sure. So, I studied computer science at Stanford, which is like a very classic career path to getting into tech. But I just have always felt that there's a lot of things that aren't going extremely well in our world today. Not just related to our current pandemic, but that innovation is one of the huge, bright spots of our country. And just personally, I've always liked to be, I don't know whether you want to call it like the life of the party or like where things are really happening, and tech was always just that spot where there was a lot of innovation going on. Studied computer science and then joined Google in 2002 when it was 500 people. And that really got me even more in meshed in everything Silicon Valley.

Brian Ardinger: And you stayed there a number of years. What kind of projects did you get to work on?

Minnie Ingersoll: Yeah, so I was a product manager, the whole time I was there, and I started when it was 500 people. I left when it was 60,000 people. So it was varied, but a lot of the time that I was there, I was working on access projects. So getting more people online, faster speeds, lower prices. Everything from domestically, looking at Muni WIFI to internationally looking at societies where they're trying to suppressed access to information.

Brian Ardinger: Were you ever involved with the Google Fiber stuff in Kansas City?

Minnie Ingersoll: Yes. Definitely. Flew out to Kansas City, actually drove a minivan around the Midwest for a while, looking at different places. And interesting when you're deploying Muni WIFI and you come from a tech background, Google fiber was less about signal propagation, but you know, you're thinking about the technical aspects, but you realize it's really about government relationships and navigating the public sphere. A lot of interesting lessons there.

Brian Ardinger: I'm sure it was very interesting case study in a lot of different ways. And it changed the forefront of what was going on here in the Midwest. Put a spotlight on some of that new tech that could be done outside of the Valley, too. So, you were at Google for about 12 years or so, and then you decided, Hey, I'm going to jump into the startup scene. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what made you make the jump and tell us what the company you built.

Minnie Ingersoll: Google was amazing, but I left in 2013, I was on maternity leave actually. And that sort of helped incubate my startup, which is an online marketplace for used cars. So, if you, I have a car you want to sell, it turns out most people are very bad at selling their car. And we probably could have built a whole business just on pricing used cars. It turns out it's an interesting data challenge because we have all this data about what's selling on Craigslist. What's selling at auction, what dealers are selling for. And yet, you know, you've got something like Kelly Blue Book, which is fundamentally static source of information. And you've got used car dealerships that are not transparent in their pricing.

And you might walk into a used car dealership and get different price than I walk in and get for the same car. So, we felt like there was a real interesting opportunity to do something. I mean, you could kind of say it was like, a used car dealership, but Google DNA, right? Like a lot of the lessons that we learned at Google, I had two co-founders. We all had worked at Google previously, so that's how we knew each other. And we tried to apply a lot of the lessons there to disruptive the used car industry.

Brian Ardinger: And through that particular process, I know you grew very fast, so you had to hire a lot of people. And so, tell us a little bit about what it's like to go from nothing to something in a very short amount of time.

Minnie Ingersoll: You know, like your pants are on fire constantly. That was kind of the feeling. I then had a tiny baby and we hired 200 people in probably our first 18 months or two years. And I think doing anything well requires a lot of time. Unfortunately, there's no shortcuts to anything. So, you just need to decide. Where you are going to put your time? And I think we decided that we would hire really good people. And so that was probably a third of my time or something. Like I just spent a ton of time on hiring, because that was the only way to really scale.

Brian Ardinger: Are there any particular things that you would recommend to founders or in that position to find the best talent?

Minnie Ingersoll: The best thing for sourcing is probably being really, really clear on who you want to hire. And so, the more you can come up with what attributes are going to make someone successful and take those attributes of what success looks like, and maybe turn those into certain personas. And then you could say, you know, I think someone who has previously scaled a startup would be successful here, or I'm looking for a CFO and I want them to come out of the FPNA and a direction or out of the accounting background. But being really clear on what those personas are, then allow you to target the right people. And when you meet them, know who the right people are and not have the swirl that comes afterwards. So just putting a lot of time in upfront.

Brian Ardinger: So now you're in a totally different world. You've jumped onto the other side of the table, so to speak. You're at TenOneTen Ventures. So, you've moved from the startup side to now investing in startups. What's that like?

Minnie Ingersoll: You know, a lot of pieces are the same. A lot of what I'm doing actually has some similarities to hiring people. I'm meeting with people all the time and trying to do that dance of is this the right fit for what we're looking for. So, some of that feels similar. There's less managing people. And I got a lot of personal growth from managing people and there's probably more sales, which is not something I totally expected. My background's in product management, not in sales. You know, you're always pitching your companies to other investors and trying to help them acquire customers. But other than that, it's a fantastic job. I think I'm smarter. I think I'm honestly a smarter person for having done it for the past year and change now because you sit there and people explain an industry that you know, nothing about and they know so much about. And I just trying to really understand how does this industry work? You know, they've got an insight. It takes me a little while to understand, you know, all the different forces at play there. So, I mean, it's a fantastic job is the summary.

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Brian Ardinger: So, you're based in LA. I would imagine it's a little different than the Valley venture environment. LA seems to be a growing venture backed environment, but it's still second tier, at least from the Valley's perspective. We're further down on the list as well, but what's it like to be in the venture space in LA?

Minnie Ingersoll: Well, Brian, I will say it's great to be second tier.

Brian Ardinger: We're all about the Midwest and other places outside the Valley, outside of the core tech hub. So, I'm always excited to hear what's going on and places that are building tech and building startups outside of what is perceived as the core areas.

Minnie Ingersoll: So, a couple of things. So, the first is entrepreneurship used to be more of a black box. You know, 5, 10 years ago, it was unclear how to raise money, how to hire great people. How does the startup flywheel get going? And nowadays it's far less a black box. There's podcasts like yours, entrepreneurship is being taught in universities. There's just so much more out there. And so, you don't need to be sitting there in Silicon Valley anymore. And that's fantastic.

And another thing I think is that Silicon Valley or San Francisco, has gotten so fully saturated. I think we hit peak San Francisco a couple of number of years ago where it just got harder to live. It got harder for...you know, you as a person couldn't thrive as much in San Francisco. I think it just got harder to have a house, have children, that sort of thing. It has contributed to the success of other markets because people now great people and great talent is now willing to leave Silicon Valley.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk about some of your portfolio companies or how do you go about finding good startups? Tell us about that process of finding talent and finding startups to invest in.

Minnie Ingersoll: Well, the first thing I'll say is, although you're based physically in LA, we do invest in startups nationwide and worldwide. So, if there are listeners who have great startups, I don't want to limit ourselves there. Our sweet spot is pre series A, but not pre-seed. So, we're usually nowadays I'd say most people have two rounds before a series A, some have three. And we're usually the second round there, which is to say people usually have revenue, have products out in market. And our sweet spot tends to be an entrepreneur who knows an industry really well and understands where the point is for disruption. As opposed to creating a whole new industry, we tend to invest in technical founders and there's usually a fairly heavy software data component. We don't do consumer.

And so, for us, like a good example might be True accord is in our portfolio. They do automated collection, which you know, it's an unsexy industry, but it's a really big industry. And it turns out that call centers are the way things have been done before. Call centers are a bad experience for everyone. You're incentivize to have things that are not compliant to have conversations that are not compliant when doing debt collection. And it's the sort of thing that computers can do much better. And I just assume have computers send me a text message or an email then having someone on the phone calling me. And, I could give any number of examples, but tend to be big industries that haven't had a lot of tech applied to them.

Brian Ardinger: That's interesting. Because you know, a lot of the startups that we're seeing here in the Midwest and other places are going back to their core. They understand the core industries. They're not looking for creating a brand-new industry. They're really looking at how do they find customers in their own backyard? How do they enhance the existing infrastructure and the existing ways of doing business outside of the Valley? It seems to be, that is the core. It is like, how do you actually build a business versus build a dream so to speak.

Minnie Ingersoll: Yeah, we like things about building a business or even just making a business more efficient. So just adding automation and especially in today's environment, as in a potential downturn environment, places where you can create efficiencies automation, make a lot of sense.

Brian Ardinger: So that's a great segue. As we're recording this, we're in the middle of the covert pandemic. Obviously, the landscape has changed for virtually every business out there. What are some of the things that you're telling your founders to pay attention to? Or how has the environment and venture investing actually changed in the last six to eight weeks as pandemic is popped up.

Minnie Ingersoll: I think a lot of companies we'll have some degree of tailwind. You know, things that are creating efficiencies, cost savings. Some of that will just continue. But I think a lot of the things that are still to be felt. So, we have a fairly heavy B2B portfolio. We don't do a lot of consumer investing. The consumer companies have felt an immediate hit. A lot of them have because everything has been shut down. The B2B companies have not felt it as immediately, but they will, you know, Q4 could be horrible just because I think those industries are slower. Their contracts come up slower, but there's going to be a lot of cutting coming. So, we are definitely telling our founders to be extremely cash conscious. I think there's still a lot of funding that is happening right now.

We have a good group that we're a part of and we've been checking in with them. A big group of venture capitalists who I think have their ear on a lot of things that are going on. And they call it “anec” data. Which I really like. So "anecdataly," I will tell you, I see a lot of deals still going around, but I think valuations anecdataly, are maybe 20-30% lower than they might've been. And a lot fewer of those crazy outliers where there's some pre-seed company getting a $20 million valuation. I don't see that happening. We've done a couple deals since lock down or sheltering. And they have been for the most part companies that I think probably in a different environment would have done a series A but are instead feeling like having a strong second seed or third seed, is a totally fair option.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing a lot of the VCs basically hunkering down and focusing on their existing portfolio companies? Are you seeing new deals going?

Minnie Ingersoll: I'm seeing new deals going around. I think that there was a let's hunker into our portfolio to help with things like re-forecasting, navigating the immediate situation, and 2020 forecast all needed to be revised. But now I think there are a lot of deals, in part because B2B companies will take a little while to feel the effects. I think investing will take a while and I worry about what's going to happen in a couple of years, but right now funds like ours, we have funds to deploy, but I think it'll get a lot harder for emerging managers, emerging VC managers, to raise funds. And so, what I worry about is that the LPs, the limited partners are all, you know, endowments that have been squeezed. They won't then fund as many new VCs and that effect will have a real effect on the ecosystem, but that's going to take years to be felt.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned you do a lot of B2B stuff. Are you hearing things from the corporate environment, as far as how they're looking at startups and investing in that side? Do you do a lot of partnering with corporate venture or anything along those lines?

Minnie Ingersoll: You know, I'm not as close to the corporate venture side of things, but generally I think there's a lot of things that are going to be relooked at, and disruption is a great time to invest. And when things are disrupted is the right time to lean in. And it's not just disruption the way we do business, but it's also in regulations right now. There's industries we like health tech, education, where regulations and bureaucracies that were slow to adopt things are being forced to rethink what they're doing. And that's again, a great time to be building a startup or being an investor.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's definitely interesting times. I think both good and bad. And we'll see who wins and who loses in the near future. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about TenOneTen ventures. What's the best way to do that?

Minnie Ingersoll: Our website is TenOneTen.net. And then I host a podcast where I talked to VCs. Some of this is I've been cheating because I talked to a lot of VCs about what they're investing in, what they're seeing at LA venture podcasts,

Brian Ardinger: Minnie, I thank you for being on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights of what's going on out in the West coast. Appreciate your time.

Minnie Ingersoll: Thanks so much, Brian,

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Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest today. We are recording one of our IO Live sessions with legendary Fernando Garibay. Fernando is a record producer, songwriter, DJ, entrepreneur. He was the official music director for Lady Gaga's Born This Way ball and producer for her Born This Way Album. He's worked with some amazing artists from U2 to Brittany Spears, and now he's working with some amazing corporate giants as the founder of the Garibay Center. Fernando, welcome to the show.

Fernando Garibay: Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me on your show. I'm a huge fan. You're one of the best interviewers I've come across, so I'm excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Thanks. Thanks very much. And you and I met about a year ago when I had a chance to come out to your studio and see your process of how you create a hit. And so I wanted to have you on the show for a couple different reasons. One, to start things off, the world has changed dramatically in the last two months. And we're entering what I'm calling the Great Reset. The old models are not working. Old ways of thinking. Status quo are being disrupted.

And I wanted to have you on the show to talk about the creative process. And how the business world needs to awaken its creative side and how you're doing that at the Garibay Center. How did you move from producing some of the biggest hits in the world and work with some of the best artists on the planet, to pivoting and working in this corporate innovation environment?

Fernando Garibay: So, it's really interesting. It's what the Garibay Center is all about, and why I founded this arena, what I call a New Paradigm. And just to clarify a couple points, one point is I still leverage and create content for the purpose of not only expanding and supporting and showing proof of concept that our model does work, but also to stay active in a creative community and stay creative myself.

Second point, what gives me relevancy in this climate and culture of innovation and why I started working with the corporate sector is because I realized none of what we do, as individuals, as human beings is sole dependent. It's not one person, it is community growth. And as I realized, working 20 years in the music industry at the highest tier, I realized that if we become an Island and we only create content with the purpose of expanding brands, so to speak, creating music and books and creating music and not really focusing on diversifying our creative portfolio, we're limited.

And what I realized is besides access, right, on all sides, musicians are always creating at the highest level every day. They're in the trenches being creative. Where is another value set that we can use that creativity and apply it to outside businesses, besides entertainment industry. You see, man, it's a projection of myself because I am completely polymathic in my approach. It's all subjects. It's all sectors of business. It's all entertainment. It's all combined because creativity is creativity. Creativity is you find a new path to work every day because you are creative and looking for different novel ways of getting to work. Theoretically. Right. So that's just a very simple anecdotal version of quick creativity is.

Having hit records, having the success, it got really empty and vapid for a while because essentially, I was defining my success by the hit records I have, and that's a very common problem. So, what I decided to do is shift the creativity and what I do every day. And all this happened in my career is I've evolved to look at this and adopt this orthogonal perspective. It's all things are related in a theory of emergence and chaos. Everything is related, right? So how can we utilize our skill sets of being creative and apply it to the corporate sector? How can we apply our creative attributes as musicians, as actors, as artists, as entertainers to use those lenses and solve problems?

Now, that sounds like a really high, abstract and tangible goal. But the reality is it's possible when you have Elon Musk tapping into the creativity of the Philharmonic New York conductor for his design idea, so to speak. Then you start to see that there are people who are hungry for different lenses. And so, my goal was to educate the entertainment and arts and music industry. Find mentees who are interested in being entrepreneurial minded. So they can not only create music, but learn the Harvard Business MBA course, learn a Wharton MBA course, learn the Oxford Neuroscience Course, which I distill in a way that musicians and artists can understand and apply these frameworks to expanding who they are as individuals, but also expanding their output.

Think of the Garibay Center as it brings relevancy to these artists as thought leaders. And it comes from this crucible of thought. Well, if you look at the greatest thinkers of all time from Einstein to Galileo, you start to see a correlation with musicianship. So there were musicians, Einstein was a violin player, and you start to see this correlation...you can make this connection that individuals who are creative, have creative expressions such as an instrument, et cetera, have this ability to look at things differently. All I'm doing is giving them the vocabulary to be able to do this effectively and to have this discourse now and sharing creative ideas. Now, not just making music or photography, et cetera, but also applying those skill sets to design, to helping corporate leaders, to think through their problems in a different way.

Aligning academic professors and the academic community to also apply this creativity in a different orthogonal way, so that we bring value to each other. So, think of the Garibay Center as a best in class, academic, corporate, and entertainment industry, working together to solve real problems.

Brian Ardinger: Let's get tactical and talk a little bit about how that actually works. One of the things I liked about you and the session I went through, was how you brought the business side into the creative process. So, can you talk about how do you go about creating a hit. You know you're working with an artist. What do you do? How do you use metrics and analytics on that to craft that and talk us through that process?

Fernando Garibay: Okay. In order to do that I have to kind of define a few terms, right? So, what is a hit? And so, we define a hit as when you successfully connect your content to a mass, participating groups. Identifying a target audience and then connecting with them on a genuine, authentic level. You've done that. You have a hit. If you want to go into music, entertainment industry, you look at such metric as billboard or charts, et cetera. They show you... Spotify streaming numbers...they show you who you've connected with successfully with the help of a machine, such as a label and publishing the marketing departments, et cetera, a machine to expand your content. To distribute your content. Or independent artists, relying on the virality effect of something like TikTok to become a creative launchpad for your content and successfully connect with your target audience.

Without getting too technical, that's kind of a summation of what a hit is. Now we realize that the same model applies to brands. And we realize that same model applies to corporate leadership. When we look at the connection between what an artist does, an artist essentially, a creative brand about postulating a narrative. That model like creating a hit for that brand is the same as creating a hit for a campaign for Gillette, for P&G. It's all the same framework. So, what we did very early on in the Garibay Center, what I did was I was case setting every single artist I've worked with and looking at their emotional tone of their brand.

And remember brand is just a word, it's a simple over contextualize word that we can compartmentalize how the public sees who they are. So, I just brand in that context and not so much as a soulless, business, old ideological perspective. You know, as I case studied these major artists that I worked with, it was always about launching the next single. What's the next thing you're going to be about and what's the purpose? Most of the artists that I've worked with were always socially impact driven from U2 to Lady Gaga, to you name it. And so, it was always about telling the right narrative to help their audience identify with who they are. Or maybe helping the audience identify who they are as individuals. So, it's multilevel.

So, it was a process in which we ideate ideas, right? Create content, go back and test it and see if it works within our A&R team. I started seeing the correlation between the creative process of creating hit records with ideals, design thinking, Stanford design thinking. I started seeing agile in this. I started seeing lean manufacturing in this. And as I look at these corporate structures, frameworks, I started implementing in organizing the creative process in a way that can be scaled and can be taught so that we're no longer shooting in the dark.

Okay. We're going to go in and try to create a hit record and where do we start, right? No, no, no. There's a framework for this. And you can go in, be more tactical about it. And still be even more creative because that creative energy is focused in a structured way. It's way more fun than having to guests work your way through it. So that's what the Garibay Center did. So now we use those same frameworks and teach it to corporate executives and academics equally. So, we may co-study and figure out new novel ways of solving problems using this creative process.

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Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing artists adapting some of these lean startup techniques as far as early experimentation, working directly with the marketplace to understand what works, what doesn't work? What are some of the things that you're seeing?

Fernando Garibay: What I'm seeing is that they've always done this. Way before agile and IBM and Microsoft had started implementing some of these frameworks. And all I did was connect, you know, these correlatively, you know, similarities so that I may give some context to what they do. And by distilling this, some might say, why would you overcomplicate things? Well actually, no, I'm defining what they're doing and clarifying what they're doing so that others may understand and take advantage of the ability of the creative community to provide novel solutions and new ways to approach this. You see creativity arguably comes from divergent thinking. New ideas come from divergent thinking. And for my case studies, most of the artists that I work with come from, an extraordinary amount of trauma, which led to a different way of seeing the world.

If I may teach and help use this talent that comes from extraordinary circumstances to see the world differently. And there's still that. So, the world can utilizing skills that they've learned and practice every day to express themselves, to express new ideas, to test on the market space in real time. Right. Launches single on discover, Hey, that's not working. That's not connecting. Let's go to the next thing. Go. Let's create new content immediately because that's the world we live in now. It's quick testing, right? Quick failing, quick feedback. And that's agile, right? It's back and forth. And that's also designed customer centricity, et cetera. And that's, what's really valuable now.

And I know we touched upon this previous when you and I spoke, you know, we're at that time now where it's like the Darwinian effect of how we evolve as a society, to be more technical. We are now living online more than ever before. And this process is evolution has happened and where we have to migrate to the cloud. We have to now migrate in having these Zoom conversations and lectures. And conferences, et cetera. This is new. All society has migrated by force. So, we pushed and nudged society until a whole new paradigm in which it's putting an end to the knowledge worker, Peter Drucker's knowledge worker and now we're entering a fully engaged creative hemisphere, right. We are now in a world where you have to be created to excel. And who better than to tap the entertainment, art musicians, photographers, et cetera. You should share how they've been innovating every day of their lives. 24/7, for years. That's what I'm excited about.

Brian Ardinger: Let's get a little tactical. What are some of the resources or life hacks or things that you've used, or your artists have used, or even the companies that you've worked with to accelerate their learning in this particular space?

Fernando Garibay: One is empathic circles and empathic spaces, empathic rooms. So, when I'm working with an artist, I have five minutes, right. The caliber of artists that I work with don't have a lot of time, and their attention span is short because they too have to have so much focus on other things. Running a machine like that with the major artists is very complex and requires a lot of thought and if the artist is driving that then they have to allocate time. So, what I do, how do I capture attention? How do I get people...the most important than you can do in a room is get people emotionally engaged?

How do you engage the limbic system? This is very valuable in leadership and corporate leadership. Which requires extreme empathy, right? And yet, the traditional corporate leadership structure lacks empathy and that's kind of a theoretically, right? Like it's known to not really know about each other's personal lives, how they feel about things. It's more about like, directives, right. Traditionally. Now that's changed completely. Now people realize in order to be creative and have ideas, you have to engage the limbic system. So that's always been the case in the music industry, when I worked with artists, is I have five minutes back to this point, I gave myself five minutes because I knew by that time on average and start to lose their attention.

So, what I do is immediately when I went with an artist, I asked questions. And what's the first question I typically ask something like you know, an artist just got off tour. Right? So, the last thing they want to be is at my studio. Or they just had a big show or had numerous interviews, last thing they'd want to do is hear about more music, depending on their headspace. So, what I ask is what's your favorite song of all time? How has this song changed who you are? Or what does this song mean to you? And I have not had one circumstance where they have not answered honestly. Or I'll ask something like, you know, what was the performance that made you want to do this for the rest of your life? Something that's delusional as chasing this dream of being a 0.0001% to be a successful artist.

And the answer in a form of light. It was when Whitney Houston, when she sang this one song, it was Madonna when she performed at the MTV music awards. Right. It was that, that change, that was the pivotal shift to their perspective, of how they would see the world from now on. When they start talking about this, there's a prefrontal limbic system shift, the body expression change. Their all of a sudden back to when they were nine years old, seven years old, eight years old, and they saw the US, or they saw Green Day perform and they wanted to do that for the rest of their life. They had their calling. So, I just tap into those moments. And it's the same for executives is the same for management. It's identifying purpose.

Or re-identifying purpose or showing that purpose evolves, it's not static. In those moments to create an empathic environment within the space you're working in. That's extraordinarily powerful, invaluable, because what that does, it gets the leaders in the room or every individual room to get engaged on a deeper level. Yeah, I'm sure most of us now, watched the Phil Jackson, ESPN, The Last Dance. That's a great example of what we've been doing from day one, right? When we do have writing sessions, we're in a room sharing our deepest moments. And that's every day with strangers. Cause we work with different artists every day, with different writers.

So what I framework is a tactical model that can be taught so that people can engage themselves at a genuine, a hundred percent honest level, like who they are, why they do what they do, and how can we create meaning for us and how can create meaning for our brands, our community so we may make a social impact and create change in the world. That can happen in any room and that's inspiring people to move towards action.

Brian Ardinger: We're going to open up for Q and A in a bit here. You've been around again, some of the most creative individuals on the planet. Are there particular attributes that stand out or skillsets that these folks have that differentiate them and put them at that .00001%? What have you seen?

Fernando Garibay: That's one of the core essence of why I started case studying, Oh you know, the artists I've worked with, and I want to be careful how I answer that because in respect to the artists and how extraordinary each one is in their own unique way. The universal attribute that, that I was able to recognize is divergent thinking. It is divergent thinking coupled with the ability to get rid of that wall. Let me explain. Majority of the artists I've worked have had dramatic events happen to their lives. As most of us have. Now, what they were able to do is translate those traumatic events to create meaning and purpose in their life. I was bullied so I'm going to take that and help others that were bullied too. Or I was abused by my parents so I'm going to take that and make that my drive so that I can share that I can overcome that no one can stop me.

These commonalities of triumph using divergent thinking, coupled with their unique selves, that combination was like lethal. That cut through all the noise. That aligned with their dedication to their craft. So, let's add that, to right, so it's divergent thinking, authentic selves and extraordinary ability to not only craft, but to partner the skillsets so that they may apply it to these two principles.

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing things differently now? Like as the world's changing us, the entertainment world's changing. How do you see what you're learning and what you're working on? How's that going to change as this new world's changing?

Fernando Garibay: That's the now, right. So, I mentioned before, I believe this Darwinian Effect is incredibly advantageous. I mean, think about this. The world has just hit a pause button. What a great time to take advantage of that in a way where you can better yourselves. Right? Here's what I do. And here's what I recommend everyone do. Not only has it worked for me, but it's worked for so many people that I have passed this on to, and that is educate yourself. Right? I mean, imagine if in a perfect scenario, you can put a pause button on the world, so you can learn as much as you like about bettering yourself, bettering your world, bettering your family's lives, bettering your community, the lives of people, right, by educating and understanding and giving yourself the tools to learn how people have failed in the passions that you have, so that you may not repeat those failures. How powerful is that? Audio books, podcasts like yourself, Brian, who are educating your world and giving people these hacks to better themselves and better the community and better leadership.

My favorite anecdote to this is Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management at the Harvard Business School, who no longer is with us, obviously, but he had to idea that would work for a corporation, thought process, works for a family. What works for a family to succeed, healthy, growth, you know loving, empathic environment, works for a corporation. Isn't that powerful. Well, these things are like what you pick up as you learn and study and do audio books and listen to podcasts. And just follow your passions, let your curiosity beat a motivator. Curiosity is painful, right? Like that's, it's a little ting of pain. That's what drives a brain to perform. Right. And to learn. So use that as motivation to define what your purpose is and listen to these great authors, such as Steven Pickering, Nassim Taleb, Noam Chomsky, Alan Watts, you name it like there's people out there who have gone through what you've gone through and have carved a path. So why not go there? That's what excites me.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great transition because you've been in this industry for a while and you started very young. Somehow you found early mentors and early folks that were able to help guide you through that industry and give you a path and that. What kind of recommendations or thoughts do you have for folks starting out in whatever it is, whether it's a music industry or new startup that can help them find mentors and find that network and find that learning mechanism that accelerates their growth?

Fernando Garibay: Yeah, that's a great question because I think throughout the history of, entrepreneurship, the history of the arts as well, and the history of science, it's always been driven by mentors. If you look back, Picasso had a team, right. He mentored like...and every major, individuals left footprint on this planet came from a process of mentee and mentor. And the key is, here's the have, I highly recommend first of all, you find somebody that you can model yourself or you look up to, at the very least look up to. And the key to having a mentor is it is absolutely essential, this is why I'm talking about it, is to make sure that you have a give back.

I would highly recommend you never approach your idol, or who you want somebody to mentor you, with, can you help me? I highly recommend you approach your mentor, your future mentor with how can I help you make your day easier? Here are my skill sets. You know, these skill sets, maybe they can apply to you. You know anything I can do to help you make your life easier. I'm here at to do. I'm a huge fan of what you do. I am happy just to observe, you can spend a little time just to answer my questions here and there. I'm available for you. I don't think any mentor is going to be able to turn that down unless they’re completely like just awkward.

Brian Ardinger: All right, let's go to some Q and A. So, if you have any questions from the audience, but feel free to put it into the, the question box here. We've got a couple of things here. My dream is to work with Fernando. You're so talented. It's not really a question, but congrats there. Question on, have you experienced anyone deflect your disarming approach? Like how do you overcome that? You've got a very charismatic approach that really is disarming and it's different than what you traditionally see in a business setting and that. How do you go about I'm making connections quickly?

Fernando Garibay: A lot of practice. I think it comes from my background. So, my father was an extraordinary eccentric man. He came from a factory, you know, blue collar labor. I mean, we grew up in some difficult times, but what he would do, even though our family was struggling, he would feed homeless people every day at our dinner table, breakfast table, I should say. And that taught me a lot because, you know, he would introduce them as family members. And you're talking about all sorts of races, all sorts of gender preference. It was everything right. And so, I would ask questions, you know, as a kid, you know, it was like like an Uncle from the Middle East? I didn't know we had an uncle like, this is bizarre, like random people, but my Dad was very giving.

So I learned how to connect with everybody by looking for universalities right. We all get hungry. What a basic principle to start with. I started to be able to see behind the illusion that people give their front. Because everyone has one. We are protective of our inner core. What I do is I just put it out there, like immediately. It's about sharing your flaws. It's about like, just being authentic.

Brian Ardinger: Like, did that come naturally or how do you break down the barriers of saying, okay. I want to be authentic, but like you said, there's all these reasons why you don't want to show your core and that. So how do you overcome that?

Fernando Garibay: I could just test this with you. We had an earlier panel today and one of the members says I struggled with depression. Okay. I'm in a room and that's a great example of vulnerability, right? So, it's like what I call Vulnerability Gestures. We all marry each other in circumstance, right? We're a product of the people we surround ourselves with. Not only in life as a whole, but at the given moment, we're all marrying each other. Right? Essentially. So, the key is to use that. I'll get in a room with the C-Suite at Microsoft, C-Suite at whatever. Or I'll be in a room with, you know, a major artist. And it's universal. It's like, it's as simple as how do you get over when you're not having a great day? You know, I'm honest with what's going on in my life.

My brother just got over COVID, you know, yeah. I was terrified. It's as simple as that and sharing that aspect. Immediately people engage. Oh yeah, me too. You know, and the biggest easiest starter in the creative communities, is mental wellness, right? What I call Mental Fitness. I can see you're having a difficult time. Am I presumptuous to say you're having a difficult time right now? And they will answer, right. So, I can cast out, genuine, vulnerable pitches, to people in the room. And so, what I say is in my studio and my creator space, I throw myself under the bus all the time. I want to be the one run over first, so I can get you to be in touch with yourself. And that's what it is. That's why, I don't have people turn me down.

Brian Ardinger: Another question in here. What does your daily routine look like as a music producer? What are your biggest challenges in life?

Fernando Garibay: I split my time up between creating and making music. Why do it? It's interesting because it keeps me sharp. It keeps me in the trenches with my creative class. I spoke with law professors who have guided me through these courses on my own. I'm an autodidact. I learn on my own. And they've guided me. And what I notice is I asked them, why do you teach when you can do. This is a very general question, and the answer they gave me, is it keeps me sharp. Right. So, you have these Harvard professors. MIT professors, Oxford professors, that are telling me that they write books, but instead of promoting these books or instead of working in the corporate sector, et cetera. There's nothing wrong with that, either one, but they chose to stay and teach because it keeps them in the trenches.

All right. So that's what I do. And I try to split my time between working in bright produced records, while I teach, I teach other producers and songwriters. While I do this. And then I create a farm system in which they teach others. And then equally at the same time, I teach them how to be orthogonal. And what I mean by that is they learn the Harvard MBA essentials. They learn the Wharton School of Business essentials. They learn Stanford Design Thinking essentials. They learn Oxford Neuroscience essentials. All these things are relevant to how they create. And then we start the conversation and invite people to solve problems together in music industry, along with, again, academic in the corporate sector.

So, I divide my temporary making music, teaching, lecturing and spreading the gospel of the Garibay Center and what we're doing, alongside our Gener8tor and Proctor and Gamble, et cetera. And eventually do a DJ set here for fun, here and there, but it's really all over the place. I stay active, so I may be better to serve people.

Brian Ardinger: All right. One of the questions, we've got time for maybe one more, you have a compelling way of describing the act of creating music as being driven by making an impact or coming out of adversity. Have you ever debated with anybody about music for its own sake? This person is saying, because my answer to this song that first changed my life might be a song that just had a newer awesome sound to it, that pleased, my ears. Is there a subtle answer or a way to get to that deeper meeting?

Fernando Garibay: I get this question quite a bit and I feel I have a grasp on this. I mean, let me try to answer this with empathy because it's important. For me, I'll give you a case study for me, I was named after an album and song called Fernando. My Dad didn't have a name for me. There was this nurse who, when I was born said she loved the song named Fernando by Abba. So, my Dad went out and bought every, every record from Abba. And so, you know, I've been hearing it since I was, I was raised. And so if anybody knows, like pop music and the history of pop music, Abba laid out the framework of what pop music really should sound like. Every pop song you hear, the majority part of European pop music and American pop music has had this framework of these choruses, right verse, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus model. So that music I still to this day had an imprint on me. It's kind of like music tends to leave an imprint on an individual.

Art tends to leave an imprint. It gives people narratives. It gives people a sense of direction. A sense of meaning that's what's so powerful about art. It can define your path and your trajectory and the story you're going to tell yourself about your future, who you are in this earth and planet. That's so powerful. Music, art, can be, and this is why it is essential that we harness that creativity, that prowess and share it with the world. To answer your question. I think it's about the music for me that defines who you are, who you can be. That's the most powerful thing that I've learned about creating music and what it does, for people and with people. Some people see it as a form of therapy. I believe, you know, according to neuroscience evidence, I see it as a language.

And the more you learn how to speak in your artistic language, whether it be music or painting or photography or acting, the more you're able to express yourself, using your language. Right that's all it is right. Behavioral therapy is communicating which is similar. You can see it as therapy, but if you adopted a perspective that it's like a language, and you're becoming a better speaker, you can be more effective at communicating with your therapist, whether it be your audience, or your A & R or your manager, whoever it may be, or your marketing campaign, et cetera. It's all the same thing in my head. And I believe that for me, it gave me structure to create these frameworks again, to teach people that, Hey, this is so valuable, what you do and who you are is so valuable to the world. Let us help you identify that for you to live out your version of success.

And that's important, Brian, right? Defining your success because there's different versions of success. We don't have to model our success after what's out there right now. We can create our version of success on a novel version of ourselves in the future.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Fernando is always fascinating to have you on the show and to talk about some of the things that you're seeing out there in the world. If people want to find out more about yourself or the Garibay Center, what's the best way to do that?

Fernando Garibay: TheGaribaycenter.com. Fernando Garibay at Instagram, @FernandoGariby on Twitter, be creative in how you reach out to me. And that's how we identify talent that we can fast track. Right. And the key again, my mission is to create a thought leadership paradigm in the music industry, in the arts community, to align and share their intellectual thought leadership prowess. And that's the big goal is the new value prop that since we live in a creative world, why not bring the creative class along for leadership and thought leadership. That is the most powerful thing I think I can contribute to this world at this moment.

Brian Ardinger: As the world changes, we definitely need some additional thought leaders and new ways of thinking about everything. So, I appreciate you coming on. If people want to find out more about insideoutside.io, please go to our website. We're going to continue to do these IO Live events. Next Thursday, we have Henrik Werdelin, who is the founder of BarkBox and also Prehype. So, join us for that and sign up for our newsletter and be part of the insideoutside.io community. And thanks for coming out and joining us.

Fernando Garibay: Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much. Thank you for your wonderful, wonderful interview.

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Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. With us live today, we are doing our IO live series with Jeff Gothelf. He is the coauthor of a number of different books: Sense & Respond, Lean UX. He wrote the book Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking: What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams. And today we have him on the show to talk about his latest new book coming out called Forever Employable. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Gothelf: Hey Brian. Good to see you again. It's great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you back on. I think you've been on the show three times in various forms across the platform [various forms - laughing]. That's probably three or four years ago when you were launching Sense & Respond. You and Josh came on the show to talk about that. More recently back in Episode 156, we talked a little bit about building a culture of innovation and learning, and now the world has changed, and you've written another book Forever Employable. You're known as the Lean UX Agile guy. Why did you decide to write a book about career development?

Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. It's super interesting. And everything you're saying, everything you're bringing up is exactly sort of the thought process and concern that I've gone through over the last couple of years. I've considered this project and whether or not it was something I was going to invest in and put out there. But the reality is that as different as it may seem, by comparison to Lean UX, Sense & Respond, Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking. When you read it, what you'll see is that the subject matter is different. Subject matter is you, your career, your professional development, your growth and your safety net. But a lot of the thinking is very, very similar and should be very familiar. If you're familiar with Lean UX, Sense & Response, Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking.

And the reason why this project even kicked off in the first place is tongue in cheek to some extent, but not really, was a response to things that I was sensing from the marketplace. For years now, for the last two, three, four years, I've been getting inbound requests on a semi-regular basis to talk about how I built my career and how I built this platform and how I started writing books and giving talks and teaching workshops and that type of thing. People really want to know this kind of stuff. How do you actually make it happen?

So I added an item in my backlog that said, you know, write something about this, tell this story, that type of thing. And I just maybe do a Medium piece about it or blog posts or whatever. I've been thinking about doing it, but then never kind of kicked off anything about it? Because again, it really felt outside of everything else that I was doing. And then, about eight months ago or so I had to give a talk for a private community of product leaders primarily. And the talk they wanted me to give was the author's journey. That was what they called it. Again, another request, right? Another inbound piece of feedback from the market that says there's a desire to hear the story.

And so, I wrote a 45-minute talk that told me the story. At which point I was like I have a story arc. Now I've got a slide deck, right? This is basically a table of contents for a book. After a conversation, and just a delay, so I dragged my feet a little bit. But after conversation with some folks finally kind of got the kick in the butt to make it happen. So really it was a lot of sensing and responding and eventually just not being able to ignore the inbound evidence.

Brian Ardinger: The timing is impeccable in a lot of different ways. Last couple of months, we've been thrown into a pandemic and a lot of people are questioning this whole idea of disruption and it's a little bit more real to folks. And so, I think a lot of people are at that point where they're starting to reevaluate, Hey, what am I doing? And the world of work is changing. I'm changing from a timing perspective. You couldn't be better time to tell people about some of these tricks and tips and ways to go about that.

Let's talk about the changing world of work. You talk about how you have to create yourself as an invincible career and this ability to the forever employable. I talk a lot about this idea of having a portfolio career. It used to be you could be a product developer for your entire life, and that was what you did, but now people have different slash jobs. I'm a podcast or I'm a newsletter writer. I'm a director of innovation at a big corporation and whatever it is, it's never one thing. So, let's talk about the world of work. How are you seeing it? Are you seeing this pivot to this career that's never one career?

Jeff Gothelf: There's a tremendous amount of volatility and unpredictability in your career. My best friend, his father worked at DuPont Chemicals for 40 years. Can you imagine? No. Right, right, right. Like the concept is so not reality anymore. And I do a lot of work in financial services and banks and that type of thing. And I meet folks who've been at the bank for 20 years, 25 years. Even those numbers to me are unheard of. Right. I think the kind of volatility that we're seeing today, hopefully not to the extent of the pandemic. But nevertheless, it's going to become commonplace, right. This idea of evolving markets, market shifts, competitive shifts, economic shifts, geopolitical shifts. The organization that you work for, it may not be as stable as you think, or as you'd like.

And frankly, the loyalty that you might expect from that organization is probably not as stable as you'd like. I mean, right now, good people are getting laid off right now because the pandemic is challenging. These organizations to stay in business, in a way that they've never been challenged before. And so good people are losing their jobs. People who didn't do anything wrong. Who did a great job? Who are not the bottom 10% like the Jack Welch, you know, let's take this as an opportunity to cull the herd. These were good people.

Look, I know this. I spent the first decade of my career following in that standard career path. So, applying for jobs, interviewing for jobs, getting my resume in shape. And then doing it again and then doing it again for a slightly better title, a slight bit more money, like just kind of playing that game. And every time there was a layoff, every time there was a seismic event in the market, I would start to panic, and I would see the panic in my colleagues as well. Like, Oh, I got to get my resume in shape. I start applying for jobs. Oh my God. My portfolio is out of date, all this kind of stuff. And that is a crappy way to live. And I don't believe that you have to live that way. I believe that you can create a situation where it's clear to the world, what value you provide.

And it's clear to the world when they need that service or value or skillset, where to go to get it so that you don't have to have that panicky feeling every time something kind of changes in the marketplace. And to me, that's huge. If I can help people build that safety net around themselves, that's a huge win.

Brian Ardinger: So, we are live. We've got a number of people in the attendees. So, we are opening this up for Q and a and a bit. If you do have a question, you'd like to ask Jeff, you can go to the Q and A box at the bottom of the Zoom. Click your question in there, and we'll start answering those in a little bit. When you are the product, effectively, nowadays. What can you do to be a better product manager for yourself? What are some of the tips and things that you've talked about in the book to utilize this product management expertise on your own career?

Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. And that's exactly the foot in the previous content that is maintained in this book. Right. And to me, that's what made me feel more comfortable writing it, frankly. It's because there is that connection, right? It's not just as like the sharp left turn, but there is that connection that says, treat yourself and your career and your professional development growth as a product. And use product development, product management practices, bring them to bear on that product and service that you're building.

So, let's think about it. Okay. In the same way that we think about solving problems with the products and services that we make. Great. What problems do you solve? Right? Let's start it there. And again, it comes back to the value that you deliver. So, what problems do you help solve? I help people innovate more successfully. I help organizations become more agile lowercase, a right. Yeah. I help organizations focus more effectively on their customers. Whatever it is. Right. What is value? If you can boil it down, what is the core value that you provide? That's number one.

Who do you provide it for? Right. Who's your target audience. All right. And who are your personas? And my friend J.F. Patent is going to laugh when I say this. Yeah. Because I always fight with Jeff about, he loves to say that organizations can have a persona. You can make a persona for an organization. And I like to argue that organizations aren't people, and that you have to make a persona for a person inside the organization. However, in this particular case, I might side with my friend, Jeff, and say that if you're solving problem, if you have a target audience for who you're solving problems for, you can say, I help solve these problems for legacy financial services institutions. I help solve these problems for law firms. I help solve these problems for plumber.

I think you can create sort of a target persona of an organization here as much as a person. And what benefit will you bring that person? Reduce their time to market. I will help them be more competitive. That thing. And then how will you get there? Like what, what's the hypothesis? How will you do that? And so you kind of break it down that way. And you start to think through all of these assumptions that you have about the service that you provide, and then start to identify hypotheses, hypotheses that you can write about value that you can bring. And most importantly, and this is where it gets really interesting. And I think new for a lot of folks, we're going to read this book outside of product and tech, is the measure of success. For a lot of folks, their measure of success is going to be well I launched my YouTube channel. I published my blog. And that's an output. I said, we can come back to outcomes over output, right?

Again, foot in innovation and product development. What is the outcome? If the YouTube channel resonates, if the blogs that you published succeeds, if the podcasts that you're putting out, is working for you, what is the behavior change you want to see in your target audience? Well, I want to see them listening. I want to see them sharing. I want to see them reaching out and saying, I want to hire you, right? I'm going to bring you in to give a talk or teach about this. All that stuff. Is a hundred percent applicable to you and your career and your profession development.

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Brian Ardinger: I know you outlined in the book, some of the qualities that a person who is trying to become forever employable should be nurturing and building. What are some of those qualities and what have you seen that's worked for yourself?

Jeff Gothelf: So, the quality is I listed in the book are the qualities that I see in myself today. That is not to say that I saw those qualities in myself 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And even when I finally struck out on my own, I mean, I co-founded a company with Josh Seiden and Giff Constable in January of 2012. That was a big move, but I still had partners in that. When I finally struck out officially on my own at the end of 2015, roughly, it wasn't until then really, five years ago, less than five years ago that I really started to feel like an entrepreneur. So, the first quality is entrepreneurial-ism. What have you done to build entrepreneurial ventures, entrepreneurial skills in your life that I can help you invent and reinvent yourself as the world changes around you? Right?

So, for example, I talk in the book about how I used to play in bands. And a lot of people will tell you that I didn't realize this at the time. I was just having fun, trying to be a rockstar. A lot of people will tell you, yeah, bands are startups. It's a bunch of folks getting together with a crazy idea. Investing everything they have in it, sleeping on floors, trying to get the world to come to you and believe in your vision. Subscribe to your stuff, buy your stuff, whatever it is. And I helped not only play music in bands, but I ran those businesses. Business is a strong word, you know, businesses would imply we were making money, but I've ran those ventures. Let's just put it that way. I have that skill set. I'm sure you've done something entrepreneurial in your life to lean on.

Self-confidence is key, right. What have you done in the past that was risky or something that made you uncomfortable, but you persevered and succeeded in the end or learn something from it? How do you leverage that to build your self-confidence. For me the story that, again, the story that I tell the book is I joined the circus when I was 22. And then right after, I mean, literally I graduated college on a Saturday, and I put all my stuff in storage. And my stuff, just to be perfectly clear when I was 22, my stuff, if I recall consisted of, I had a motorcycle, that's pretty cool. I had a mattress, and I had a Bob Marley poster. That was pretty much you know...

Brian Ardinger: Hard to get that mattress on a motorcycle, but...

Jeff Gothelf: It's tough. It's tough. The Marley poster, you know, I can kind of roll up and throw on my shoulder. But, you know, and then Monday I was in the circus and it was a paying gig. I was doing audio production and sound and lights, and it was the gig and it paid money and real, more money than I'd ever made before, and it was miserable and weird. This subculture that no one ever talks about or knows anything about. But I learned a ton about myself, about how to survive, about how to make the best of a weird situation and, you know, leverage that self-confidence. And then you start to get into kind of these more agile qualities. So continuous improvement, continuous learning, and then ultimately reinvention as well. Right? So, as the world changes. I don't believe in your core value has to change. But your delivery method, your channel, your face to the world, that might have to change to correspond with whatever's happening out in the real world.

Brian Ardinger: Entrepreneurial focus, self-confidence, continuous learning. A lot of these skills and qualities are not something that can be turned on overnight. And you talk about the fact that this is the journey and it takes a while sometimes to get these pieces in place. There's not like a silver bullet where you say, okay, today I'm going to be forever employable. And here's what I have. It's really the process that you have to go through just like building a product where you have to build the product over time. And sometimes I take a while to make that happen. Are the things that have sped up that process or things that have given you guidance as you've built out those skillsets?

Jeff Gothelf: Yeah, it definitely took time and continues to take time, but I don't think I'm done. I feel like I'm actively working on this right now. It's at a level of success now that's taken me a decade to get here, a decade plus really. At this point, probably about 12 years to get here. The interesting thing here is that, you know, and this, this is going to sound cliché, but like success begets success, right? So, small wins, but you don't have to be like, Oh, I got the book deal. You can start with, Oh, my treat went viral. Or I got a thousand people that read my blog post. I got a hundred people to read my blog posts, whatever it is. Right. So, this idea that the more you can create, the more that you can put out there. The more the success accelerates ultimately, and then eventually starts to pick up.

So, for example, I started actively pursuing this approach when I was 35 and I published Lean UX when I was 40. Not exactly early on in my career. And it took me five years from the day that I decided that I was going to pursue this to the date that Lean UX was published. So, five years. The accelerant attributes, the accelerant effect of Lean UX coming out on my career from that point forward was exponential in relation to the previous five years. The previous five years was very incremental, incremental, incremental, incremental, and then the book hit and it was like a significant step forward. I think that it takes patience and perseverance.

One thing I'll tell just a quick aside, I've started a series of interviews, not on like these called Forever Employable stories and they're all my blog there. Jeff gothelf.com. I've done two so far. I've got three, four or five of those lined up for interviews and I'm going to post them as basically as they get finished up on the blog. The first two people I interviewed; one is a guy named Joel Hoekstra. He's the current guitarist for Whitesnake. Which made me happy to an extent that I can't begin to convey. And certainly 16-year old me was extremely happy about that interview, especially being my first. And the second guy was a celebrity photographer and designer named Mathieu Bitton. He's Lenny Kravitz's personal photographer.

Really just amazing, amazing guy with a story, a career like you can't imagine. If there's one theme across those guys and the rest of the folks that I'm interviewing for this, it's perseverance. Right? So, you're going to send those tweets out. You're going to write that blog post. You're going to make those videos. You can make this podcast and no one's going to listen. Right? It's going to be super, super rare if you come out of the gate, screaming, like screaming success, right. And no one's going to listen, but if you persevere and you push and you're determined and you're consistent and respectful and contribute to the cannon and help the conversation grow, eventually people will start listening. And for me, that's the takeaway, right? So, the takeaway is perseverance and consistency. What is it that you want to own? Right. Where are you planting your flag? how do you consistently tell that story?

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about how teaching's important to being able to not only have that particular skill set, being able to share that with others. And then I think another one of your principles was kind of give it away. So, can you talk a little bit more about that?

Jeff Gothelf: In January, but pure coincidence. I ran into give Gib Biddle, Gibson Biddle, the former VP of Product of Netflix. Super interesting guy, super nice guy, very generous. And he and I are doing roughly the same thing these days, you know, kind of the same kind of work roughly in the same space. You know, obviously he comes out from a different story and I come at it from a different story and we were talking over dinner one night and he said, what do you like best about what you do? And I had to think about it for a second. I said, I really liked teaching. It was the first time I had realized that that's what I was doing.

It wasn't the first time, but it was the first time I maybe, I first time I'd accepted it right. Accepted, that I'm a teacher because I'd be like, Oh, I'm a workshop facilitator. I'm a trainer. I'm a coach. I'm a consultant and speaker. Right. I'm an author. Boil all that down. I see myself now as a teacher. And that's something I never, ever would have expected 10 years ago, 15 years ago, even 5 years ago.

And so, A: I find it incredibly rewarding to just get out there and share what I know with folks. You know share my experience and tell my stories. And if they get something out of it, that's a huge win. The nice thing about it is I get better at telling my stories. The more that I teach them, because you can practice, you get feedback, you get receptive audiences, you get less than receptive audiences, and you need to be able to handle yourself in those situations and be able to convince people, regardless of what's happening there. I'm using it, not in tongue in cheek, but there's a sense and respond loop. When you're teaching that allows you to improve the thing that you're teaching.

The satisfaction that I get from people telling me that I'd helped them. I've made them more successful in their career. And now I'm starting to get feedback from folks like, wow, you've really made me think about what I should do in my career with my next step forward. That kind of stuff is meaningful to me. It makes me feel like I'm making a difference and like I'm having an impact, which has always been the case. So that's why teaching, I think is really important.

You asked about giving it away. That part is really, that's come late. That's been a recent realization, relatively speaking. You build up your expertise, you build up your experience and then you spend time developing the muscles that allow you to share that experience, that expertise with people, teaching, storytelling, writing, speaking, that type of thing. And the idea that given how much time, we're talking about years Right? Years and years and years of my life has gone into developing that. The idea of just giving it all away for free was it definitely a tough one for me to swallow? I'm not gonna lie, right? It's like, man, I worked hard for this. I should be getting paid for this.

And the amazing thing is, again, the more that I started to give away for free, the more videos that I publish, the more articles that I published, the more came back. Which to me, it was completely unintuitive for a long time. And now I totally see it as this virtual cycle of, you're developing the community. You're building that following you're giving back. And when that community needs something more specific or more targeted or more explicit to their situation, they know who to go to. It's you, you become the person synonymous with that value and they come back to you. And that's been a massive learning for me. That's really transformed how I run my business today.

Brian Ardinger: Well, let's open it up for questions from the audience. If you want to go down to the Q and A button on the bottom of your Zoom, you should be able to type in any type of question as people are looking at that. I'll ask a couple more. Can you talk about some of the agile tools sets that you use or have used in this particular book that are applicable and that you've used to apply to this new realm?

Jeff Gothelf: Absolutely. I mean, you name it. It's in there. I work in short cycles. I do retrospectives typically by myself to me, I mean, my assistant and I work on the stuff together. I do a lot of work with Josh Seiden who's been on the show as well. And so he and I do retrospectives together to understand what's working. There is a tremendous amount, agile-ish stuff, right. It's kind of the broad umbrella. So, I manage everything in a Trello board. I limit work in progress. I focus on delivering value consistently and regularly, right? So there's always something coming out for me on some kind of cadence that's, that's very important to me. I change course. I have hypotheses about how things should work and I changed course. I'm going to give you a perfect example. And it's in the book, which is sort of ironic because the book, the manuscript is basically completed. As the lockdowns were kicking in.

I want to create a community that I wasn't finding for myself yet here in Barcelona, where I live. And so I decided to go and create this particular community. And I created a meetup and I invited the people who I wanted to be in that community to join me. And it was a very specific type of meetup for executives, right. Digital executives. And, and we held our first in person meeting and it was fantastic. And the hypothesis was, look, I'm going to build this meetup. I'm going to grow it to some size that was going to make me happy, but not too big. And then from that, we were going to start to generate more local work because I was getting tired of traveling and I wanted to generate local work for myself. Right. That roughly was the hypothesis.

Well, we had one meetup and then the quarantine hit, and the meetup was amazing. It really was, it was just this amazing confluence of really smart, interesting people having a great conversation. And then the quarantines hit, we couldn't do it anymore. And everybody was like, Oh crap. My company is imploding. My company has got to reinvent itself. We've got to, yeah. You know, all this. And it took us a long time. And so, like that sort of poofed for a little bit, and we're trying to restart it now as a virtual meetup until we can get back together. In-person right. And so, there's all this stuff is like I had a hypothesis something's changed in the world. The first virtual attempts, we tried didn't work as well as the in-person attempt. So, I dunno, I dunno what I'm going to do with it next. All that stuff, it's baked in it.

Brian Ardinger: I like the concept of experimenting. I think what troubles some people probably it's like, I don't mind experimenting at work, but experimenting on my livelihood or my career is a little bit more threatening or whatever. But if you take the perspective of this is a mindset, mind shift of I'm doing a small project or a small experiment, it probably takes some of that burden away. Or the fact that not every decision has to be the biggest oldest decisions you've ever made. It's like, how can I incrementally improve incrementally, build incrementally grow and experiment in the marketplace so that I can grow my career. It takes away that fear of I've got to find my next big gig cause that's, what's going to make my livelihood. The next thing.

Jeff Gothelf: That's exactly right. And so that's kind of the next step, right? So, you've got this hypothesis. Great. How do you do risk it? The risk it by running experiments and those experiments could be, and anything from I'm going to tweet about this topic for a while and see if I can build up some expertise and some recognition about it. For years, when I was employed full time, I moonlighted. I would pick up a five to eight hours a week of moonlighting work and I would do on my commutes, early mornings, late at nights, weekends, before everybody woke up. That type of thing to see if that was the next thing I wanted to do, if it was. Great. I was already building up an expertise in it and some portfolio work. And if it wasn't well, okay. So, I lost a couple of, couple of hours of sleep and a few weeks and decide I didn't want to do this. So, the experimentation is fantastic. Yeah.

The last thing I'm telling you to do, please, don't misunderstand, but last thing I'm going to do is quit your job and start writing a blog, right? Cause that's going to pay your bills. It's not, it's not right away. Right. And so, so figure out how to test your ideas. I don't go spend $10,000 on a YouTube studio into your garage, right? Buy a $10 tripod and point your phone at your face. And talk about your expertise for five minutes and put it online and see what happens. Right? Those are your experiments.

Brian Ardinger: So, we've got a question coming in. Hi, Jeff, what is your advice to college students who may still be unsure or undecided of a future career path? How can we build our professional brand when facing uncertainty or the idea that you don't know what that is yet that expertise that you can share?

Jeff Gothelf: So, I think you're in a unique position in that you really, from a career perspective, you have nothing to lose. It's not like you're going to throw away a decade of experience doing something or 20 years of I've been in the bank for 20 years and I'm going to step out and join a startup. Right. I think you've got nothing to lose in that sense. And so really it's writing down the things that you're passionate about, the things that you might have, some experience or expertise in the directions that you think you might want to go in, and the building small experiments in those directions to kind of see A: what's resonating and B: whether you like it. Because oftentimes we say, wow, I really want to be a soundman in circus, for example.

Brian Ardinger: Sounds good.

Jeff Gothelf: No one ever said, yeah, no one ever said that, but here, here I was, right. Nevertheless, right, you pick a thing, you pick a direction, you say, look, I think this is what I want to do. Like, I want to make videos about my family business of sheep farming. Before you commit like the next year of your life to doing this, right, what are some experiments that you can run? What's already out there? Who's doing what, how can you differentiate? What's gonna make you better. Can you participate in the current conversations without creating your own necessarily, but just contribute now. Build a name for yourself and then branch it out on your own.

There's a tremendous amount of opportunity for you and very little risk at this point, because if it doesn't work, let it go and we'll move on to the next thing. As stuff starts to land, the potential here is enormous, right? Because if you, if you can find it in your mid, early twenties, even your late twenties find that flag and you start to build up around it. By the time you're in your thirties, you got a decade’s worth of experience and a body of work around this. That's tremendous. It's tremendous. Very, very few people have that kind of body of work around themselves in their thirties. Right. They have a resume, but not that content ownership that you might have.

Brian Ardinger: Switching gears a little bit. There's a question coming in. How do you see the evolution of the product agile market in Barcelona and in extension, in extension to the world?

Jeff Gothelf: Well, it's interesting. So, product management, I don't think is going anywhere, anytime soon. I think product management in one form or another is going, going to be around for a long time. Right. There's a need for this clearly. And that the variability in the position, is something that is never going to go away? Agile is interesting. Do I think that in 20 years, we're still going to sit here and talk them about sprints and backlogs and retrospectives. Maybe not. The principles of agility. I don't see those going away at all. Right. Continuous learning and continuous improvement, inspect and adapt, customer centricity, you know, delivering value in short cycles. Like all of those things. Why would we not want to do that? I don't know why that would ever go out of style.

Will we call it something else? Probably. Will the values be pretty much the same? Probably. Which becomes a really interesting challenge. Right? So, as a product manager, I think you've got a tremendous opportunity to build a career, a forever employable career around yourself, especially as you figure out kind of what that niche is that you're going to, you're going to own for yourself. I think as an agile, I'm not going to say an agile practitioner because I don't know what that is. Right. But I think like, as an agile coach, for example, I feel like that is increasingly becoming a commodity, which is a both difficult place in the market, but also, I think a good opportunity, but it's difficult because okay, everybody's doing it.

Everybody thinks they can do it and there's a lot of noise. How do I stand out in that? So, you're gonna, people largely equate one agile coach with another. However, the opportunity is standing out in that crowd. If you could figure out how to become the person, everybody goes to first, what's unique about you. What's different about you, right? Why is your style of coaching better than everybody else's, that's a tremendous opportunity, right? To kind of lead the pack behind. But that's the thing that always is interesting to me is that when people have hitched their wagon to a methodology, I don't know that that's a long-term plan for success. Hitching your wagon to a philosophy. Yeah, I think that has staying power.

Brian Ardinger: What are some of the tools or resources that you've used that are out there that are very valuable to helping think through these career changes.

Jeff Gothelf: I'm building some of those now, so that'd be great. So that's going to be something that's going to come out and it's kind of a value add for the book. For people who bought the book and that type of thing. So, I'm putting together a workbook that has canvases in it. Forgive me for putting more canvases into the world. I'm sorry about that, but really thinking through, I think the tools for me are Lean UX, lean startup, scrum, business model, generation. Those are the tools that you can repurpose and apply into your career development. I think I look, initially it's really taking a personal look and saying...one of the questions that I asked...on the day that I decided that I wasn't going to chase jobs anymore, the jobs were going to find me.

One of the questions that I asked myself was why would people look for me? Talked about this a little bit earlier. Like, what problem do I solve? What's my core value. I think if you can ask yourself that question and really boil it down to a core value, not tied to a specific methodology, maybe not tied to a specific technology, right. What is the core value that you provide? I think that's a great place to start. If you can get to that, then it's a question of, okay, well, what are the various channels that I can use to deploy that value.

I did a Sense & Respond book club, actually, not too long ago with some restauranteurs, which was super interesting, and they'd read Sense & Respond. Super interesting. It's like, why are you guys reading this book, but they're entrepreneurs. And so, they read the book and the quarantine had just hit when we did this. And a lot of them are like, I hosed, right? There's nothing I can do. I run a restaurant and if people can't go to the restaurant then I'm screwed. Yeah. I had the same conversation with them. I said, okay, great. I get it. I get it. Right. Like I, the physical place is the thing. Well, what is the core value of the physical place? Like what is the vibe of the place? What is the unique value proposition of the place? Right. Is it tropical vibes and delicious food? Is it beautiful people mingling with other beautiful people to lounge music?

I don't know. Like now you can't recreate it in a physical space for the foreseeable future. How do you create it in another space? And to me, that's, that's entrepreneurial ism that's creativity, that's design, that's product management, that's development. That's fun for me. Right? Some of those ideas are going to suck. Don't send your life savings into them, incrementally, test them and figure out which ones are actually gonna be the next way for you to either recreate what you did before. Or at least to survive until you can get back to doing what you did before.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Yeah. Great stuff, Jeff, thank you so much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation again, to tell us a little bit more about, some the new stuff you're working on. If people want to find out more about yourself or the new book, what's the best way to do that?

Jeff Gothelf: Foreveremployable.com which will take you to my website, which is Jeffgothelf.com. So, everything's there. If you go to Jeffgothelf.com. Everything you need is there to get in touch with me. See all the books, everything's there.

Brian Ardinger: Well thanks again for being on the show for other folks that want to continue the conversation about innovation, technology, talent and the new world of work, please tune into insideoutside.io. We are having a couple of new opportunities for folks to have these IO Live events. So, on May 22nd, we've got Fernando Garibay, the DJ entrepreneur, person who ran the Lady Gaga Born This Way Tour is was going to be on live with us. And then the following week we have Henrick Werdelin, who is the founder of BarkBox and a new book called the Acorn Method. So those are a couple new ones out. Check out our podcast, Episode 200 just dropped today. So, appreciate everybody being part of the community. Thank you, Jeff, again for being on Inside Outside Innovation live here and look forward to seeing everybody the next time. Take care.

Jeff Gothelf: Thanks, Brian.

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Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. I'm so excited. Alexander Osterwalder is a Swiss business scientist, entrepreneur, author, and strategy consultant. You probably know him if you've tuned in, based on his work on Business Model Generation. He's written the Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, co-founder of Strategyzer, and author of the new book, The Invincible Company. That's why we wanted to have him on the show. So welcome Alex.

Alexander Osterwalder: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you here. You're coming to us all the way from Switzerland, but you've always been a big mentor of mine. And a lot of the folks that you have around your circle, whether it's David Bland or Tendayi Viki and that. We've learned quite a bit about corporate innovation, startup innovation, and I wanted you to have you on the show to talk about your new book and some of the new things that you're seeing in this world. For folks who aren't as familiar with your work, can you give us an arc of how you started with Business Model Generation and how you got into The Invincible Company?

Alexander Osterwalder: That's going back pretty far. Right. But years ago, we published a book called Business Model Generation. Actually, published it with my former PhD Supervisor Yves Pigneur. He's an academic. And I went out into the business world and our idea was, you know, bringing a better way to describe and change business models to the world. So, we created the business model canvas, which comes out of my PhD dissertation and the tool and the book took off like crazy.

So now there are millions, literally millions of people around the world using the Business Model Canvas, which is this simple tool to sketch out business models. And then the book took off and is now selling over 50 languages. So, it was really fun to see how that took off. But again, it's one tool and one tool doesn't solve everything. Right? I like to make this analogy. If your surgeon walks into the operating theater with a Swiss army knife, you're going to run away. Right. There is no one business tool that does everything, and that was never our intention with the Business Model Canvas. So over time companies we were working with, we were seeing the different challenges that they had when it comes to innovation.

So, we expanded the toolbox and, you know, the big, first expansion, it was meeting Steve Blank, the father of the Lean Startup movement, and then putting that tool set together. And then Eric Reese made it popular throughout the world. Right. So that was the next kind of step. And then we just always asked ourselves, okay, what does the world now need based on the problems we see. And we always say, when companies can't innovate, we don't blame them. We blame us. We say, okay, the thinkers and authors and doers and educators are not doing a good job. Consultant's not doing a good job. So I don't like blaming companies and saying, they don't know how to do this. They don't know how to do this because nobody's showing them right. Nobody becomes a surgeon or an innovation surgeon overnight. So that's how we kind of evolve with our books. Second one was Value Proposition Design. Third one was that Testing Business Ideas with where David Bland was the lead author.

And then the last one is Invincible Companies where we really realized, Hey, a couple of things missing that we need to bring to the table because we always ask, does the world need another business book? Very rarely yes. The answer, but we arrogantly think every now and then this is a yes. So here it's two topics that we really looked at.

What do leaders need to understand in order to build innovative companies? And the second part is the business model topic, we believe is still not fully explored. So we help people design better business models. So, leadership to really innovate constantly. The other one is how to bring better business models to the world to stay ahead of everybody else. Because I think innovation today is stuck in product and technology innovation. Not good enough. It's a game you cannot win. I'm not saying you don't need technology innovation, but you can't stay ahead with that. So, we go a little bit further and show what leaders need to do to build, we call it the invincible company, you could also call it resilient or defensible company.

Brian Ardinger: We are recording this live as part of our Inside Outside Innovation podcast series. But because it is live, we do have a number of people in the audience, and we want to make this as interactive as possible. So, I'll ask some questions and that, but if you have a question for Alexander, you can go to the Q and A bubble at the bottom of your resume there and put it into the Q and A box there. And we will try to get that answered. Please start putting in your Q and A questions as we go along. Why do you think companies need to pursue this systematic reinvention? What's changed versus years ago when you could keep your business model forever?

Alexander Osterwalder: Maybe actually let me draw something here. So, let's see if I can share my screen. Traditionally, every company starts with an idea. You can even take a Nestle, biggest food company of the world, they started with an idea. And then what happens with a startup? Is it tries to become a real company? Right? So, let me just draw this a little building here. Let's call this a $1 billion company. Now, traditionally, people write a business plan or used to write a business plan. It has this wonderful thing going up here, but business plans don't really work because the innovation journey and entrepreneurship journey is a messy one, right. Ups and downs. And then you try something. Customers say they don't like this. They don't want to pay for it. And if you survive this journey, okay, good ideas, good technologies. Rest in peace. You become this real company.

Now here's what happens afterwards. Once you've found a business small and you scale it. You don't focus on this search anymore on this exploration, but you focus on scaling and managing, right. You're manage. And we call those two worlds here, Explore, which is the world of entrepreneurship and innovation and Exploit, which is the world of managing a business. So, what actually happened, let's say over the last, you know, 100, 200, 300 years of business. Is that companies got better and better at managing what they have, but because they focus on that, it's almost like they forgot this exploration skill.

And that was okay for a long time because the world was moving very fast. You had to do product innovation, but your business small would usually be very stable for a long time. Even in one industry, you'd have the same business model for decades, right. Or for hundreds of years. Now what happened is that it became less and less reliable, you know, focus on one business model. Today if you're a leader of a company, you probably have to reinvent your business model. If you're CEO for our leader for a long time, several times over your career. So, the shelf life of business models got shorter and shorter. And I like to say, you know, business models, value propositions, they expire like a yogurt in the fridge.

So that means you have to buy a new yogurt, or come up with a new yogurt, right. So, what happened is that this year Exploit is it's stronger than ever before at risk of disruption. And, you know, let's take the situation. Now everybody's business model was disrupted. Even those that had a positive disruption like Netflix or Zoom, that was in the positive sense. Now let me add one last piece here, just to the visual. The Explore world here is one, a very high uncertainty. Okay. High uncertainty. You don't know if things are going to work. In the Exploit world, you have some relative certainty in the sense that, you know, the business model, you know, the value proposition, you know, the customers over time, but now everybody was kind of pulled over here, back to the Explore world.

And I think besides the fact that this has a very dramatic impact on job security, on health, et cetera. I also like to see the very positive side of this because it forced us to rethink the way we do business. On the one hand, in terms of our business models. On the other hand, also in terms of how we organize, because all of a sudden, we see, Hey, there is a huge workforce of underpaid people that are now jobless. And there's no, you know, there's no security. So, we're seeing good forms of capitalism, bad forms of capitalism. We're seeing companies that are opening up their hands, you know, and they're asking for government support. While, you know, just a couple of months ago, they were buying back shares and putting money in the hands of the shareholders and they didn't think long term.

It is a big crisis, also for the ugliest form of capitalism. And it shows the strength of the better forms of capitalism, but I don't want to get too political, but I do think this is a really, really big moment in many, many ways. That will also have, I believe once we come out of this, an extremely positive impact because it resets the way we think.

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Brian Ardinger: You and I were talking a little bit earlier about how different companies are approaching this pandemic and approaching innovation. And some of them have hunkered down and try to reinforce their existing business model, where others are saying like, Hey, this is the perfect time for us to try some new things or experiment whether they have to, or not. What's your advice for companies that are in that process of trying to figure out, should we go, all horizon three, shoot, the moon loons shot things. Or should we focus on our innovation at our core and making that better in this turbulent time?

Alexander Osterwalder: I think it's a great thing to refer to different types of innovation. Right? So, use the Horizon model by McKinsey, right. That Horizon One closer to the core Horizon Two further out, and then Horizon Three, really breakthrough innovation. I think that's very important to define that first because when people say innovation, it means nothing. Right? So, when a leader says, we need to innovate, everybody needs to be an innovator. Then, you know exactly they don't understand what innovation is. Right.

I like to use, could use the Horizon Model, but I like to use Clay Christensen's approach. It is more like efficiency innovation, improving what we have. Let me just quickly share the screen back here. Right. So, efficiency innovation, is here in the more on the Exploit side. And then you have Sustaining innovation, which might be here more in the middle, and then you have Breakthrough or Transformative innovation over here. And now my drawing is getting really messy. So, I'll stop sharing that, but we have these three types of innovation. Now it does mean you need to ask yourself, where are you today as a company?

You know, how much at risk are you going out of business in the next weeks, months, four years in terms of business model, in terms of cash reserves, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, we're going to be stuck in probably two years of a recession. So, you first need to just draw the picture of where you are and then you start to ask yourself, do we need to start to work now on breakthrough innovations while we have this opportunity because we have to. But if you're running out of cash, you don't have that time. Right? Because breakthrough innovations, you don't come up with them overnight. So, you probably have to focus on the quick wins.

So again, you know, it's the bad answer always is it depends, but I do think it’s a very good assessment of where your business model is today. And I like to call it business model portfolio. Very few companies have just one business model. Where's your portfolio today? How much time do you have in terms of cash and then move on? So, take Airbnb was in the news yesterday, an extremely good example of a company that had to cut back. They didn't have a choice and they did it in a very humane way. Right? Very decent way. They cut back as little as they had to 25% of their workforce. And they scaled back some of the innovations that they were working on, but they didn't completely cut back on the disruptive part, the longer term, but they obviously focused on the short term. So, a very balanced approach, I think it's a beautiful case study.

We'll see, you know, how they will survive this because that's the reason why I would choose Airbnb as a good example. This is the hardest hit industry, right? The travel industry, travel and tourism. You'd say it's a miracle if you survive this. But let's see, you know, what Airbnb will do. They raised $2 billion. They cut back on the core and they did it in a very decent way, because I think another example is Disney. They did it in a, not that I know too many details there, but I would say that's not how to do it. Cutting back a hundred thousand peoples, but while you're buying back shares paying dividends and I think big bonuses, probably not the right message.

I would work on all three H1, H2, H3, depending on your situation. And of course, let's be realistic. You need to first protect the core in a crisis like this. You need to reduce and really maximize the core, which also shows innovation is rarely going to save you if you don't take care of the core first. So, I get all excited when I talk about this...

Brian Ardinger: You talk about this portfolio mapping. So that's maybe the first step is to understand the…your base case of where are your bets being placed right now, and then across the Horizons, whether it's exploring or exploiting. And then once you have that kind of map, then from there, you start prioritizing and figuring out like, do we have the right mix? Or what's the...?

Alexander Osterwalder: Yeah. So, I'm a big believer in visualizing. So, I will visualize again. We have this tool that we call the portfolio map. It's two boxes. And on the top side here we have what we call the Exploit portfolio. These are your existing businesses and you look at them two axes here. It's how profitable or how good is the return here? Plus, the higher up, the more money a business model makes. Down here, let me see if I can draw this very quickly. We have what we call death and disruption risks. So, this should be a skull if you didn't see it. So now you start looking at you are businesses. I'll draw a little business model canvas here. You say, Oh, you know, I'm Netflix, this is my streaming, was pretty much up here. Right. That makes a lot of money. It's still growing and probably pretty well protected from disruption.

But if you can already see, Oh wow. Over the last month, my business model started to go down here because you're making less money. You have to close the stores. You already know, okay, this was disrupted, but then you need to ask yourself, let's look at the next six months. Let's look at the next 12 months, 18 months. Is it going to move over here in the sense that this is a business model, it's never going to come back or it's going to take a huge amount of time?

Take the movie theaters. Wow. It's not clear what's going to happen. So, movie theaters are probably somewhere over here in terms of death and disruption, but disruption happened to this. So, this is the immediate in terms of financial. This is the probability, the trajectory. If we take a historic example, of what happened to Kodak? Okay. If we take the cameras here used to have these analog cameras with analog film, got disrupted. Okay. They didn't change. The business model went down, profits went down and then rest in peace because they didn't reallocate the resources. So, what you need to ask yourself now is if you're moving over here, how much do you now need to either, the two options that you have? One is, let's say our business model is now down here. It's making less money and it's likely to die. Can I move it back up here? Right? Can I improve it? Renovate it. And that can be. So, in our new book, The Invincible Company, we show what we call shift patterns. Where you can shift from an outmoded or dying business, to a new one.

A good example there is Hilti. Hilti is a manufacturer of light machine tools for builders. They used to make, Oh, here my drawing skills are going to die. So yeah. Well, I'll make people laugh a little bit. You know, this is, this is a drill. Okay. So somehow is a drill. So, they use the manufacturing and sell drills. Now they decide, and this has happened in the last financial crisis. They decided to reinvent their business model of manufacturing towards the service business model here, which was not just services added to manufacturing, but at the core of what they do. So, they would offer building companies, a fleet rental service online. And provide them with the right tool at the right place at the right time.

And customers loved it so much that that became the core business model. They still sell some tools, but the rental became a core thing, but now it's a service company, so their business model change. So, can you do something like that during COVID-19, but then let me go to this part. Here's the Explore, the explore space, same thing when you're exploring new ideas. You need to look at the potential profitability or expected profitability. Could this idea make a lot of money? Okay. Oh, is a great idea. You know, it looks great on paper could make a lot of money. But if it's just an idea on paper and here's where it gets critical for COVID-19 days, if it's just an idea on paper, you also need to realize here, this is a different type of risk, not death and disruption risk. It's what we call innovation risk.

Innovation risk is the risk of pursuing a stupid idea or an idea that's too premature because the infrastructure is not there. Right? Which means you need to test your idea. You test it. Oh, nobody wants to pay. Maybe it goes down here, but you just learn what not to do. I'm going to pivot my idea and that's here. I've got a different business model until you can bring it up to here. And at one-point, transfer it into the Exploit portfolio, but here's the challenge. Right. We have very little time. You have enough cash to actually start exploring. That's the key thing and companies that bought back their shares that paid bonuses, focus completely on exploit, but you know, it didn't build up the Explorer skills and now don't have the money it's going to be very tough.

Brian Ardinger: You know at that Explore stage, you can't at the very beginning bet on which ideas are going to be successful because they're unknown, uncertain. So, you have to have a lot of them in the funnel. And I think that's where a lot of corporations fall down and it's like, they spin up an innovation lab and they put 10 ideas through it. And they say these 10 ideas are going to make or break the company where in reality, you probably need 250.

Alexander Osterwalder: That's what I was going to get to. I was going to make that a little guest. So, here's the big thing, right? The innovation myth is I'm in an established company. I need to build a new billion-dollar business model. People think I make a big bet to have a big return. But in the Explorer world, you don't know if it's going to work. So, the reality is you actually need to invest in 250, and this is where the data stops probably more, 250 projects in order to get one that makes it up here. How do you actually do that? So, to make this clear, a company that did this, really well, is described in our new book, it's Bosch. They invested, over three years, into 200 projects. Okay. 200 over three years. But here's what they do, because you can't, you know, afford 200 projects, you know, over a year or so. So, after three months they give them actually about 130,000 Euro. After three months, they kill guess how many projects they killed? 70%. Okay. So only 30% make it to the next level here.

And then they do the same thing after six months, they kill another, a bit more than 70%. So that's creating now this innovation funnel in their case about 14, over three years made it to Exploit. So, in innovation, you need to invest in many ideas, a little bit of money, and then only invest in those that bring evidence to the table. So, the winners can emerge. So, here's what leaders need to do. That big leadership task is not to pick the best ideas based on their opinion. But it's to create the conditions for these ideas to emerge, which means the right culture, the right guidance. Okay. The right incentives, which is very different from the exploit world. And that's where it's really difficult for companies these days, because they're so used to managing the existing.

Brian Ardinger: And that brings up a good point about culture and hiring in that they are considerably different skill sets, to some degree, whether you're have been hiring for a particular business model. And those people are experts in what they do. And they're job is to optimize that model. Versus if you think of an entrepreneur or startup where. Their job is to really seek a business model that actually works and on that search mode. If you've hired and built an organization around your existing business model and existing people to optimize that model, how do you then go about creating an environment or culture that allows that exploration?

Alexander Osterwalder: What you want here is small teams of two people maybe that are starting the project. And the more you find evidence that this is actually a good idea, the more you add team members. Okay. Cause this also means more dollars. And here's the thing you should have probably one or two people who are professional innovators, professional entrepreneurs. And here's another big thing that people mistake, they think, Oh, innovation is about technology. It's about science. R and D no, it's not. It's about entrepreneurship, which may or may not use technology or science. Right. So, these need to be professional entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs, innovators, however you want to call them.

And the team that grows can actually draw here on people from the core. It could be people from the supply chain, from marketing, who knows this particular market, or sometimes you need to bring in new people because now, you know, you're working on digital. You might not have those people in the court, but you grow the team based on what you really need. And the difference with the startup is that you can draw from the core and that's what you should do for a very long time. And if you're in an area that is pretty close. But here what's really important. This is the one I would want to emphasize most.

I remember having a conversation with the CEO of Logitech, Bracken Darrell. Amazing person who really turned around Logitech. He said, we talked about this idea of professional innovators or professional entrepreneurs, salaried paid entrepreneurs. He loved the idea because he understands that you actually get better over time. It's a profession. You don't take somebody who's really good at managing and put them in innovation. And he, or she is good overnight. They can become good at innovation, but it's, it's actually a different job. It's one that you learn. And this is what I think we're missing in many companies is professional innovators.

I don't think we're missing the talent, it is there, but people who've done this over and over again. That's what we're missing. And that is the crucial thing that we need to build more of, is people, their only job is to innovate. And here's what makes me laugh a little bit. So, when I hear companies saying, yeah, we do innovation. We're giving people Friday afternoon, 20% of their time, day per week. Did you ever say that for marketing? Hey, you know, go do a little bit of marketing or go do a little bit of financial reporting on Friday afternoon. Like that makes no sense. Right? So, I think what we're seeing now is innovation is becoming a profession and a real function. But again, we don't want to create a silo. We want to have a mix, but you do need to have a least one person who's done this a lot for the more breakthrough type of innovation.

And then you can ask from everybody else, efficiency innovation, everybody needs to think how to improve, but not everybody needs to build new growth engines at a company. So, people get confused and say, no, no, no, everybody needs to be an innovator. No, don't, if you're running a supply chain, you're just going to incrementally improve because the supply chain needs to run because you'll lose millions of dollars. What sounds trivial is not what we're hearing from leaders these days. So, there's these myths around innovation that are now starting to be cleared up.

Brian Ardinger: So how do you go about measuring the early stage stuff? A lot of times corporations will look at an idea it's like, well, that's never going to be big enough or it's too small. And you don't know until you actually test and build and experiment in the marketplace to see if it's actually to get there. But a lot of ideas are killed too early because of false measurements or measuring the wrong things. Can you talk a little bit about how you measure success across this platform?

Alexander Osterwalder: I will go back to drawing just very quickly. And let me just assume that some of you know, the Business Model Canvas and others, you can Google Business Model Canvas. Very simple tool to map out business models. You do this to shape your idea. And I'll put the idea at the middle at the risk of being mistaken for the product is the core thing. You have an idea you shape, and it could be market opportunity could be a technology, could be a product, whatever, you shape your idea with the Business Model Canvas, we call this business model design. But then the second step most important is hypothesize. Ask yourself what needs to be true for this idea to work?

And you will come up with four types of hypothesis, four types of risks. Everything related to the fund stage, which is what we call desirability hypothesis. Will the customer buy it? Is the customer interested? Then we have feasibility hypothesis. Everything, the backstage of the business model. Can we actually build it? And then we have viability hypothesis. Can we make more money from it than we spent? Okay. So, desirability, feasibility, viability. And then around a business model, you have the business small environment. We call this adaptability hypothesis. Can this survive in a COVID-19 environment or in a recession for the next 18 months or so. So, four types of risks, and here's where it gets interesting. And here's what we are, where I'm getting to the answer of your question. We can measure this, right? So what, the one thing you want to measure when you go from idea to business, is you want to admit uncertainty is high. I don't know if I, my idea's going to work.

And we just said we had four types of risks. So, we have desirability plus feasibility plus viability plus adaptability risk. And this is the only thing we need to reduce, reduce risk and uncertainty. And we need to measure, did we reduce the risk that people actually don't want it? Did we reduce the risk that we can earn more money from it than we spent? So you gradually measure how much you reduced the risk. Question of course, is how do I do that. Experiments. So you maybe talk to a hundred customers. Oh, I just learned, stupid idea, but I learned what not to do. I'll do a paper kind of, you know, a PDF exercise with my product description. Just learned, which features customers don't like. Oh, now I'm going to do a technology prototype. Right? So, you increase the spending in experimentation and prototyping the more you reduced uncertainty.

So here's the big thing. You don't need to build anything to test. There are many different experiments you can do. That's why we wrote Testing Business Ideas because there's a whole library of experiments. In that book, we came up with 44 experiments that you can conduct in order to reduce risk and uncertainty. And this curve here is the one you measure. So we measure, so with Strategyzer we created the Strategyzer Innovation Metrics. You measure the reduction of risk and uncertainty in order to be able to compare ideas. So now you can say here's an idea that can make a $100 million dollars. Here's an idea that can make $500 million. Can we compare which one we've de-risked more? So again, we try to make this very practical, so we created the Innovation Project Scorecard and download it on the internet. So, we can score every project, look at the size of the opportunity.

That's a traditional measure, but that's just a fantasy. But then we look at how much did we de-risk each one of these ideas, and then you make an evidence-based investment. You only invest based on the evidence that the team brought to the table. And that's where the portfolio management comes back together because now, you're going to make evidence-based investments in your portfolio. And remember the Bosch example. Now, you know, which ideas to kill, because you're going to kill here. Remember this one, you're going to kill after this first stage. Not based on which ideas you like but based on which ideas brought most evidence to the table, you're going to give the team, teams that got evidence follow up investments. And then at the next stage, again, you're going to only reward the teams that bring the required evidence to the table.

You're making evidence-based investments, which means you're constantly reducing risks. You're going to have a return on portfolio, not a return on project because return on projects makes no sense, in ideation.

Brian Ardinger: I've got a couple more questions on that, but I know that our audience probably has some questions as well. So, reminder if you have any questions, put them in the Q and A box at the bottom of the Zoom there. We talked a little bit about culture, but a lot of the book invincible company, it goes into culture as being one of the core assets. And is this something that has to be driven from the top down with the management coming on board with this methodology or can the average employee within the organization start applying some of these methodologies?

Alexander Osterwalder: Everybody can apply the methodologies. It's just that it's not going to be very effective, right? Because if you start innovating. And, you know, you're experiment and your testing, you're reducing risk, you're doing the right thing, but you as a team member are measured based on execution metrics. You're basically committing career suicide. So that's where startups are better incentivized because they're incentivized to do one thing, which is to find a value proposition that customers care about and the business model that can scale. That's what they're incentivized to do from the owners, from the investors, et cetera. We need to create that context where the team gets the right incentive. So leadership needs to play that role. That's really the leadership's role, but then the actually living that culture comes from the bottom up.

So, here's an interesting conversation I had with Scott Anthony, great thinker. And I was talking to him for our new book. I was asking what about the enablers that you see? What do we need to put in place? The cultural enablers for innovation? And he said, well, there are a couple and gave me some articles that they wrote. He said, Alex, probably innovators want to innovate. But the problem is there too many blockers that are holding them back. We require business plans from people with a new idea. That is the enemy of innovation. The business plan is the death penalty of innovation because you're forcing people to sketch out a fantasy and build an implementation plan for a fantasy.

You're going to maximize the risk of failure with business plans. Let's kill those and give them the right incentives to do the right thing. So, it is leadership's role to do that. And that's why I like to say a leader needs to spend 40 to 50, to 60% of his, or her time on innovation for the organization to take innovation seriously. So, I call it the Rita McGrath test, Columbia Scholar, good friend of mine. She says, look at your leader's agenda to know if he or she is taking innovation seriously. And I would add if it's less than 40% innovation, breakthrough innovation, not going to happen in that company.

Brian Ardinger: If companies are trying to figure this out, do you recommend them starting to explore investing in startups and that. What's the way that a company can say, okay, we get the concept, we understand, but we don't feel like we're in the right position to execute immediately. What are some ways they can make that happened?

Alexander Osterwalder: Yeah. Great question. I actually think, you know, the direction of, Oh, we're going to invest in startups through a corporate venture capital arm. Bad idea. If that's the only thing you're doing. I'm not saying it's a bad idea per se, but if that's what you're doing, it's not going to work. The other one is build an incubator. Well, look, every company has a lot of innovation activities, but as Steve Blank, Rita McGrath and myself, we call that innovation theater. Yeah. A lot of activities that don't work because it's not strategic. So the number one thing, before doing anything else, is give innovation power.

That means either the CEO spends, you know, over 40 to 50% of his or her time on innovation or you create a co-CEO. So Ping An is a great example in China. They, this is a banking and the insurance conglomerate, the founder, Peter Ma, it is one of the top 400 companies of the world. The founder, Peter Ma created the position of the co-CEO. Hired a lady called Jessica Tan to push innovation. Okay. All, you know, explore area. So, he gave innovation power. That's the number one thing to do.

And then how you implement innovation infrastructure. Do you invest more in startups? Do you do more homegrown? That is a choice. You need to understand the options. There are many things you can do. You can invest and then acquire. You can experiment, learn, and acquire. You can experiment and grow. Every company will have a different strategy. And that strategy also needs to be very clear. Ping An, they did a lot of home-grown stuff, a few investments. They did some, which were very successful. Tencent, they did mainly investments or Alibaba. Amazon, a lot of homegrown, right.

There is no right answer in the sense of here's what works. Anybody who tells you that is a charlatan. It doesn't work that way. You need to have a very clear strategy of how you're going to do it. The thing that is clear across the board, you need an exploit and an explore culture, doing everything outside, not going to work. So, I remember projects we were doing with Bayer, a pharmaceutical company. They said we should actually mix internal teams and startup teams earlier on at least, both, right. So, I wouldn't go for one or the other. I would go for a very clear strategy that works for you in your context.

Brian Ardinger: All right. Let's open it up for questions. Anybody out there in the panels have a question, feel free to put it into the Q and A or the chat and I will get it answered here. What are your thoughts on venture studio models and how corporations leverage that expertise?

Alexander Osterwalder: There are a lot of activities and the activities per se are rarely wrong. The challenge, I would say with venture studios, with accelerators, incubators, investments is if they're not part of the core strategy. I'm not saying innovation strategy, but the core strategy. It's not going to work. It's not going to have an impact. You're going to have homeless ideas coming in and homeless ideas going out. So a lot of the challenges, actually, that companies don't scale the ideas that they found and actually de-risk. So I would say, you know, whatever activity you do, integrated into a clear strategy, we call this portfolio guidance.

So, the leadership team, needs to create a very clear portfolio guidance, strategic direction, organizational design, brand image. We call that the corporate identity and that needs to drive your exploitation activities. That what you're managing, what you have and your exploration activities. And then whatever you do, we'll be good, right. Because you know, again, there's no magic answers that you need to do this. You need to do that. But they need to be integrated into a strategic activity. The reason why I'm emphasizing that is because that's the biggest problem. The problem around which activity to choose is smaller than the problem that these activities are not integrated and inside of a structure where innovation has power. That's the biggest challenge in 90% of the companies I see.

Brian Ardinger: I think the more you do that, the more you create that culture of experimentation de-risking things, failure, quote unquote, is okay. You know, not failure from the standpoint of doing the wrong things but learning that your assumptions aren't always right. Those are some of the things that I think eventually can start that flywheel moving.

Alexander Osterwalder: Yep. And it needs to really, you know, as a leader, you need to create the conditions for success. Showing that innovation is important. It's in the top management meetings. Creating incentives for people to actually experiment. Here's a good example. Jeff Bezos publicly saying to his shareholders, Amazon is the best place in the world to fail. And he doesn't mean when you build a new warehouse, he means, right. Guess why he is saying that? Because he wants to attract innovation talent. So that comes from the very top. Leaders create the conditions for innovation to flourish. Leaders should not pick the winning ideas for that you build an exploration portfolio. That's exactly what they do at companies like Amazon or Ping An. World-class innovators, build exploration portfolios.

Brian Ardinger: What would be the recommendation for research-based early stage company to make sure that they are on the right path for innovation?

Alexander Osterwalder: Steve Blank launched an amazing movement with the iCore Movement. You know, the National Science Foundation in the U.S. started applying these methods, mixing customer development, lean startup with Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas, to help, you know, scientific people. Really some of the smartest minds on the planet. To keep the right business mindset together because sometimes a little bit of a misconception of what business is. It's accounting. It's finance. No it's two things actually at the core. Creating value for customers, right, and then creating value for your organization. And you need to think about that from the beginning.

And you might have a scientific invention at the center of that. And then create a product, but again, it's just a product or value proposition. That's not a business. A business is something that makes more money than it consumes. So what sounds trivial is not baked into these research-based companies that have been more scientific or technology mindset. From the start you need to think Business Model, and then, you know, just for the philosophical part, value for customers value for your business. And if you really want to be a world class company, you'll immediately think about value for your team and value for society. Right. So I want to bring those out because I think more and more startups actually are thinking like that. More and more corporations.

But back to the research, you know, early stage, even scientists, the customer development you do, the testing in the market will actually inform your research. And I remember a couple of neuroscientists saying, wow, through this iCore program, I've saved years of research because I would have gone off into the wrong direction. So what I would also add to that is scientists actually have a very good foundation to do this, right.

So, I work a lot with huge pharmaceutical companies across the world. They're all knocking on Strategyzer’s doors. Interesting. Business model has died. They actually have everything they need. The scientific mindset of having a hypothesis, testing it and changing it until they figure out what works. It's even, you know, to a certain extent you could say it's easier in social science because we don't need to be as exact and the numbers I said is 250 to one. To find a new molecule it's thousands to one. It's actually a lot harder to find a new molecule. So the question is why can't pharmaceutical companies innovate beyond molecules. Because they don't apply this mindset to business. And this is exactly what research-based companies need to do is think business R and D, think business R and D.

But very long answer because I'm passionate about it. Because pharmaceutical companies not being able to do it yet. But I mentioned just one already, Bayer. We worked with them. This is a public case. Doing it, but we have another five in our portfolio working with us. They're all on the path towards this and startups going through NSF, the National Science Foundation program do this as well.

Brian Ardinger: The question from Jason Williams is Alex, thanks for sharing today. Great stuff. As you've been studying companies from across so many different industries, what is emerging during this crisis that gets you excited about the future?

Alexander Osterwalder: Again, what gets me excited? Like what I said at the beginning, this is a huge opportunity because I don't know any company that hasn't been disrupted right. In one way or another, some positive, which is also good, like Netflix and Zoom. But then others very negatively like Airbnb. So, there are a couple of positive things. First one is everybody now needs to deal with disruption and there are companies who already have structures to deal with this, and they are rewarded for having done this upfront.

And the people who helped build these structures are going to get a higher profile in the company. So they're catapulted to the forefront, those who built innovation infrastructure. Those who haven't now are waking up. Right. So, they have to. I remember just before the lockdown being with one of the biggest financial institutions in Europe with the CEO and team. And so, and you know, there was a hesitation and, you know, disruption was still pretty vague. They knew it was coming. But then we talked about Ping An, you know, as an example of a company, that less than a decade ago, they made this shift. Now everybody's waking up to make this shift.

The other thing I'm excited, excited is the wrong word, but there is a certain punishment of those companies who just in quotes bought back shares and, you know, just focused on Exploit, paid huge bonuses to managers and leaders who didn't even create value for the company. And again, I'm not happy about that. But I'm happy about the fact that this is now become very visible. You know, we see the other side. Again, you know, mentioning Airbnb as an example of a company that also had to go through something very tough, but they did in a very decent way. So, you can see the great leaders emerging and they're now visible. Just like you can see the terrible leader. Everything is amplified. Right? Great leaders. And terrible leaders and I'll stop my comments there. I won't get political, but we can really see the difference between great leaders and terrible leaders in a crisis like this.

Brian Ardinger: It's like that old saying when the tide goes out and you see who's wearing a bathing suit.

Alexander Osterwalder: Warren Buffett. And by the way, taking Warren Buffett as an example, what's interesting. And this makes me think about the crisis now. Berkshire Hathaway has a lot of cash on the side. And normally, you know, Warren Buffett would invest and buy companies, but even Warren Buffett is now not buying assets because he says it's not clear where the world is going. So, it is a difficult time to make decisions and we need to be very careful. And that's why I think all this whole experimentation is important that we keep that in mind. There are things you can learn. Well, we can't learn. There's nothing that will help us with experiments is where's the economy in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months. But you know, you can, good management will be able to deal with that.

Brian Ardinger: I think we have time for a couple more questions. Question around...have you seen any case studies or examples of companies that are startups or otherwise that have done a good job in the last two months of pivoting or, or looking at different ways to explore and exploit?

Alexander Osterwalder: We're doing a little bit of research and I don't have the names of top of my mind. Getting old, have memory loss, but I remember the context. So, there's a Japanese office. I think it was office material company. That made an interesting pivot very quickly and saw COVID-19 as an opportunity in the sense that in Japan, apartments, lot of people live in apartments, not in homes, in houses. The apartments are very small and the rooms, you know, are there's a lot of shared space and the individual rooms are very small, right. So now if you have to work from home, may be difficult, like even more extreme than in most cases, you know, in the Western world. So, this company created from scratch, tents that you could use as an office tent and isolate yourself. And what's amazing is how fast they did this. Right. They immediately saw COVID-19 as an opportunity in the crisis and they pivoted very fast. I love that example. Yeah.

There's another one, a Chinese example. I really can't remember the name of a company that launched a new multimillion-dollar film. It's an really expensive movie. And they couldn't distribute it through theaters. It's the American example, which we all trust. But, but in that case, what they did, which was very interesting, is they work together with, and social media provider to distribute the movie in smaller chunks, right. They really thought partnership very quickly and they didn't just go direct. That would be in a different option, but here's the thing you can't just go from, we use the distribution to going direct because you don't have the reach. So, it was a very smart, strategic direction to say we don't have that clout. Let's sell the movie for, I think it was $600 million, something like that, a big number. They would sell the rights to a social media company who would then take care of monetization.

So, there are a couple of interesting pivots like that. And, you know, in some cases can be very hard airlines, well, stop not much you can do. But you know, I think also with airlines, what we're seeing is now there, Scott Galloway, you know, we know he talks about that a lot. Right now, they're giving it, they're holding their handout. Because they weren't careful before, again, it's a difficult industry, but you know, it, it's crazy what kind of behaviors we see from some leaders and from some corporations out there. So again, I also think we see the great corporate citizens and the terrible corporate citizens now really emerging. That's the positive side. Those that are doing good work. Now they can show it off. Those are doing terrible work, they'll be punished. Because again, we need to protect the jobs that people, not the jobs and the companies. That's how capitalism works, but we need to also protect the people, but that's not always the case.

Brian Ardinger: We're running up at the top of the hour here. You've been super generous with your time today and everything that you've done. And Strategyzer has been very generous with a lot of your tools that are available for folks to download and that. But if people want to find out more about yourself, about the book, I'll show them up right here in that, but what's the best way to do that?

Alexander Osterwalder: I'd just type strategyzer.com. And the reason why is because for every book we wrote, so the four books we wrote, we give about a quarter away for free so people can get a tease. Right. I believe in the freemium model, have a look at that. We give all of our conceptual tools away so people can use them. So, we want these tools to spread. And then, you know, we build technology enabled services on top. We target, we mainly work with large organizations, so we want startups to use all of this stuff. Just go there and do that. And then, you know, a lot of YouTube talks now. There's an inflation of conferences. So actually, lot of good stuff out there. And then, you know, podcasts. So, go to strategyzer.com.

Can you send them to Tendayi Viki's talk and to David Bland's talk? Because two of my colleagues were on the show as well. So, I appreciate that. Thanks for that good work. And because we want to share a lot, right? We want people to do better work. That's our mission, help people do better work. Tell us what's not working and what you need, and that will help us for future books and work.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, I appreciate everybody coming on Inside Outside Innovation Live. Please follow us on social media and go to InsideOutside.io for the list of podcasts, all the stuff that we push out on a regular basis. We have a number of IO Live events coming out throughout the rest of the month. So please check that out and again, Alexander, thank you so much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. It's been a real honor to have a one on one conversation with you and to share that with what we're building out here in the Midwest and other places. So, thank you very much. That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I am your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Chris Shipley. She is the co-author of the new book, The Adaptation Advantage. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Shipley: Thank you very much for inviting me on. I appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on for a number of different reasons. You and I go back on number of years, mentoring Pipeline Entrepreneurs, and you were one of the first speakers at one of the first IO Summits that we had few years ago. So, I really appreciate you jumping back into the community to talk about your new book and everything that's going on in the world of technology, coronavirus and everything else it's happening. So, thank you very much for coming on.

Chris Shipley: Is there anything else going on in the world, but coronavirus right now?

Brian Ardinger: I don't know. Probably not.

Chris Shipley: Well, you know, it certainly contextualizes everything. I didn't plan to release a book in the middle of a pandemic, but it's put the writing and the thinking about future of work really in sharp definitions. Oddly, it's a good time.

Brian Ardinger: Well, the timing is perfect for this and you and I have been in this space talking about disruption and startups, technology, and all of this. And we've been warning folks for a long time about the coming changes, whether it's new technology like AI or self-driving cars or global climate change, et cetera. And it seems like it's only now hitting folks that, oh yeah, this disruption thing might actually be real. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on that mind shift that a lot of people are going through right now. Like they may have heard about it change and, and talked about this, this rapid pace of change, but only now are beginning to see it.

Chris Shipley: I think you hit it exactly right. It was easy before January to think about this future is something that's out there. It might be months or years or decades away, but it's, it's something I can deal with then. And very forward-thinking companies and individuals, of course, were doing strategic planning and doing longterm thinking, but again, it was very easy to focus on the immediate thing in front of you. What's been so important now is to see this acceleration that a lot of the things that we write about in the book, a lot of things that people have been concerned or working on strategic plans or longterm planning, it's just been compressed into a very short period of time where we've started to have to activate a lot of those plans or make plans and activate them very, very quickly.

So, this time, whether it's the virus or our reaction to it, has been an accelerant to get to the kinds of transitions that we know we have to make that are really hard to do when you're very comfortable where you are. It's really difficult. If you're on firm ground to take a step onto something that might be a little uncertain. Now everything's uncertain. So, leaping from the one Lily pad to the next, starting to feel like it's not such a bad thing after all.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's also interesting to see which companies are jumping on that and adapting faster. I'm currently at Nelnet. Now we have 6,500 employees in multiple different states and we basically transitioned 6,000 of those employees to remote work in a matter of 10 days. And that's something that I think if you would've gone into the boardroom two weeks earlier and said, Hey, I think this is what we need to do, we just need to go remote. It would have never happened.

Chris Shipley: Yeah. You would have said, Oh, that's an interesting idea. Think about what that could save us in real estate and HR costs and blah, blah, blah, you know, and let's form a committee. And we'll create a strategic plan and let's make that our goal for 2022. Instead, it was like, we gotta do it right now. So, what right now do we have to do? And I've seen a number of companies looking at that from we've got to make sure that every employee has the best possible bandwidth or one company that has been deploying their ergonomics specialist to FaceTime meetings where they say, well, point your camera at your work situation. Why do you have your laptop on a hamper? And you're sitting on a beach chair that really can't be healthy now, can it. Let's set up a pickup station so you can come by campus and get your office chair. I mean, they're doing things that are, we never think about, even in a very deliberate strategic plan they're making happen in matters of days. If not even faster.

Brian Ardinger: It's not just the bigger corporations it's you and I both work with smaller startups. And a lot of times they're thought of as nimbler and things along those lines, but they're also struggling with the fact that our business model doesn't work right now, or the business model we are trying to evolve our work on is now totally disrupted for six months. And we don't have six months of runway to figure it out the next step. So, what do we do?

Chris Shipley: You're telling the story that I'm living right now. I'm working with the company, tremendous potential, and you know, we've been able to make rudimentary progress over the last 18 months. We've made more progress in the last two weeks than we have in the prior, certainly six months in terms of understanding where we need to go focusing, being laser, you know, in our execution, because we know we've gotta be in a place to either extend the runway we have, or really be an attractive investment vehicle by mid summer. That doesn't give us time to, it was my father would say lollygag around, waiting to hope that something good is going to happen or that people are going to get around to figuring out what our brand strategy should be. Whatever. It had to happen like that. And so that's the positive that comes from this that we have become extraordinarily focused on. What's important, both in work and I would say argue in our personal lives as well.

Brian Ardinger: So let's go back to the book. It's called Adaptation Advantage. Can you give us a little thesis about it. And maybe how you got to write this book.

Chris Shipley: On the way back machine a little bit, it was 2015 and I was speaking at a conference in Sydney, Australia, and another speaker, Heather McGowan, who gave a presentation. And afterward I approached, I said, well, you just talked about my life. And it was this presentation about how work is changing, how individual contributors play a different role on the corporation. And, and so we just, I got to talking and discovered that at the time, anyway, we were living about six miles apart, both in the Boston area.and a friendship formed. We spent a lot of time just having conversations around these issues ultimately realized that we shared a lot of common views and we were really an interesting collaboration. Heather's a very visual thinker and if you've seen the book, you know, it's filled with about 80 and graphic frameworks.

She will say she's pictures, I'm pros. And that collaboration really worked as a writing partnership. We started looking at future of work, probably four or five years ago and found ourselves at a conference where a lot of academic thinkers we're talking about, the future of work is going to be all about the gig economy. Or It's all going to be about distributed workforce. Lots of people had lots of ideas. And one of the speakers said, you know what? I got my first job after my postdoc. I was 38 years old and Heather and I looked at each other, I got my first job I was 14 and I was bagging groceries. When did you get your first job? Oh, well I was 12 and I was delivering newspapers.

We had the sense of that a lot of people who were thinking and writing about future of work issues were also really very academically minded and just attached from actual workers. So that was one component of it. The second was that there was this again, distance again, a speaker said, well, I'm pretty sure it's gig work because when I talked to my Uber driver this morning, he said, blah, blah, blah. Heather and I left that conference. And as you do, we, went and had a couple of cocktails and we're talking about what we heard. By the end of the evening, and this is why the cocktail mention's important, I was signed up as an Uber driver, a worker on Upwork. I think it was on Thumbtack or some other service because we really thought we needed to have experience.

What is the human gig economy with a global workforce of atomoized work and this sort of thing. And that it was in 2016, it was about a four to six-month experiment. I was pretty sure that I never wanted to be an Uber driver. And I always tip my Uber drivers really well now, as a result of it. But what it became clear is that especially the experience with driving for Uber was that I was picking up people, usually young men dressed uncomfortably in suits from one VC and driving them to the next. And as you know, my background is in working with startups, I've done it for 30 years. And so I would say to them, you know, what's your company. What are you thinking about? And they would give me their pitch and I would give them a lot of feedback. And I suggest they talked to this person or did they look this idea, or have they thought about this business model?

And they would, oh man, this is great. And they would take notes and we'd arrive at the office of the next VC and they would jump out of the car and run off. And it's like, no one ever said, who the hell are you that you would ask me these questions? And what I realized there was that when I was sitting in the driver's seat, I was just the back of a head. I had lost my identity as Chris Shipley, the tech analyst who had launched, you know, 1500 companies. And that became the kernel of the thesis of the book to get finally to the answer, to your question, which is we are so tethered in our personal professional identities, that when that shifts from us or in some cases, as it is now for millions of people, when it's taken from us, we don't know how to act. We don't know who we are. Because we have a definition of, you know, I am a tech analyst, or I am a journalist or I'm a doctor. I am an educator. And when those, those careers shift, when that work shifts, whether it's because of coronavirus or it's because of fundamental changing technological economic underpinnings, we don't know how to adapt.

And so, our thesis is that we have to let go of our professional identities in order to embrace a more agile mindset and more adaptable understanding of who we are. It's very purposed focus rather than professionally focused. Meaning what am I doing? What is my…? What's the thing that gets me up in the morning and what's the needle I want to move in life. There are a lot of ways to address a particular passion or mission, and you can find a lot of pathways there if you are adaptable. And so, when one closes to you, understanding what your passions are, what your skills and your capabilities are and reapplying them in new ways, will help you navigate a future of work much more efficiently. And that's true for individuals. The same thing is true for corporations. Purpose should be the focus of the company. Not necessarily product.

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Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, the secret identity crisis. And you're alluding to the fact that you have the opportunity or disadvantage, I suppose, depending on how you look at it to redefine who you are and what you do. What are you seeing as far as experiences of the types of skillsets mindsets that are going to be able to make that transition more effectively, or if you're not ready to make that transition, what can you do to start preparing for that?

Chris Shipley: I think they're probably two things. The first and fundamentally is that agile mindset, the learning mindset, recognizing that you know, I don't know everything. We've grown up in a, in an environment that was built for an industrial revolution. Took kids off of farms, we put them in classrooms. We made them very disciplined to sit in rows, to learn how to go be very disciplined workers in factories and offices. And you learn about a bunch of stuff between the ages of, I don't know, four or five and maybe 21, 22, maybe a little bit older, depending on your graduate degree, then you'd work for a bunch of years and then you'd retire and you die. And then that retirement and die part was a pretty small window because we needed you to go so that we could bring the next group up.

Now we've got longevity. So, people are looking to live a much longer. You and I, it's not unreasonable to think that, I'm 58, maybe I have 40 or 50 more years ahead of me because of the advances of medicine and all sorts of things. We will live longer lives. So, if I stop working in four years, which is what the actuarial tables are expecting me to do. That's a heck of a long time to be retired. And the learning that I had as a college student in the eighties probably is losing some of its relevancy, at least around specific skills. So how do we start to make learning and working in retirement a much more cyclical experience that goes through, through our lives.

That's only going to happen if we embrace an agile mindset, a learning mindset that says, you know, things I used to know to be true, may not be true anymore. I need to unlearn those things. I need to reimagine new ways of doing things. I might need to top up some skillsets, but that continuous learning is going to be the number one survival tool for people as they move through their careers now, and that will be guided by a real sense of purpose. When I think about what do I do? I don't think I put words to paper and create books. That's the exact. But what I do is, is try to think deeply about things. Try to be a connector of dots and a catalyst for other people's thinking.

So, whether it's doing a podcast or it's writing a book, or it's walking down the street and having a conversation with someone, there are lots of ways I can do that. And some of those ways are very efficient and earning money. Some of them aren't. I'll figure that out as I go, I need to find more than that are certainly, but the point is I can apply that in a lot of ways. If I think of myself as just a journalist in today's environment where newspapers are dying, that's a real nonstarter for a next phase of a career and a next phase of a career. The two things, agile mindset always be learning and always be driving to a purpose. And that doesn't have to mean save the world and end starvation and bring peace to the Middle East. It means, you know, my passion is helping people or my passion is teaching or my passion is connecting dots and being a resource for people are lots of different ways you can define passion, but once you're focused on what that is, you can fulfill it by a lot of different avenues.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and it's interesting when I talked to folks it's really democratization of innovation, which seems to be coming about, and yeah, you and I have been both in this space for a long time in technology and that, and I think back 20 years ago, when I had to build a brand new website and it cost $2 million to do so. And now you have all the world's knowledge in your pocket and no code tools and things along those lines that makes it easier. Even for a non-technical founder, to kind of get up, get going experiment. I think we're entering this age of impact. I guess it's either age of impact where you're going to be doing the impacting or it's going to impact you, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on some of the trends that you're seeing from a technology side that may help people navigate this.

Chris Shipley: I like that idea of age of impact. I think that that's right. Technology is moving so quickly. We're things that we thought we needed to learn or code that we needed to be able to write or the latest technology trend. The shelf life, the half-life of any new technology is increasingly short. And so, it's really hard for me to say, well, this technology or that technology is going to matter most. Democratization is a really good word that the ability to push that out, but also to be thinking about as a individually and as a business leader, what are the levers that I get to pull? And today it might be artificial intelligence or big data, or 3-D manufacturer individual custom manufacturing, 3-D printing. It could be a lot of different things. It's just what makes sense in context of where I am today and what I'm trying to accomplish. And it feels like kind of a non-answer to your question. But I think that the trend really is what can I grab today as a resource and really test in the market and innovate quickly to better serve my customers to purpose.

And you know what's been interesting is watching a lot of small businesses, they're really scrambling to think about how do I stay in business? An example, maybe an overly simplified one, but there's a, a little, um, cafe in Palo Alto across the street from the Stanford hospital. And as you can imagine, it's wedged between the Stanford shopping mall. Nobody there anymore, the Stanford hospital, people that are pretty occupied. Their business virtually disappears. It's a little, you know, lunch counter kind of business. And they, we can't have customers coming into our shop anymore. But a large number of our customers work in the hospital.

What if we put on our lunch menu for a hundred dollars buy sandwiches for this, the nursing staff and all we'll do is fulfill those orders. We'll, we'll just take food that the generosity of our community to feed our first responder works and they have been able to thrive. It's a really different way. You know, they had to figure out how to put a website up, but I use social media to communicate this idea. How to get the word out that they were doing this, but they are 10 packs of sandwiches at a time, making that business work during this really disruptive period.

Saw this thing the other day of a Dunkin' Donut franchise, where of course it can have customers coming in. They're not making donuts. They turned their shop into a face mass production facility. We've seen local microbreweries and some actually even larger corporations are saying, well, yeah, we used to distill perfume in our factories. Now we're going to make the hand sanitizer. People are thinking about just how do they pull different levers of technology, of need, of understanding to get through these periods. And I don't think anyone came at it and said, what's the trendy technology. How can we leverage AI?

Now there are companies..I work with one based in Spain who was doing a personal digital assistant, technology predictive analytics. They've been working with the government of Spain to do predictive models for the virus. So, it's a different application of that technology. They didn't start with, we've got a hammer. What are the nails out there? What are the problems that we know that we could have leverage to fill? And that's where real innovation happens. When we have this constraint, we have this unexpected emergency. When we, don't have enough money or time or resources, but we know we've got to do something. And we'll find the right technologies. Whatever's trending at any particular time to help us do that.

Brian Ardinger: I was working with a startup the other day and they were, again, struggling with the fact that they're going to be out of their normal business model for at least 90 days or longer as they're trying to figure this out. I was talking to I said, yeah, I used to run an accelerator. And it seems to me like, this is a perfect time to use that model. Like assume you're going into TechStars for the next 90 days with your initial idea. How far can you get with whatever that new thing is? And it gave a different framework for the problem. It's like, well, we may not end up here in 90 days, but let's use this time to pivot or change things, experiment, try some different things that may get us to a new, new or not, but at least we're actively trying to make progress versus, Hey, nothing's going to happen in the next 90 days. Anyway, we can either sit and die or do something about it.

Chris Shipley: That's right. You know, when we've been seeing restaurants turn into grocery stores because they have the supplies or meal kit companies, because they have the ability to do that. It's just taking a look at what you can do and where your skills are, where your resources are, where your expertise is. I'm thinking about how you apply it differently. We'll see the companies that, you know, unfortunately won't make it through this. We're going to see companies that will muddle through and then pick up again on the other side. We're going to see companies that do really well and then thrive. And then companies that completely change who they are. And then thrive on the other side. This is a horrible thing that's affecting our country and our world. I don't wish it on anyone. If we look at it as opportunity, we're going to find, that we are a creative and imaginative, innovative, bunch of people that are going to find much better ways to get through this.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Businesses are built on solving problems and now we've got a lot more problems to solve.

Chris Shipley: Years ago, a colleague said to me, you know, you don't have any problems. What are you talking about? Oh no, you always say you've got an opportunity. We've got plenty of opportunity right now. And I think if we embrace it that way, we're going to...some really interesting things will come out of this.

Brian Ardinger: So, one of the things I liked about the book is you do talk a lot about the individual and helping that person understand that the new new is coming. But you also have a large section of the book talking about how organizations are doing this. And we've touched on it a little bit, but this idea of culture and that. Can we talk about how organizations are adapting and how do you see the changes that are happening? Give me a little bit of outline of the book of how organizations can prepare for some of this.

Chris Shipley: I think that the number one thing we can do as leaders is create an environment where our people can innovate and thrive and adapt. Maybe not in that order but adapt and innovate and thrive. Because if you don't have an environment in which to do that, if you don't have the operating system and the general instruction set, if you don't have the psychological safety to make mistakes, if you don't have you know, the guideposts and the real direction to purpose, then you're just kind of sitting there waiting for the next tactical order to come down the line.

I think it's really difficult for companies to move fast enough. If all your people are just waiting for the next instruction. That's kind of stuff you want to the offloads algorithms, right? They're really good at managing instructions. We want people to be doing things that are really pushing the boundaries. So, the third part of the book is about how as leaders, we create those environments. And I think it starts with culture because culture is our operating system. It's our roadmap. It's our true North whichever metaphor you'd like. If we all understand why we're here, by what rules we will operate, then we can, we do a lot of really interesting things. We can disseminate decisions throughout the organization. We don't have to have this command and control center that demands approval of every thought or every action or decision.

I know that if my organization is about, you know, in the case of Intuit, I think is a company that's grown up around a strong culture. Delight the customer is one of their primary values. Well, I know if I do something it's going to make a customer uncomfortable that's not good. If I do something, that's going to make an executive uncomfortable, but make the customer delighted, that’s okay. As an employee, then I know how to navigate through my culture and make decisions as I have customer facing interactions. Without that, I don't know, do I please the boss, or do I please the customer? So that's just a very simple example, but culture is the playbook for the rest of the company.

So really understanding that and really articulating that and not just saying you, we value these things, and this is the way we operate. But also celebrating it when it goes right. And I use the word sanctioning it when it goes wrong. Well, I've worked with companies that have had these really lovely mission statements and value statements and culture posters that are all around the organization. And they'll say things that, you know, we're about X, but you look around and it’s really Y. Right. And if it's Y but you say X and what you really have done as a culture of dissonance, you know, where people don't know how to act, behave to make decisions in the best interest of the company.

So, as leaders, we have to make sure that culture is never a poster on the wall. Culture is what happens every day in the organization. And if you could make the poster on the wall and what happens every day in the organization align then good on you. That's really what you want to be able to do. So that's, I think the starting point, I think, for any organization, and then it's sort of, how do you put the pieces in place that make your employees, put them in a place to be much more learning and adaptive. And the number one, we talk about a number of things, but if it was nothing else, it would be about creating this environment of psychological safety.

We looked at some studies that were done in a number of organizations and the places that thrived were always, those where employees knew that it was okay to make decisions. It was okay to make mistakes. It was okay to push the envelope or to challenge colleagues. That they could do that without it being punishing. Clearly there's a place where explosive mistakes are going to have consequences, but the ability to speak up, the ability to challenge, the ability to ask an executive anything and get an honest, transparent answer.

Those environments were ones where workers went away and really thrived and really contributed to the environment. That they felt safer. They felt more confident. They felt that their vulnerability was mirrored by the vulnerability of the executives. And that created a shared sense of purpose and safety that allow people to work together. If a strong culture and a sense of safety are the only two pieces you can work on right now, go work on those because that then lays the foundation for all the other things that you can do in your organization.

Brian Ardinger: It will be interesting to see how cultures and organizations adapt to that, because I think you know, in the old way of thinking, you moved up the ladder based on your expertise and you had to level up each time. And by the time you got to the top of you were smarter or knew more domain expertise or whatever, then the people below you. But now that's not always the case. And in fact, a lot of times you're going to often have to be able to raise your hand and say, I'm no longer the expert. What do we do next? And I think, yeah, that is going to make people uncomfortable. So, are there tips or hints on how to become more comfortable in the uncertainty and ambiguity?

Chris Shipley: Well, I think that's it. You've got to get comfortable being uncomfortable, Heather and I, over the last several weeks have been doing a lot of virtual reading clubs and book clubs and podcasts. And we ask how do you feel about these transitions in your organization? As people move around and they bring new capabilities into your team that you don't personally have, does that make you feel uncomfortable? And when people answer, honestly, they typically say. Yeah, I'm kind of insecure when I bring in somebody who's really smart at that thing, or really good at that thing. And I'm the boss, by whatever definition, I feel a little insecure.

Acknowledging that owning that is a really important step in getting to that place where you're comfortable with discomfort. I used to say, I want to be the dumbest one at the table because I want to learn from other people, you know, and yes, I have enough ego to believe I'm pretty smart. So, if I'm the dumbest one, our organization's going to be really smart. We've talked about this in startups. You know, you want A teams, hire A teams. And B teams, higher C teams. We always want to be hiring the A teams because that's where we learn. If I knew everything, I wouldn't need to hire a bunch of people, I'd just coded in a bunch of algorithms and we'd be done.

So I think recognizing that your opportunity as a leader, your value as a leader and your opportunity to demonstrate your strength is in embracing these sets of talents and capabilities that you don't have, but are found in other people in your team. And by being willing to quickly acknowledge, I don't know that one, I don't have time to learn it. I need to bring somebody here who has expertise and my contribution to the company is not that I know that thing, but that I know how to get that resource. That's a different way of thinking about it that makes you...put you back in that sense of leadership that I'm going to put together, the right team. That's my skillset, put them together and give you the environment in which to thrive. Not, I feel like I have to know how to do everything that everybody else on my team does.

Brian Ardinger: I want to give opportunity for folks in the audience to ask any questions. I know we're pressing to the end of our time here, but as people are typing in any questions, one of the questions I have is you've been in technology and trends and writing about that started the demo conference, all this stuff. And you've always been on the cutting edge of this. What are some of the resources or ways that you stay current and up to date with what's going on?

Chris Shipley: I read a ton. I wake up when the sun comes up and so it’s probably a lack of appropriate window coverings. So, the first thing I do is grab my iPad and I just start reading. I read news. I read across a range of outlets, because I think it's important to have not just my stereo view of the world or my myopic view of the world. I want to have this 360 view. The place I've always learned the most is in conversation. It's, you know, we used to say about when I was doing the demo conference, I was meet with literally 2000 companies a year and hear about the products that people were building and the ideas they had. And that's, you know, it's easy to predict the future when everyone tells you what they plan to do in it.

But those conversations they fed, what I think is in me, an informed instinct. And so I could hear ideas and then, you know, the next person company would come in and they'd talk about something. There's a connection there. And I was able to see those patterns, but not because I was particularly brilliant at any one thing, but that I was listening to enough people that the patterns start to emerge. Yeah. Reading is important. Sometimes diving deep into something that seems odd that why would I want to know about that is actually insightful that you bring something from one discipline into another but listening and talking to people and listening more than speaking. I think it was my secret weapon for really understanding what was happening in the industry.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think that idea of having a solid network inside and outside your organization. I think a lot of, especially in the corporate environment, and you get stuck in your industry and you start hearing the same heads talking about the same things, and sometimes it's better to poke your head into a different industry and see if there's anything you can leverage or pull out of that.

Chris Shipley: Absolutely. There's great research from the Institute for Young Australians. And it says that someone coming into the job market starting their career today we'll have 17, as many as 17 different jobs across 5 different industries. I suspect that that's an underestimate as we go forward. So if that's the case, then having those deep dives, talking to somebody who is an educator, talking to somebody who's in healthcare, maybe front lines of healthcare, having a great conversation with the small business owner or pick any industry, but doing that with great intention, because you want to listen and learn about what they're experiencing.

And then being able to connect the dots among them. I think that kind of learning is invaluable because I don't know that I'm ever going to be in the airline industry, but fascinating conversation with a head of an airline understanding how they work. Which totally impacted how I thought about air travel and how I was able to talk about retail space with somebody else, because you know, effectively a plane is nothing more than retail space. And so, what does that mean in the context of selling this fungible good which is an airline seat. That actually applies to a lot of different industries. If you pull your head back up and think about it. Yeah. Go dig deep with those around you who are doing really different things. I'm blessed with many, many friends and with a great tech network, but most of my close friends don't work in tech. And so, know we get together to socialize. We're not talking about the latest technology we're talking about legal cases and architecture and. communications and lots of other things that it gives it a broader worldview. And I'm very grateful for that.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Chris, I really do appreciate you being part of my network and sharing your insights with our community out here. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that.

Chris Shipley: You can visit cshipley.com, which will be a gateway to all the information about the book and other things, but also the Adaptation Advantage will give you more details about the book, but you sign up to our newsletter, which comes out every couple of weeks and shares ideas about the future of work. We'll certainly share a link back out for this podcast. You Google me, you'll find me, and I encourage you to do that and to reach out. Because I do, like I said, conversations are my learning modalities, so I would welcome that.

Brian Ardinger: Well, once again, thank you very much, Chris, for being on the Inside Outside Innovation podcast. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Chris Shipley: Thanks, Brian.

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Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with us on our second IO Live event is James Gill. James is the founder of GoSquared. Welcome to the show, James.

James Gill: Hi, thanks for having me, Brian pleasure to be here. Looking forward to chatting.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you back on the show and regular listeners will know that we had a chat probably about a year ago when you were on the show. Talking about some of this no code stuff that was just popping up and that. And so, when we decided to go to a live event, I figured, Oh, I want to get James back in to talk about...a lot has happened in the last year or the last week. Exactly. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background about your journey as a founder, a long time ago when you started GoSquared as a wee lad, as I like to say, and then we'll go from there.

James Gill: Thanks again, Brian, for having me. It’s crazy times. Sure, we've got a lot to dig into. Just as a bit of background on me, I'm one of the founders of a company called GoSquared. We're a software as a service business. We perhaps haven't taken the traditional route of a software business. We started the business, back when I was in school with two of my friends back when we were just wee teenagers.

So over 10 years ago, we'd been together running a company. We used to build websites together and stumbled into building software, and we really love it. And fast forward to today. Continue to be a self-sustaining profitable software business. We got thousands of small businesses that use our software all around the world. GoSquared as a platform is all about helping small businesses grow online. So, we help you with that full customer journey from acquiring leads at the top of the funnel through to engaging with them throughout their journey, and ultimately looking after them and keeping them happy as they continue to be customers of our customers.

We really love running a business. It's been a wild ride. There's so much to get into, but myself I'm pretty much a self-confessed like product geek. I love design. Obviously, there's a lot we can dig into in terms of software. We use GoSquared, and the lessons we've had since becoming an entirely remote team and trying to keep things running smoothly. Happy to take whatever questions people have.

Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. You're in London right now? Talk a little bit about your team. And did you have an office? Were the people working remotely? How are you hanging in there?

James Gill: First of all. Yeah, I think were hanging in there okay. Thanks, Brian. I hope you are too, in terms of how we operate. It's a weird one actually. When we were at school, we used to all work from home. We used to work from our family homes, you know, probably coding away in the early hours of the morning or in the night when we should have been doing homework, building things and working from home. And that was how we started building GoSquared back in the day.

And then as time went on, we became more of a proper business and gradually we moved to London and then we sort of centralized there and that's kind of the way we'd been until literally like a month or two ago. And we always had a team in London that was always when we had face to face, lots of benefits of that. But last year, one of the team. Well, he moved up to Scotland with his partner and he really pushed us to think like how do we operate with everyone in one office and one person in Scotland. And so, it started making us rethink quite a few things around how we communicated, how we operated.

As 2019 went on we found it was working really well. And then we made our first hire from the outset. There was a remote employee and we brought in someone who is based in Costa Rica of all places. By the end of last year, we already had two people full time, remote employees, and he really taught us a lot about how to communicate, how to make sure people are, hopefully not left out of the loop, how to prioritize sort of asynchronous communication because Costa Rica, you've got a time zone issues too.

And so, we've kind of tried a lot of that stuff out and, but the rest of the team remained in the office. And then obviously with this all happening, as soon as things started getting serious, like we insisted on everyone working from home. We didn't want to take any risks. And, you know, all, any of us need really is a laptop to work from home. So as far as I'm concerned, as software businesses and SaaS businesses, like we are in no rush to get back to the office. Like we are very happy to be the last businesses returning to offices. The more we can stay out of public transport and mingling with the rest of the people. Like there's no urgency for us to be back. More than happy to chat more about like some of the stuff we've been doing more recently to make this work.

It's been a whole lot of stuff from tooling. Like we use Slack for team chat, but we also obsessively use great a tool called Notion for like internal documentation. We obviously use GoSquared to understand and communicate with our customers. There's been a bunch of lessons from that and also just process things as well like how we engage with the team.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about this no-code movement. You know, one of the things that how I found GoSquared is I'm not a technical cofounder, but I put a lot of stuff together and I cobble and hack together stuff. And I found GoSquared as a really easy way for me to take a lot of the marketing automation and specifically the chat robot. I put that onto my events and that, so I could have real time interactions with customers. So, talk about how you've seen the no-code movement come to bear. And how's that affecting your customer's ability to actually interact and do more stuff with their customers.

James Gill: I think it's an interesting one, I guess, adopting that term "no code" has made it a movement, but from my perspective, I've always viewed it as making stuff easier to do and use. And, and I think just fundamentally, like we're just continuously on this train towards enabling anyone to do what they need to do online and brew software. And so I think a lot of it could be replaced from like from code to no code to just stuff that was hard to do, that's now easy to do. From my perspective, I'm not a coder. I can tinkle around with HTML and CSS, but I'm all about design and how it looks, how it works. Whereas I've always been very fortunate to have co-founders that are now a team that can actually code and engineer and develop real hardcore software. It's always frustrated the hell out of me whenever I hit that block of like, not being able to do it, you know, if you need to write some Java script or whatever, and it makes engineers almost seemed like magicians in many ways.

Cause it's like, you want to get this idea out of your head, and I can take it so far, but having to hand it off. And I'm so excited about just the wealth of things out there now. The tools out there that can help you take those ideas into reality and into working things. And so even from design tools, getting closer and closer to like a real piece, we've always used Sketch for designing things, but we increasingly started using Figma, which you can mockup a pretty realistic interface with scrolling behavior and fixed layout components and linking between things. And you can get very far as a designer, without any coding knowledge to getting a working prototype is something you can put in front of real customers to try stuff out, which I think is just incredibly exciting for anyone who's not taught themselves to code just yet.

And also, you know, there's amazing tools. Like we use Zapier a lot for connecting stuff together and all of our stuff is not just that. It's obviously easy for someone without an engineering background to do. It allows you to do things you've never been able to do before because the effort to reward ratio just wouldn't have made sense. You know, it wouldn't make sense to take one of the engineers off of core product work to connect two things together because it might take two weeks and it might not work out and you might have nothing to show for it. Whereas Zapier makes it a five-minute thing, which anyone on the team could do. So, I think there's all of these great tools, which are just so dramatically changing what you can do as an individual. It's incredibly exciting as someone that can't, you know, if I sit down at a terminal window and I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

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Brian Ardinger: It brings that democratization to other folks in the organization. And like you said, it opens up additional opportunities for the developers that are, can actually code the hard stuff. They can go back to coding the hard stuff. And it gives you, or the marketing person, of the creative person, an opportunity to test and experiment and build some stuff that doesn't require you to have either as much, or you can allocate your team a little bit more effectively. So on that side of democratization of marketing, really, you are providing tools in GoSquared that gives more functionality and more capabilities to the average small business marketer out there. And I know you've been adding a lot of new stuff to your platform. So maybe talk about how you see marketing automation evolving and how's that playing out?

James Gill: Yeah. Yeah. I think again, like a lot of what I love about us building our own software and running our own company is our own desire to make stuff easier and simpler. It's very easy to get sort of boxed into like categories or market segments and definitions. One of the things I love about running this company and kind of almost controlling our own destiny as much as we can is that we've tried to avoid getting too caught up in like, looking at competitors or looking at market definitions of things. And I think it's just zooming out and thinking in terms of marketing, the marketing space. Well, even just zooming out even further than that, for like what are most small businesses wanting to do online then, and it's not that they're necessarily, or looking for marketing automation. Marketing tools themselves, are not necessarily what you need.

It's that you want to win more business and you want to ideally keep those customers with you and you want those customers to really like your business. And so for us, it doesn't really make sense in many ways to sort of pick up one tool for doing the marketing analytics bit and one tool for the live chat bit and one tool for the, and marketing automation, one tool for your customer support because you've got one customer moving through that journey. And the more you can make that a seamless end to end experience, the more that customer is going to have a nice experience. And the more you as a business are going to understand what the hell is going on.

From our perspective, a lot of it is really about trying to build a really great, easy to use platform that takes people from end to end. And so that sometimes means building maybe more than you would say having just any one tool that specializes in any one category, but we have sort of that functionality that helps you do what you really need to do end to end. We will freely admit, like we don't have every feature in the world for what you can do in marketing automation. We don't have every feature in world for live chat, but what we really feel is just ultimately the experience is so much better for the end customer. And as long as we keep following that, like what do our customer's customers benefit from? Then the better we can do, I think.

Brian Ardinger: What kind of feedback are you getting from your customers specifically around nowadays? I would imagine pandemic and all, driving revenue is a very important thing for customers out there. And what are you hearing or feeling from your customers? What's happening and then how's GoSquared helping them?

James Gill: Oh, you know, I'll freely admit I don't, I don't want to be like some big sales pitch on GoSquared on it. There's a mixed bag. We have loads and loads of customers that use us and some of them are struggling and some of them are doing better than ever. That's just been something that's been really eye opening for us like in terms of how some of our customers have fared through this. Well, all of our customers have some sort of online presence, but some of them are software companies that are naturally online and some of them are like, offline events companies that sell tickets to offline events. And so, you know, we've seen some of our customers really struggle and we've been trying to be as helpful as we possibly can.

You know, we get the situation right now. And so, we don't want to sort of part ways with customers permanently over this. We want to ideally see them once we're through this again. So, I think a lot of like engaging with those customers to try and make sure we can help them out as best we can. And then yeah, some of our customers have been skyrocketing and off the charts, like we've got churches that have become some of our most traffic sites are the weekends because they're doing that sermons online and their congregations coming online.

It's like these customers you wouldn't think of as like needing software to grow. We've got customers like that. We've got learning platforms and things like that, where, you know, they've just got this crazy, like 10 times as much traffic than normal, where people are just wanting to learn more. So, their coming to some of our customers like that and yeah, a whole range of what we're seeing. And we feel very lucky to be able to well with a lot of our customers and hopefully be...we do hear from our customers and other software vendors and other vendors in general are not being as helpful as they might really should be. And I think we try and look at us and see, like, how can we help right now? And how can we do as much as we can to be the good guys and just try and help out wherever possible.

It's been a mixed bag. I'll freely admit that, and it seems to be changing, you know, as we, go through. Things are just evolving all the time. And I think it's also been seeing things develop. We've got quite a global customer base. So it's seeing things develop in different geographies.

Brian Ardinger: We've got one question coming in from the chat. How do you distinguish GoSquared against other SaaS products in the market? Like Intercom and that. Because you do cross, like you said, you have bits and pieces of feature functionality that compete against different products. I would imagine. So maybe give an overview of that.

James Gill: Every vertical, every and sort of industry within SaaS has tremendous competition. And I've been to many conferences and things focused around SaaS. And you sort of meet all these other tools though. Hey, wait a minute. You all do the same thing. I think one of the greatest things in our space is there is this tremendously large market. Like there are more and more small businesses than ever, and there are many, many existing dominant players in the world of marketing software alone, many companies already worth billions. And from our perspective, some of the players in our space, some of the better-known ones, they've got an established name, but they've also raised tremendous amounts of money as well. And I think what we've seen is a lot of them moving, shifting further and further up market and into much higher paying brackets, you know, more like the realms of sort of the Salesforce and enterprises like that.

And you start looking at these people and they, like, it feels like they used to be on the side of the small businesses and due to a lot of those pressures that perhaps various dynamics have caused, they're moving higher and higher, further upstream. And so we see a tremendous number of customers coming to us that feel somewhat alienated, by the way, those guys have been moving a lot of like forced on pricing changes, not the nicest behavior towards their own customers. We see a lot of that and yeah, I just think, again, it comes back to some stuff I said earlier, around controlling our own destiny a bit. It's like we ourselves are a small business. I feel like we continue to understand small businesses better than anything. Well, I didn't think we'd be that great right now, building truly like enterprise level software or adopting enterprise level sales techniques.

We love building self-service really easy to use software. The company is just like us. And we do that better than anyone. And you can look at a feature checklist and compare that way. Or you can look at the whole package, which is the platform, the team behind it, the customer service we offer, the way we treat our customers, the way we just ultimately help you grow as a business. I think a lot of that's more nuanced and you don't necessarily build that understanding until you get in the door. It's not one thing that makes us different. It's the whole package.

Brian Ardinger: Do most of your customers come in through a particular feature set? So live chat, for example, is that the feature? And then they just get in there and decide oh, yeah, you can do all this other stuff. There's analytics, there's workflow and that, or, yeah. Talk a little bit about how people have utilized your, your service and how you've grown the business and how, how you've decided, which features to add and that.

James Gill: Let me start it out. We were primarily like building websites for other people and at the time obviously the software landscape is very different, but we were always very frustrated at the state of analytics tools at the time. This was sort of very early days of Google analytics. But other than that, you sort of had hit logging tools and things that. Everything looked like an ugly Excel spreadsheet. And all the charts were like images and nothing was interactive, and everything was like a 24-hour delay before getting data out. And so why we started was around analytics, this idea that you shouldn't need to wait for data, everything should be instant. So, like if you've got five people on your website, you should see a number of five people online right now.

And, and also reminding you that these were not hits or sessions like these were people on your side by every person coming to your site is a, a potential customer. And to try and bring that a bit closer that like the business and the customer getting closer and more human. So really from the early days, like that was kind of where we focused a lot of that energy of like representing that data in a nice way. The analytics has become this, the area where we're strongest known for. And that's certainly still really one of the biggest ways that people start using us. You know, they'll maybe building that first WordPress site, or they'll be starting off as website and you can use GoSquared for free, if that's what you're doing and then grow with us.

And naturally, like once you can see who's on your site or traffic sources that are driving people. You naturally want to start acting on that. Whether that's popping up a message to like ask, if you can help with pricing or just turning any of those visitors into a lead, capturing an email address, it's sort of the start of that journey. And then we've got all the tools to help you go beyond that. That's definitely a big part of it because there's, there's just a lot of content out there about us and being a good analytics tool. So that's naturally like just been a big driver for us, but then also, yeah, live chat as well as big because we, in this very fortunate position where every customer that comes in they're putting a bit of JavaScript on that side, a bit of code onto their site, or they're using a plug in and put GoSquared on their site and if they say, use chat then that's a bit of our product that is in front of our customers' customers. So naturally like one customer can often lead to many, many more customers due to that exposure.

I guess there's another movement around like product led growth. And for us, we take that very seriously and that we don't want to build a product that is like, Buy GoSquared, all over the place. We want to make the best product we can. And if we keep doing that, it drives tremendous referral. And that's how we continue to get a large bunch of customers. Aside from that, there's also just classic sort of inbound marketing or content marketing. But I was talking to someone the other day about this. It's just you know, content marketing has changed a hell of a lot since the early days.

And it's like, you can't just write a blog post and hope people are going to see it anymore. You can't write a blog post against the specific Google search term and expect it to do well, like as has always been the case, but more so than ever just writing thoroughly, considered great content and producing great content, whether that is written more video or audio. Producing great content is the best way to get your name out there. And I firmly believe that's not the fastest thing to do, but it's the best sort of long-term strategy to grow a business to just consistently do good quality work.

Brian Ardinger: There's no silver bullets anymore.

James Gill: I know exactly. And so, you know, any of those quick hacks or cheats or whatever, you know, some, they might work for a little bit, but I'm just always on the assumption that any sort of trick in the system is going to get closed down at some point. So you can spend your time, keep you on top of all the little hacks and tricks, or you can spend your time with the customer. Yeah. That's our approach. And maybe that doesn't suit everyone, especially if you've got like a finite runway and you've just raised a ton of VC money, like, you know, that might know what makes it great, but for us, like, that's just how we've approached things. Yeah. And that's what we continue to do.

Brian Ardinger: This is an interactive podcast live event. So, if you have questions, please put them in the Q and A session. One of the questions is I'm studying math and cyber at a University Nebraska, Omaha. How do you bake in security during development? It seems that cyber folks and development folks are at odds with each other. Can you talk a little bit maybe about that?

James Gill: Sure. that's a great question. I wish I had one of the team to go deeper on the backside here, I don't know if I can do it total justice, but I think, yeah, for, from, from my perspective, yeah. Security and privacy as well, which often gets bundled in which we take as seriously as we possibly can. You know, it's incredible to see how, how much more they are in the public eye than, than ever. You know, rewinding back to when we started GoSquared and you know, back when, rewinding to like, thinking about when the first iPhone came out, you know, you just used to get your iPhone swipe to unlock your access to your whole phone.

Now we've got like military grade security better than military grade security on everyone's device, they carry around. Looking at things like Zoom and how front page of every newspaper in the UK is like Zoom security related stories. So, security's become such a, the thing in the of people's minds. So for us, we take it very seriously and there's a number of things...its perhaps an overused used term but like security by design and that literally when we start working on any kind of new functionality. We start with an outline of what we're trying to, the problem we're trying to address and how we're trying to solve it. But within that, doc is elements around, you know, how is this thing going to work? How are we going to roll out to customers? How are we going to measure the success of it? But there's things like, and what are the privacy implications of this and what are the security implications of this and its to make us think about that stuff before we even right. A single line of code.

There's that side of things, which is quite like a fundamental level thing. And then once you get into building stuff, it's like, you know, having good code policies, good testing frameworks, you know, we have a pretty rigorous pipeline for how we ship updates to customers. So yeah, sure. We run a software as a service platform. And so all of our customers are running the latest software. You know, that with Zoom, you've got to install a new version of Zoom every time they release an update. With GoSquared, you log in to GoSquared in your browser. You're running the latest version of GoSquared, which helps a lot. But us pushing software to production, we have pretty rigorous testing there. We sort of run things on an alpha branch, a beta branch, and we have various third-party tools as well that are constantly sort of firing lots of vulnerability, scanning and testing. We also partake in a few things like the hacker one, there's various communities out that way you can sort of put up rewards for finding vulnerabilities.

We would rather reward someone for finding a vulnerability than for someone to use it maliciously against us. So there's all sorts of things like that. It's a topic we could dive into more, but, you know, we could probably do a whole podcast on that. I think one of the things that is a really interesting thing your guest asked, is it sort of that there is actually this trade off often of security and usability and ease of use. And a perfect example of that is us making sure our login screen is good. Like we, we really pride ourselves on the login screen because it’s one of the first time you, it's one of your first experiences with the product you use it often on a very regular basis. And we want that to be really slick and look great. But obviously it's also the front door to your accounts. So, there's various things. We've talked about a lot in the design of that in terms of how we store passwords, you know? I don't know how deep to go on it, but then how we store passwords and how long you let someone reattempt a password. Like how long you give a delay?

Brian Ardinger: The example of Zoom. I think one of the reasons why they took off like wildfires because they were easy to use. They got rid of a lot of the frictions that probably traditional enterprise grade video conferencing systems either have in place or had to have in place because they were working with enterprises and they're having to backpedal a little bit to kind of catch up. You mentioned privacy and GDPR, and that I'd imagine that's changed the world of marketing automation and analytics and that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

James Gill: GDPR is one of those four letter acronyms that you couldn't go very far without hearing those four letters in London, at least for a very long time. There was like a deadline for that legislation to come into force. And then pretty much the day after it was in force, you didn't hear much about it anymore and stuff went quiet and then it's gradually rebuilding again. And I think California has got that data privacy legislation and also just companies like Apple keeps blurting out about the importance of privacy, which is keeping it in the public's mind, which is a good thing.

I think with GDPR, we took it very seriously. A lot of our customers were looking to us like, what do we do here? How do we approach this? We certainly benefited in many ways because a lot of customers had historically sort of acquired mailing lists and contact address books in questionable ways. And, you know, a lot of them are looking to start a fresh. And so it was a good opportunity to work with them on some of that. Again, it kind of touches on some of the stuff we were talking earlier about the marketing side of things, of like, there's a lot of people that find GDPR an inconvenience, and then there's a lot of like asterisks you can put on things and say, Well, you know, we're talking to business users does that mean that consumers?

And, you know, you can try and wiggle around all these things and try and question the written law. From our perspective, we feel like fundamentally GDPR is about giving consumers more control about their privacy, about where that data is stored. And that's only going to be something that consumers care more and more and more about. And I think trying to fight against that or trying to work against that or weasel out of any of the specific laws is a losing battle. So from our perspective, it's just, what's the bare minimum we can do to meet the regulations, is how can we lead more on this. How can we do more than what GDPR says and do that in the best way that both helps customers and businesses?

You know, there's a lot around educating people about the benefits because okay might be more frustrating that you have to ask permission from consumers, whether or not you can collect their email address and tell them what you're going to do about that. But. If expectations are set better on both ends, you build better relationship and trust from our perspective, it's GDPR is a positive, good thing, and trying to work against it is not going to get you very far.

Brian Ardinger: Another question in the chat, what's your ambition for GoSquared in the next three to five years, or how far out do you plan? Maybe it's three to five months. Where do you see yourself going?

James Gill: I think, yeah, like you said, like three to five months, it's like, there's a lot that's changing under our feet right now. We're very grateful for the position we're in at the moment. And you know, there's a lot of companies out there that are having to make incredibly tough decisions about whether or not they can even trade next month let alone letting staff go and things like that. And, and so far through this, we've managed to steer the ship. Okay. And, but who knows how long this, this is going to continue for and what the economic climate looks like as we move into the second half of this year and everything.

But from my perspective, like we really get a kick out of building the company that we want to work at ourselves. We've had the opportunity, on several occasions to sell GoSquared and to flip it in a way. And you know, each time we've evaluated that or, you know, would we rather be doing that than what we're doing here? I have a natural desire to be someone that creates things and start things. And so I think even if we were to sell, what I'd end up doing is doing whatever I need to do to sell and then starting something again. And if I start something again, am I going to be able to put myself in the position I am now, with such a great team around me in such an exciting market building, such exciting software with all those customers.

We want to continue growing GoSquared in this self-sustaining way as profitably as we possibly can. Where we're at today with the platform and the customer base, I feel like we continue to be at a fraction of where I believe we could be. You know, I think we're only scratching the surface of what software like ours can, can do. The overwhelming majority of the market, the software market for marketing tools and to some extent, the customer service tools, the tooling and software, there still feels so old school and so not customer friendly. And I just feel like we've got so much, we want to contribute to that industry in that market. And we're just so hungry to get building it and getting it into the hands of customers.

So over the coming months and years, like we want to keep building the best software we possibly can. I think we could grow our customer base. Tenfold a hundred-fold. And I think we've got a really good team in place now to do that from here, we've got marketing through to customer success through to the product team we have. So yeah, we're just really excited to make sure we can do a better and better job for our customers. And if we keep doing that, then hopefully we'll keep growing and everyone wins.

Brian Ardinger: You come from a design background. And so how do you approach feature development and product development? From the design side kind of really focused on the user versus I guess how developers approach it or business people approach it, or talk a little bit about your philosophy around that.

James Gill: Absolutely. And I think it's always very easy to talk about this. And often when I talk about it, it feels like it might be so easy, but it's actually incredibly difficult to continuously practice what you preach. It's a wonderful thing to have engineers. Here, ready to build things. But I think one of the challenges often in a culture of being incredibly developer friendly, and developer...valuing hugely the contributions developers make and having them in houses. Then often developers are very hungry to build what they believe they want to build. And I think there's a real balancing act of enabling developers to make contributions successfully while also making sure you focus your energy on solving customer needs and customer problems.

You hear that kind of phrase, customer solving customer needs a hell of a lot, but it does take very thorough planning and structure to make sure you spend enough time with customers to fully understand their problems and their needs. And that that's where, most of the really hard work is not in the building and the coding. It's in the understanding those problems and getting close to customers to understand them and talk to them and, you know, okay at the moment, getting on a Zoom call, but getting into their office and like saying, wait a minute, we play this like role that's maybe they spend half an hour with us in the mornings logging in and they maybe spend some time in the afternoon.

And actually, look at what the other stuff they've gotten their to do list in the day that's like, competing for their attention and how much time they can spend learning, GoSquared or understanding things about GoSquared. Like it really makes...I find it very humbling to get in the room, with customers, and just see where we fit into their lives. And so a lot of the work in building stuff is that side of things that really getting your hands dirty and working with customers, talking to them, understanding them.

And then we feed a lot of that in and prioritization is always an ongoing challenge. So there's a fair bit of got. And there's a fair bit of where do we want to be as a company and feeding that in with opportunity of winning new business, and what the market's doing. There's a lot of like inputs and I'm yet to find anyone that's got like this clearly written formula of how to here's the prioritization, and bill those variables and outcomes the feature that will be guaranteed to make you successful. So that's sort of how we get into deciding what to build. And we used to like get far too quick into building stuff. And even small things, even like changing a button in an interface, can be something that can be misunderstood or misrepresented and yeah, it is always important. And I think we pretty much religiously do this now is make sure something is written down about what we're going to be building and what we're going to be shipping.

And one of the best things that I think we, he stole this from Amazon. Is Amazon has this philosophy of writing the press release or the announcement first, and it's such a simple idea, but actually it solves so much if you can bring yourself to do that. It feels like unnecessary work at the start of a project, or it feels like a bit of laborious work at the stop, a project, but it's such a good way to align everyone involved with a project that this is what we intend to tell customers. And if you get to the end of it and what you've done, well, it kind of does that, but if you stand on one leg and, you know, hold the umbrella up, then it actually does this, that like, it's a very good way to align everyone and keep it real. It's just a really simple but effective way to align everything from day one on building stuff. And we try to have pretty high-fidelity mockups and try and get those mock ups in front of customers before we start coding stuff.

Brian Ardinger: It comes back to a couple different things too. Like how do you measure success? Like you mentioned early on where a person using your tool may only use you for a little bit of time of day. And so, is the goal to have them use you actually less and be more productive with it, or is it your goal to have them more engaged with it and continue to use it throughout the day?

James Gill: That's a great, a great question. I think, yeah. You look at companies like Facebook who are kind of grappling with that moral dilemma at the moment of like, as a business, we want people to spend more time at Instagram, but what does that mean? It really varies by product area actually. So within GoSquared, you know, we have the analytics product to help you understand what's happening with your funnel, with your marketing efforts. We have our inbox product for enabling customers to basically engage with their customers, to chat with them, to help them out, to respond to their question on live chat.

We have upcoming automation product, which is all about helping you communicate with your customers at scale. It really varies a lot depending on those tools, but we use a framework would like jobs to be done in terms of understanding the task people are trying to achieve with the different areas of the platform. So for something like the analytics product, okay, well, it's fine if you want to spend your day geeking out, looking at graphs and numbers, but from our perspective, like if you're spending all day looking at that, that kind of is not necessarily seeing we're doing a good job with the product.

What we'd rather be doing is giving you clearer numbers and surfacing, what might be important or what's changed significantly. While we've got a long way to go on that. So what we strive for it's like, how can we surface answers to you rather than graphs and numbers? The inbox product is all about responding to customers. And, you know, an aspect of that is we do want people to have that onscreen and, you know, we do want people to be using that because it means that they're responding to customers, but we look at things like how long does it take businesses to reply to their customers? How long are they spending in the inbox?

How can we improve the workflow there so that, you know, rather than writing out 500 words to a customer, they can use saved replies or how can we even bring in some more automated functionality to understand the kinds of questions customers are asking and answer that for them? Yeah, it very much depends, but like for us time in product or time in the platform has never really been a key metric we obsess over. The numbers we care about out are whether the customers are growing their business. Are they capturing more leads? Are they retaining their customers? Are they ultimately growing their business or they as a business, are they growing and how much of GoSquared are they using is part of that?

We look at things like net promoter score and customer satisfaction and you know, whether the customers are yeah. sticking with us ultimately. So that's kind of how we approach that really. So we're not trying to put like ding you with a notification five times an hour to tell you someone new, you might be going to an event you might be interested in.

Brian Ardinger: I guess I'll end with my last question as far as what are you most hopeful for looking forward to in the next six or eight months when it comes to either personally and or with GoSquared?

James Gill: I certainly looking forward to going to the pub. I'm very much looking forward to getting back to the local pub whenever we can, because it would be great. I think on a serious note, I think just the whole world's going through a crazy time. And I just, I would, I just really look forward to us getting through this and you know, a lot of people are in far, far tougher times than we are at GoSquared and far tougher industries. I just look forward to the world, getting back to some form of normality and the thing, there's a lot of things that are going to be different. And I look forward to the things that will be better because of this, you know, the things we'll learn and adapt because we've been forced to. I'm excited for the things that we'll learn from this whole process. And I just hope we can, many of us as possible can stay well to get through it and get through to the other side. That would be my main takeaway.

Brian Ardinger: Well, James, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, the podcast and our second IO Live event to share what's going on in your business, and that and share your insights. So really do appreciate you coming on. I look forward to continuing the conversation. Hopefully it will not be another year before we have a chance to talk.

James Gill: Thanks so much, Brian. Pleasure to chat.

Brian Ardinger: Alright, thanks everybody for joining us. We'll see you again next time.

James Gill: Thanks everyone. Thank you.

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Sean Sheppard is the founder of GrowthX. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Sean discuss the impact of COVID on the startup and investment environment, Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, trends we're seeing in the world of no code, and ways that startups can generate revenue and adapt in this challenging environment.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sean Sheppard. He is the founder of GrowthX. And for long time listeners, you may have heard and met Sean before. He was actually on Episode 14, I believe, back in 2016 so welcome back, Sean.

Sean Sheppard: Hey, thanks Brian. I had no idea. I was so early.

Brian Ardinger: We're recording this in April, and this is our birthday week for inside Outside, and we're five years into this podcasting scene, so it's been kind of crazy, but it's been fun to do all these shows.

Sean Sheppard: Thanks. I can't believe it's been five years since I came there to do that talk and sat in your studio. Right?

Brian Ardinger: That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you back on. Probably a lot has changed with GrowthX and we want to talk about that. Also want to talk about now that we're in the Corona virus disruption, I wanted to get your insights into what's going on in the Valley, what's going on in startups and get some feedback there. Maybe we start by telling the audience more about what GrowthX is and where you are in the scene.

Sean Sheppard: We started about seven years ago as a group of serial entrepreneurs turned investors, turned frustrated investors, because our companies weren't succeeding, not because they couldn't build products, but because they didn't know how to build markets. And we set about trying to solve that problem for ourselves, and we built a proprietary framework for helping our companies find product market fit. It was exclusive only to the companies that we invested in, but it became quite successful and very popular. And so we started to share it with the rest of the world.

And now we licensed that, and I spend most of my time when I'm not in quarantine, traveling the world, working with governments and companies and countries and incubators and accelerators, on how to incorporate product market fit thinking and programming and execution into their support systems for their startup communities.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about how the world has changed in the last four, five, six weeks, specifically around what you're seeing in the startup scene. Even what you're seeing from corporate innovators that you work with. What's the general consensus of what's happening? Where the holes that we need to be plugging, that kind of stuff.

Sean Sheppard: Obviously, it's an unprecedented and interesting time for anybody who's in our generation and certainly in our lives. I've been through many economic crashes. I go back to 87'. I remember that one. I remember the dot com boom and bust, 9/11 certainly, and then the 2008 crash. This one feels much more like the 9/11 experience.

And by that, I mean it certainly does feel much more like war time, you know, we do have this enemy that we're, we're dealing with. Obviously, it's not one we can see, but it's there and I think it's going to change behaviors on a global scale. The degree to which those behaviors will change and the permanence of that change and when that change starts to normalize is yet to be determined.

You can watch the news all day long. Watch people predict the future. But like a smart man once told me, if you want to know the relevance of the news, just watch seven-day old news, and you'll find out just how unimportant it is. But the point is that we don't know, but we don't know yet about that. I do believe that there is going to be some measure of behavioral change.

Like the way we have security measures post 9/11 that aren't going away, and over time have been relaxed, but they're there to stay. I think we're going to have similar security measures, for our health, that will be here to stay, and then there will be certain things and behaviors that we will all change, whether it's less people shaking hands and hugging, which to me is very sad because I think the need to connect basic human need that we all want, need, and desire. I think just for our own physical and mental and spiritual health. But other things like working from home. The digital transformation that everybody has been talking about that's been coming for years and years and years. I think it's going to be dramatically accelerated.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think you're right. It's not that it wasn't seen or a lot of it wasn't seen disrupting education, disrupting healthcare, disrupting all these industries that we've talked about, but a lot of us, what we talked about in the past, it's focused on like the technology being that core driver. And I think the virus just expediated that conversation and forced a lot of those folks to change faster than they even were going to have to, given the circumstances going around. So, I'm not sure that necessarily we would have been facing these things in the future, just this virus has accelerated the impact.

Sean Sheppard: Yeah. So, a big part of GrowthX family of companies is our corporate business, which works on helping corporations commercialize new innovations, bring great startup technology into their environments, invest in the startup community, things like that. And when I'm having conversations with our corporate community, and partners, they're all number one in triage mode right now. Period. End of story. They're just trying to deal with the current situation.

That's number one and number two is those that are starting to actually see some stabilization around that are starting to recognize that there is more productivity than they thought, in their distributed workforce, than they thought would be there. In fact, two of the world's largest banks. I have very good friends and partners in the community that are at the C suite. Have gone through this triage mode, are trying to manage the mindset and mental wellbeing of their workforce, while creating this distributed work from home environment. And they're seeing that productivity isn't waining. So now they're rethinking their whole footprint. Like, why do I need some super expensive tower in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago or London when most of the people that I'm talking to are out meeting with customers half the time. They're 50% travel anyway.

Do I need all this space? What does that future look like for them? We're already seeing security concerns with Zoom. But they're having those conversations about, all right, now that we've sort of standardized at least sketch a patchwork version of what our world's going to look like. You know, how do we improve and optimize on that? So, there's going to be a lot of opportunity there. And I think what you're going to see is they're not going to get rid of this infrastructure that's working whole infrastructure. I think they're going to use it as an augmentation to some degree. And it feels like, to me, the new normal will be about 70% of what it is today.

Brian Ardinger: Right. Well you look at higher education, you and I both have kids, and we were talking earlier before we got on the recording about how the world of schools changed. And I think about the universities that are out there, private and public, and the number of them that might not come back to class in the fall. And how's that going to impact it when you've got a lot of infrastructure built on buildings and that, and people are finding out quickly that all the world's knowledge is at your fingertips in a variety of different formats. How does that play out as well? Industry after industry is going to be completely changed it in both good and bad ways. You know, you're talking about remote working, and I've heard two sides of the conversation. It's like, well, this is a great thing for remote working because now everybody's going to have a chance to be a part of it and actually experience it. And on the flip side, it's like kind of the worst way to actually introduce people to remote working because it's under duress and it's under stress and all this other stuff. It'll be interesting to see how we come out on that side when it comes to, is remote working good or bad?

Sean Sheppard: On the education front. I think you already know my worldview on institutional education, which is why I started a university to begin with, GrowthX Academy, as a way to disrupt and combat the things that are missing from big education. I've been making the joke, that whatever it is, 90% of the world's children aren't in school right now. Maybe they will finally start learning something. But yes, they're going to get disrupted tremendously. It's already happening. I can tell you that I've got three college-aged kids taking their online classes in my house right now and have been for the last three weeks, and then my son is four weeks into online high school.

Being here in the Bay area, we went into lockdown much earlier than many, and it's working by the way. We flattened the curve and the number of cases is reducing. It's not increasing. So stay home people. Work from home being introduced in such a shocking way, I have tremendous faith in the human condition and our ability to adapt, to change. I mean, Darwin said it best, right? Adapt or die. We're going to figure this out. It will change the way we communicate, how we work to some degree, like we said, the degree to which we don't know yet. But I do believe that people will learn how to cope with this and then there will be much more long-term strategic discussions about what's our future look like in terms of how are we going to operate going forward.

Do we need to have all this in-person interactivity, but like I said, not a hundred percent one way or the other. You don't necessarily have to go to one extreme or another. We're all working from home now, right? Does it mean we all need to go back to work 100% of the time? There can be a blend, there can be a mix, and it can be an intelligent mix, and I think this is going to open up people's eyes to that.

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Brian Ardinger: The other trend I want to talk about, and we scheduled to talk before all this stuff happened. So one of the things that was on my agenda to talk about is this trend that we're seeing moving towards no code tools and the ability for the general founder, the nontechnical founder, or even a person within a corporation to access and tap into productivity suites and tools that never were possible before.

So, I see coronavirus and everything else impacting that where people are given a chance to explore and do things and build and create. It's almost like the democratization of innovation is coming. I'd like to get your insights on like this no code movement with Zapier and Air Table and all these other tools that are out there that are making it easier for nontechnical folks to create technical products.

Sean Sheppard: Yeah, I think it's all wonderful. Look, I have two views of this right. Software as a service or SaaS is a movement that should improve human performance. If you're somebody who doesn't know how to code, but you want to build a product and there's a way for you to do that and solve a real problem with it, I hope, without having to spend money on someone that you don't communicate well with, who does work that you don't understand and therefore puts your capital at risk, then great. Knock yourself out. I can't tell you how many times I've seen non-tech founders get in trouble. I'm not going to assume intent on the product development teams, right? They're not intentionally trying to screw people over, but you've seen it as many times, if not more than I have Brian, over the years.

You've got great product people who really have a good sound business and market acumen, understand deeply the problem they want to solve, and how they want to solve it. Then they can't communicate that to the binary brains of the coders near shore, offshore, or otherwise. And they never actually can get the problem is solved the way they want to get it solved and they burn through, whatever resources they have to do it. If we can eliminate that, I'm all for it.

We have a portfolio company that does just that called Bos Framework, BOSframework.com. They automate 60 to 70% of the repeatable integration tasks associated with building most software. And they're cutting the time and costs associated with getting these products to market by automating all of the ancillary tasks that take up the most time. So, you can focus on core development. And I've seen it work with enterprise product management teams all the way down to non-tech founders. That gets these people what they want faster and cheaper, by focusing on the core stuff. That gives me a lot of hope. Is there risk with that, sure. Yes. Does that mean that coding is a commodity? Yes. I do believe that. I think coding by itself is a commodity.

I think what separates yourself in the innovation economy from the robots and the AI is your, EI. Your emotional intelligence, your creativity, your ability to collaborate and solve problems and come up with new ideas that set you apart from all of that automation. I'm watching guys use Air Table in all walks of different industries as a way to quickly work their way through problems.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, build out prototypes. Exactly.

Sean Sheppard: Yeah, and they're having a great time doing it. And these are people that aren't coders. Of course. They tend to be a little bit more technical, however, just generally might be maybe more of a traditional engineering mindset than a software engineering mindset, but they're crushing it. They're doing great things with Air Table, answering questions faster than they could have before. And what I love about all of that ultimately is it that empowers people to help themselves, those who want to.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about startups. You work with, have a portfolio of a number of different startups. Wanted to get some insights into what are you telling your portfolio companies to do? What kind of help are you seeing out there? How can I generate revenue? What are some things that you're seeing, as far as advice, that our startup listeners out there might be looking for right now?

Sean Sheppard: Broadly, the community at large, those who have investible capital are still making investments. It's their fiduciary responsibility to deploy capital in alignment with their fund thesis, in a responsible way. So, people are asking, is there still money out there? Are there still going to be deals to be had? The answer is absolutely yes. Some of you may have seen, there's some memes running around in the tech community about some of the biggest unicorns that we know of today were started during the last recession.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely, yep.

Sean Sheppard: Yeah. Dropbox, Zen Desk, Groupon, Venmo, Uber, Instagram, Black, WhatsApp, Square. Cloudera, Pinterest all started in 2008 basically or shortly following that. So you need to go from this mindset right now of thriving into the mindset of surviving, frankly. But you need to do it positively. Yeah. A lot of people talk about only the strong survive. I talk about only the resourceful survive, especially now, and you've got to pack your way into figuring out how to stay on the field long enough to learn, whether that's pivoting off of what you're doing in the short term so that you can stay alive in the long term. Whether that's going after this government cheese from the paycheck protection program, many startups do qualify whether they believe it or not, especially if they have employees and they have rent. They need to look into it.

Or whether it's getting more focused and narrow about who your ideal investor or customer profile are to keep you going right now. So I did a live virtual chat last week for startups all over the globe. That, it was basically a Q & A with a conversation around. You know, what are the things you can do right now to generate revenue now, because everybody's in the same, very precarious spot. Thought about it. I sat down and spent some time and I came up with these six tactics.

The first one is orient yourself around the problem and the person, not the product in the market. Right now is a really good opportunity for you to individualize your offering. Personalize it to the person who has a tremendous need right now because we're in a time where people are only going to invest in needs, not wants. And then maintaining an open mindset to be creative around that, to create a conversation with people at the bottom of your funnel about what's really going on with them and how can you be helpful and do that from a services mindset, not just a product mindset. Most successful SaaS portfolio companies all start as service companies first, and then they build automation once they validate that there's a problem to be solved.

Brian Ardinger: You may have to go back to those things that don't scale, that you might've done at the early stages of your company when you were trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. You may have to go back to that stage to try things that don't necessarily scale or not as profitable or whatever, but you're trying to move the ball forward, learn faster, and understand the new dynamic.

Sean Sheppard: That's right, and then focus on a very small group of individuals that you think you can help right now. Especially if you're a small startup team, you can only help so many people and talk to some people anyway. Get really narrow and focus. Maybe there's only a half a dozen people that fit this criteria. That's fine. Let's see if you can help them first and then leverage your own knowledge, experience, and insights to solve their problem. Don't necessarily worry about whether or not the product is there. And then think about it from a jobs perspective.

Bob Moesta, Jobs-to-be-Done framework is really helpful here, which is what's the job your customer is hiring you to do? How well do you solve that job? How well do you do that job? How do you know that you're doing it well? In other words, how would you measure it? What claims can you make and focus on that.

Then the fourth tactic is to build a value hypothesis around this idea at 25 words or less. Tell me why you are the person that I should be hiring to do this job for me? What's the use case and how do you measure it, and then how would you charge for that? You don't necessarily have to charge a recurring revenue model SaaS or product based or cost of goods sold based pricing model or even your traditional way of charging.

You can do a labor-based approach, time and materials. People know how to pay for that. Think of yourself as a consultant in these instances. You're not looking for the ideal visionary customer long term. You're looking for whoever needs your help right now. And then finally you need to build a campaign around that, and that campaign needs to be something that you can do, hopefully very high touch in terms of live interaction, over the phone, through a zoom in synchronous way.

When I say high touch, I don't mean slobbering and coughing and sneezing all over each other in the age of COVID. Pick up the damn phone. Call these folks. Have a conversation. Pitch them your value hypothesis. Look, I think I can help you in this way. What are your thoughts around that? Or what are the major major needs you have right now where you think I could be helpful? Because I know you're going through triage mode. I know you're scared. I know you're like everybody else and we can have that conversation too. But let's talk deeply about those things and see if there's a way we can work together.

Brian Ardinger: Great advice and it will be interesting to see how...which companies thrive in this new environment in which ones have to go away. It's always interesting to see what happens in times of crisis, and I'm personally optimistic long term. I think there's a lot of challenges ahead for us, but I am optimistic we will get through this as we have done in the past. Any final thoughts or concerns or questions that are coming up that you want to talk about.

Sean Sheppard: Yeah. I just think once again, I just want to play on your point there. Be positive right now. Stay strong, be resourceful. This will pass. We've been through difficult situations before. We will get through this one. Economically speaking, why I feel so bullish about our future is that this was a self-imposed economic challenge. This was not market-based. We had sound fundamentals coming into this. Yes, it's going to be difficult for some things to restart and the way things happen are going to change, but every challenge creates a new set of problems that need to be solved. And for those that have the right mindset going into this, they can find those opportunities. I think we'll be normalizing again by late spring, early summer, and I think we'll be back to some measure of stable normalcy as a society, economically speaking, commercially speaking by Fall without a doubt.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think that's a great way to end it, Sean, on a nice, upbeat note, we have to get back together before five years again, so thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to tell us a little bit about what's going on with yourself and the world around you. If people want to find out more about yourself or GrowthX, what's the best way to do that?

Sean Sheppard: Yeah, they can go to GrowthX.com or GXacademy.com and take a look. They can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, that sort of thing.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Sean, thanks again for being on the show and we'll look forward to talking with you again.

Sean Sheppard: You're welcome. Talk to you soon bud.

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Laurel Lau is the founder of the innovation consultancy Six Atlas and author of the book Interplay: How to become a top innovator. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Laurel about her experiences helping manufacturing companies innovate, the impact of the Corona virus on global supply chain, and what might actually happen after disruption going forward.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. Today we have Laurel Lau. She is a founder of the innovation consultancy Six Atlas and author of the new book Interplay: How to become a top innovator. Welcome to the show.

Laurel Lau: Thanks for having me Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Hey. I'm excited to have you on the show. You are living in Lisbon right now. We are taping this March 22nd so Corona virus has locked everybody down. What brought you to Lisbon? What kind of work are you doing in the world of innovation there?

Laurel Lau: I am helping a Chinese company with innovation program. They bring international brands into China and help them sell there. They've worked with P & G and Unilever back in the days, but I was helping them with building up the innovation program, so help them to become more systematic in it.

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on, because you've got a new book out called Interplay, and you're talk a lot about the culture of innovation and that. Let's start by telling the audience about the book.

Laurel Lau: The book is a result of me having experienced startup, working in startup and also doing a lot of coaching for startup founders. As I've gone through my journey, I realized that the way that we approach collaboration, yes we've been taught how to make it into process, and make it a little bit more systematic, but at the same time, there's a huge communication aspect and relationship aspect that's been missing for me to see that people are using these skillsets to be able to develop sustainable solutions.

Brian Ardinger: So what are some of the core skills that you think make an innovator more effective than others?

Laurel Lau: Let's bring it back to like where we're at right now. Everyone is social distancing. Everyone is quarantining. The whole economy is collapsing at this point. How do we know how often these type of crisis will happen in the world? I think it's being able to have foresight of seeing what kind of dangers our world is heading into and having that larger perspective is really, really important. One aspect that I bring CEO's to be able to understand is to understand the daily nuance problems that people might be having, might be reflecting a larger issue, that if you use a right communication skills to get to the bottom of it, you'll be able to unravel it much easier.

Brian Ardinger: Unpack that a little bit. Can you give a story or example about how somebody actually effectively does that?

Laurel Lau: A lot of times when I head into a company and do consulting, first I'll do as a reality check and get a lot of interviews done. Read a lot of their reports. Go to a lot of their meetings, show out the factories and understand their product and the services that they provide. What happens during that time when I'm trying to understand more is being able to connect the dots. A lot of times during this part of reality check, people might be revealing half the story, 10% of the story, but as consultants going in asking more questions and seeing what we're seeing, there's a gradual development of a framework that connects the dots of the insights that's been developed. Being able to see that, is there an important, because that helps us see where the leadership and culture has been locked at. And so even though we're implementing new technology, new systems, why are they not working so that we bring it up to a level where we're collaborating at a greater speed and effectiveness.

Brian Ardinger: Is it an innovation readiness assessment that you go in and try to determine the organization's adaptability?

Laurel Lau: That is definitely part of it. In working and allowing people to fill in this form and give us all the information and go through the interview aspect also, we're are able to collect that information and be able to understand the industry problems as long as have the corporation problems. So many of these organizations on super complex and have complicated way of compensation and motivating their staff and to be able to sift through the noise and be able to hear truly where the next one or two steps organization need to make in the next three to five years is super important to be able to get that information. Because at the end of the day, the employees are collecting a lot of the right information. They are the eyes, ears of the company, and so they should be the ones who are reflecting what they want in a corporation to help the company to be a lot more competitive.

Brian Ardinger: Where our company's falling down the most are the particular trends that you see or different activities that corporations do that inhibit innovation

Laurel Lau: In every industry, it would be a little bit different. So I'm much more focused in companies that have the factory aspect of manufacturing. What Chinese companies in manufacturing had to adapt to is the digital strategies and also be able to strengthen their supply chain, which is super helpful last year to be able to help them be stronger in facing the crisis of COVID-19 this year.

Brian Ardinger: That brings up an interesting point with regard to culture. You're living in Lisbon right now. You've worked with Chinese companies and you work with American companies. What are some of the cultural differences or different ways different companies or cultures approach innovation?

Laurel Lau: And I think it's important to understand the local culture and the company culture itself. For one of the clients we had, which is a Chinese company, it's hard for you to change all the different aspects, but you know that the level of culture change that they're willing to make and that's comfortable for them, and that's right for them. So it's important to understand the local culture. And. What's important for their innovation itself. And so there are different types of innovation styles that's right for different innovation strategies. So to be able to understand what proportion of your company's innovation strategies are more radical or just incremental, the different levels of innovation that's required for the organization to succeed. It's important to understand what level it is and also what area they lie in.

Brian Ardinger: And that's an interesting point. In the manufacturing sector, you oftentimes think about those are more old school or stodgy types of industries because it's difficult for them to change a complete factory line overnight. What are you seeing from the more innovative types of companies in the manufacturing space?

Laurel Lau: I work with them, solar companies, so they do have innovation capabilities and they are a change in market, but I wouldn't say they're super innovative, but maybe innovative in there region, in their market itself. And so automation is huge aspect and AI is a huge aspect of changing the scene and manufacturing. There's lot more to see what happens in supply chain for the upcoming year and see how the industry cope with the challenges it's been forced. Amazon is only accepting certain types of products into their system currently to go alongside with what's required this year for Corona virus outbreak.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think we're definitely living in an interesting time from the standpoint of we talk to companies about disruption in that, but oftentimes it's thought of as this abstract thing where startups going to disrupt you or whatever, I don't think we've been in an environment where the reality of disruption is really hitting everybody in every industry. Are there certain things that you would recommend for individuals trying to navigate the space and to be more innovative themselves or think more innovatively are there particular skill sets or things that you recommend or see.

Laurel Lau: There are so many new ideas and potential of each different industry. I think it's important to understand what the customers are asking for, how willing the stakeholders are willing to contribute and collaborate with you, and what new open innovation that work you can actually create. At the end of the day, I want people to be focused on what drives purpose for themselves and their community. And without that, we can't find the true meaning why we're working in this day and age. It's important to understand that there's so much more to everyone, more than their job title, and to be able to divide that sense of purpose. It's important for everyone to be instinct.

Brian Ardinger: I totally agree with that. I think interconnectedness that we are seeing is becoming more relevant and individuals are realizing the different roles that they play. And like you said, going back to, there's gotta be a higher purpose in addition to the work that they do. Talk a little bit more about the book and how collaboration comes into play in that and when some of the things that you learned or talk about in the book.

Laurel Lau: When we bring teams to work together, definitely we have aspects of making sure that they are bringing their full selves into the room that they are collaborating in way, not just because the CEO are asking them to go through some training, just to put a check mark. What I want everyone involved to be actually excited. And if they're not, maybe it's not required that you need to be there. We definitely bring in the innovation process that helps people communicate and communicate visually. So we have people draw, we have, it's all the aspects of design process that people talk about and human centered design where you allow people to communicate more expressively and so that people are using their different types of intelligence to be able to interact in a way more smoothly. We bring people to or through the innovation process itself, and find insights and develop frameworks as well as help people understand how do you use things such as business model canvas?

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about some of the ways that you measure success. Everybody has a different definition for innovation, but how do you measure if you're on the right track or if you're making progress?

Laurel Lau: The way that I've done it is using the assessment itself and it goes through a bunch of different questions and helps organizations to understand the innovation capability that they are strong in. What's important is to understand first the why of innovation for the company itself. The purpose of the innovation itself. Is it for market, is it for profit? And it also helps the organization to understand better the different styles of innovation and strategy of innovation that they are taking. And then being able to help them go from why, to how, to watch. They can discover it step by step, the leadership and culture. And there's a lot more description to it, but it's just too much detail too, to be able to share.

Brian Ardinger: What are some of the things that you're hopeful for moving into 2020 given all this disruption, what are some of the things that you are looking forward to us coming out of this and being more adaptable, more innovative?

Laurel Lau: I have always been interested in all these different innovation companies. What the purpose of my work itself, a huge component of it is actually on wellness and using wellness as a center point for what we do. I was straining my brains thinking about how do we actually get nature aspect back into corporations and so that we are understanding ourselves as part of a food chain, rather than the top of the food chain. And so I'm excited to see that when people are sitting at home, when people are working remotely, and we are all dealing with this change, that we have the time to heal, that we have the time to truly understand what we misunderstood about work and what we understood that connection was family itself, that would help us really find a better way of the meaning of work and how we assess work for the future.

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Brian Ardinger: I think there's definitely going to change the way we think about innovation and I think it's gonna open up a lot of opportunities for folks that are willing to take the risks and be willing to adapt and change as the world changes. Thank you, Laurel, for being on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?

Laurel Lau: You can check out my website, sixatlas.com, find me on LinkedIn, or find my book on Amazon search Interplay Laurel Lau

Brian Ardinger: Thank you very much again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation.

Laurel Lau: Yeah, thank you for having me.

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Thomas Weddle is the author of Innovation As Usual and his new book What's Your Problem? Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Thomas talk about why starting with a problem is so important in innovation, what it means to solve the right problem, and the framework teams can use to make better decisions in the process.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Thomas Wedell. He's the author of a couple of different books - Innovation As Usual and a new book coming out called, What's Your Problem: To solve your toughest problems, change the problems you solve. Welcome to the show, Thomas.

Thomas Wedell: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me on.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show because you've been in this innovation space for quite some time, working all around the world with major companies. And you've got a framework that you've outlined in this new book that I think is interesting and can give some insight to our audience for how to tackle this problem of innovation. So, my first question is, let's start by telling the audience about your background, and then we can delve into the book a little bit more.

Thomas Wedell: Background wise, I'm originally from Denmark. I've been abroad for maybe 14 years, try to launch a couple of startups that failed gloriously, and then I somehow got sidelined into this whole academic space that I'm in now. And my innovation work really started 10 years ago when I started working with an old professor of mine. And we started going into companies and looking at what actually worked when it came to making innovation happen in practice. And that led to my first book called Innovation As Usual, which came out think it's like seven years ago now with Harvard Business Press. And that was also what led to my current work on the book now. So, it was all quite accidental and getting sidelined into things and suddenly discovering, wait, there's something wrong about the way we do innovation or there's something wrong by the way, we do problem solving. I can't really claim to have a red thread of any kind in my career.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I like the book and your framework around focusing on the problem because as I've worked a lot with startups and early stage ideas within corporations and that a lot of people start with the solution. They have an idea, they jump immediately to that solution side, and you're taking a different framework and say, okay, that's fine, but what you're doing is probably the wrong way to approach it. So, let's talk about the book and talk about the focus on the problem and why that's so important.

Thomas Wedell: It came out of the realization that we are missing a tool in the area of problem framing. As many of your listeners, I'm sure you're familiar with, there's very often a need to go in for instance, if a client approaches you to go in and say, wait, does the client actually understand the problem they're trying to solve, before we go in and just build the solution we have in mind for them? That goes for startups as well of course, understanding their customer's problem. And I realized that while this is like a thing that a lot of people, they have a feel for, and if you go to some design agencies or whatever, I mean, they have some remnants of a process. But I was kind of interested in seeing that there's just this, we lacked a general tool and a general framework for understanding and reframing problems.

There wasn't really anything out there that I felt was both...did a good job. And also, crucially was capable of being widespread. Because I think some of the methods, we have already around this, they're very complicated. They kind of require you to be an expert in the topic and you have to host a weeklong workshop to do it and so on. I wanted to fill the gap of creating a tool around this that could really be used by everybody. That's really what led me to write the new book, which is now called, What's Your Problem? We focus of course, on the art of solving the right problems.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's give an example. I've seen some of your speeches and read some of your work and one of the examples that you talk about to give the audience an understanding of what you mean by reframing the problem. You talk about the slow elevator problems. Walk us through that particular example.

Thomas Wedell: Imagine you are the owner of an office building that people are complaining about the speed of the elevator. Now you have a framed problem in front of you there that the elevator is too slow. And what most people do there is jump straight ahead and say, how do we make it faster? What people with reframing are good at is to go in and say, wait, is there a different way of looking at the problem? Is there another problem to solve? Which might the better for us rather than going out and buying a new elevator. The classic example here of course, is that building managers, what do they do when they hear of elevator complaints? They tend to try something else, namely to put up a mirror in the hallway and just a beautiful and quite memorable example of what reframing is and why it's sometimes important to go in and say, is there a different problem to solve for here than the one that's necessarily, you know, put in front of us to solve.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I've heard a similar example in the airline industry where people were complaining about baggage claim and how long it took for the baggage to get there. And the airline changed it in such a way so it reframed the problem of how you got the bags and when you got them, the amount of time it took you to walk to get to the bag, so that you weren't standing there waiting as long.

Thomas Wedell: Yeah. Beautiful. I saw one of my colleagues in this space, Stephen Shapiro. He has spoken a good deal about that example. That's a beautiful instance of it. He's, by the way, he's out with a new book as well, called Invisible Solutions, which also looks at reframing, which I can strongly recommend. It's such a big issue, and I'm curious to hear, I mean, you have a ton of experience both with your own work, with innovation and with your client work and so on. What's your observation in this? Am I right? Is there a missing tool around this, or what's your experience through your work?

Brian Ardinger: I think we see the same things. A lot of times the first thing I do when I start talking to clients or startups is around that idea of what are we really trying to solve for here? And are there different ways to look at the framework, the mindset almost, and it's almost around trying to figure out is there something more there than what meets the eye? And I find that the ones, the entrepreneurs or the inside innovators that it seemed to get it, are more open to scanning the problem set in a different way versus this is the idea I have and I want to fight for this idea because I believe this is the way to do it.

Thomas Wedell: Yeah. When people fall in love with their solution, that's always a problem. There's a good deal of research, by the way, backing up this up, one recent example of Keith Storrs who does design research, he consistently found that expert designers, for instance, they tend not to take the problem for granted. They take, instead of building into the details, they take a step back and try to understand the context. They try to look for stuff that's not there and that he found was at least predictive of whether people did a good job in the end.

Brian Ardinger: Some of the other types of frameworks you've heard out there, like customer discovery and that open up those conversations around the problem too because you're trying to identify what are the core problems and the pain points that your customers have. And use that as more of a guide and then back into the solution based on that pain point that you've identified or looking for.

Thomas Wedell: When you look at it, reframing in my work, in the context of the broader portfolio of things that are available for the industries to work with is, I'd say that the lean startup methodology and the customer experience approach and so on. I think that's very powerful and that's one way of discovering new perspectives on your problem. You go out into the real world and you either prototype or you embed yourself with customers and then you learn. I think reframing is almost a thinking counterpoint to that.

So, reframing doesn't necessarily happen when you go out into the world. Reframing might actually happen before you do that, when you ask questions like before we get out of the building, in Steve Blank's immortal words, what are we going to look for? Who are we going to study? What problem area are we interested in learning more about? All of those ideas that are really on the thinking side, instead of just the prototyping, let's take action side. That's where I feel we can upgrade.

Brian Ardinger: I've seen another example you've talked about in the past. I think Nickelodeon, it was really focused on this usability experience for their new mobile app, and they were trying to get kids to log on and that they had to find their cable subscriber and get their parents to give them the password and all this kind of stuff. And so, they were working a lot around user experience and trying to change that. What they found out was if they reframed the problem and said, you know, what's the real problem here? It turns out the kids were more scared about asking their parents for access to that password because passwords are in fact scary to kids, things along those lines and yeah, change that dynamic. So you're not really just solving the user experience perspective, but you're really delving into what's the core challenge or obstacle.

Thomas Wedell: Yeah. I love that example because Myacin, who led the team, he was actually very partial to testing. He was constantly focused on doing things, but he realized that his team had gotten stuck in a specific form of testing named AB testing. And they kept doing what they were good at and they thought, Hey, we are experimenting with doing what we're supposed to do, but they are kind of testing on the wrong problem. I think that's where it becomes really important. There is somebody in the room who's capable of saying, wait, I know we are in love with this tool. We have a hammer. We're really good at wielding and we're using it on everything, but is that necessarily the type of problem we're facing, or is there something else we can do?

Another way of thinking about what we're looking at, and this is very real, I mean this is, there's a lot of research on this topic, but what I found most convincing when I decided to look into it was actually that in almost all areas practice, people are somehow trying to use this, like you can delve into any field that has to do with consulting or whatever. The good people, the good practitioners, they have some kind of philosophy around discovering the problem instead of going in and just doing user testing. Steve Blank is a good example. He originally, of course, came out with the whole work around build, measure, learn, and that cycle.

And then at some point he actually put out an update on that and said, folks build, measure, learn, and lean startup is not about prototyping first and foremost. It actually starts with a hypothesis and you have to stop with sitting down before you leave the building and figuring out like what is the thing, what's the assumption about the problem we are going to test for it. How are we going to use our ability to do rapid prototyping and so on so we actually learn and discover something new?

Brian Ardinger: So, can you talk a little bit about the methodology itself? I know in the book outline it as a frame, reframe, and move forward approach. Can you talk more about the specifics of that?

Thomas Wedell: There are really two components to it. One is the habit. And that is the ability you have with a team whenever you face a problem, to delve into those very rapid rounds of interaction where you try to brainstorm on new angles on the problem. So, the habit at its core is literally just to create a problem statement. What's the problem we're trying to solve for? Get a couple of people and have even a 5 to 10-minute conversation about that problem statement where you try to pummel it from lots of different angles and they're not the end of that. Did you decide, okay, what's our next step? How do we move forward, so you don't get stuck in analysis?

And I think the core thing with that method, which I'd highlight, is the speed because in some contexts. Well, if you're running a design hackathon, then you have time. Then you can set aside half a day to do a deep dive on something. The problem I want us to solve for is reframing in the context of a normal business when we don't have the luxury of going to a mountain top and thinking for a bit around the problem and the central constraint there is that people don't have a lot of time. The work I've developed here and with my clients is literally a way to get good at doing this. All be it somewhat imperfectly, but you get better at doing it in a 10 to 15 minutes discussion, so something you can potentially actually do as part of a day to day session.

I'll delve into the like the second part of that in a bit, but I don't know if you've seen that. I mean, you have the interesting context of working both in your job as head of innovation and you work with clients as well. So, I guess you see both the design workshop context, but also the regular everyday problem-solving context. What have you seen there?

Brian Ardinger: I agree with the fact that it's very, from a theoretical perspective, to do a workshop or to get the people to work through that cycle, so to speak, and have them think broader about what is the core problem and maybe brainstorm around that. From the day to day activities it is startling because everybody wants to get to that next thing. They need to show momentum, they need to show movement, and so we automatically jump to that solution, to that prototyping, to the building out something. And that's not always necessarily the wrong way to approach it because quite frankly, in corporations, a lot of times they move too slow in general. So, getting them to move at all is a step in the right direction.

What I like about it, the framework is that it if nothing else, it'll opens up the discussion around, okay, are we solving the right problem? Here's a couple of different things we can look at. Let's start with this thing and see if our hypothesis is right and if it's not, we have a couple more on the board and we can go back and say, okay, maybe it isn't the fact that the elevator's too slow, but it's the fact that people don't enjoy waiting. If you've identified a couple of different paths to go on, it allows you to then when you're doing that initial experiment to then go back and say, are we on the right track? And if you're a different place to go.

Thomas Wedell: Exactly. And I think it's so interesting you say opening up the discussion, because I see one of the core purposes of me writing this book, was actually, it's not just to teach people who are kind of already practicing it, it is to create legitimacy around it. Because right now, if many people in our line of work, if you work with innovation or something similar, you kind of know the suit. You may be relatively okay at it. The problem is often you go to a client and the client says, what are you talking about? Like, no, get moving. There's not a recognition that this is necessary. And so, one of the core purposes of coming out with this, is actually to give people who know what this is something they can take, see here's a book. It was published by Harvard Business Press. It says that problem framing is really, really important. Take a look at this client so you will allow us to do this really crucial work.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I think it's more important, and sometimes in existing bigger organizations that have a known pattern, a known business model, a known operation that they're trying to execute on. So, a lot of times when I am working with clients, they think they know the problems because, Hey, I deal with these customers every day. Which sometimes differs in the startup realm. When I'm talking to startups, they don't necessarily have that close proximity. They have not figured out a business model that works a hundred percent so they're more open to moving in, looking at problems in different ways versus an existing organization that literally has been doing and solving similar problems for a long time.

Thomas Wedell: Exactly. So, I'd say the second part of the framework that I offer. It's really some rules or guidelines for how to reframe, because one thing is to tell people, okay take a minute to think differently about the problem. The next thing is to tell them or give them some ideas about how to do it. And what I've outlined is basically is five strategies for reframing, and they are built on my client work. So, I basically went out and tested a lot of different approaches working with clients as they solve real world problems. And these are the ones that work both broad enough to apply it to a lot of problems, and that generally proved most helpful for people in, in finding new perspectives.

So very high-level summary…we can delve into some of them. It's basically. Look outside the frame. So instead of building into the details, step back and ask what's missing, rethinking the goals. Number two. So, what are we trying to achieve and is there a better goal to look for? Examining bright spots. The idea of asking whether there are positive exceptions, like has somebody solved it? Have we solved the problem before? Looking in the mirror a little bit, a painful one, but asking, what is my role in creating this problem? Not just assuming that it's caused by some other idiot. And finally, the art of perspective taking, which is really about, that's in the vein of the lean startup movement as well. Getting a nuanced, detailed understanding of what other people are trying to do versus going with your assumptions about what they might prefer or why they act as they act, so the essence here is really just it's five different lenses that can help in identifying new angles on a problem that you can get better at applying. The more you work with refinance, the more you get better at doing it on the fly, and these things are a little bit training wheels for that process.

Brian Ardinger: When you're going through this particular process, maybe you pick a particular path. And you start going down that path and you identify that, Hey, we're not working on the right problem. How do you go back? Is that part of the process? Is this an iterative circular process or how does this work?

Thomas Wedell: It's again, a specific quote I warn against is this like thing you always see it being attributed to Albert Einstein that he, he never said it. This thing about if you have an hour, spend 55 minutes studying the problem. That's a really bad idea. That's a dangerous idea because that really means paralysis by analysis. What you want to do is to do this very quickly up front. Then you may work for, you do it on Monday, you work for a week, and then on Friday you get back together and you'll say, folks, are we still solving the right problem? Is there anything here we need to rethink given the steps we took this week? And I think it's a big mistake if people think, Oh, problem definition, that's just step one and then everything falls on there. No, it's iterative.

Brian Ardinger: Well or that it's a one and done type of process. It's the whole customer discovery process. Same thing. It's something where you should be always talking to your customers. You should always be looking for different problems and things along those lines rather than it's something you do and check it off the list and move on to the next thing.

Thomas Wedell: That becomes especially relevant for big corporations because there, as you say, I mean, we have stuff that's already working and what happens is when companies become successful, they stop studying the problem. They think, Oh, we have the perfect solution, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of people are buying it. And then they start missing that the problem is changing, that the context that the world is changing and then suddenly somebody else, like two entrepreneurs who don't know what they're doing, they come up with something that solves the problem customers have now.

Brian Ardinger: That's an excellent point and, and probably a good jumping off point from the standpoint of when you talk about the world is changing. So, we're recording this during the Coronavirus disruption. I'm curious to get your thoughts on how you think the world is approaching the Coronavirus problem. Is it a testing problem? Is it a healthcare problem? You know what, what are your thoughts around how this framework could actually be used by policy makers to think through a big pandemic like this.

Thomas Wedell: For instance, take my strategy around rethinking the goal. I think a really good example of that is the debate around masks over here where you saw the health authorities initially, they went out and said, you know what? Normal people, they don't benefit from masks, so don't get masks for yourself. Leave them just to the healthcare providers. We know that masks actually do help, even if you're not very good at wearing them. They reduce the risk of transmission. And so, what was going on inside the CDC of the healthcare kind of experts when they made this recommendation?

I don't think there's any bad intent around it, but it was just, they were focused on the goal called let's make sure there's no mosque story because the health care providers really need them. And so, like an overbearing parent though, in a way, you go out and communicate to the children out there. I positioned this a bit provocatively. Oh, this is not going to work. I think there is a very good point made by Senator Fecke here in New York Timesrecently, more earlier in John Barry's book around the GreatInfluenzathat your goal, when you are an authority in a crisis is not just to manage the crisis. It is also, and perhaps even more importantly, to maintain the public's trust in you.

Because if people stop thinking that the CDC's recommendations are not to be quite trusted, then they lose the only level they have. It's hard to second guess what's going on at the moment. I feel rather it's easy to second guess, maybe too easy, but I do think it's a good question what would have happened had people gone out and set us, said, folks masks help, but healthcare people need them more than you do, and if you have spare, please donate them to your local hospitals. That would have been a different goal to pursue. That's at least one example of where I thought the Coronavirus was kind of sadly illustrating some of the points that I'm making around problem solving.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it goes back to the idea of how you reframe the problem and reframe what you're actually asking or trying to solve for. And making sure that's in line with the reality of what you need to do.

Thomas Wedell: I'd say the coronavirus situation also illustrates the importance of that very early stage of when a problem is being formed for frame, because it's only in school that problems come through as predefined, you know, solve this question. In reality problems are always messy in the start. They kind of like, there's conflicting signals. Is this a problem? How big a problem is it? Is it even real? Is this something we need to do something about or can we just like play wait and see? And you can see, I think when you compare different nations, you can see the difference it makes whether a leader early on goes in and says, folks, this is a problem. This is a real problem, and we need to figure out what to do about it versus the countries that took longer to react to it.

Brian Ardinger: Thomas, I love talking about this. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book? What's the best way to do that?

Thomas Wedell: The book is called What's Your Problem. It's available wherever you buy books, and if you want more information, you can check out the website called howtoreframe.com. There's both a bit more about the book there and also some free resources for download. And so on.

Brian Ardinger: Well Thomas, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation with you.

Thomas Wedell: Likewise. Thanks, Brian.

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Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life

What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve

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Mark W. Johnson is the author of Lead From the Future and cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Mark discuss how companies can better prepare for breakthrough growth and how leadership teams can use future back thinking to better understand the opportunities and threats in a world of constant disruption.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Mark W. Johnson. Mark is the co-founder of Innosight, a growth strategy consulting company, which he co-founded with the late, great Clayton Christensen. Mark is the author of numerous books on innovation, including Reinvent your Business Model, Dual Transformation, and his new, forthcoming book called Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark W. Johnson: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been one of the forefront thinkers in this whole world of innovation and very prolific in your writing about it. So, I wanted to start there. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to write another book about innovation and what's different and what should people be expecting from it.

Mark W. Johnson: Writing this book, I look at it almost as the culmination of the 20 years at this effort to help companies in disruptive innovation and transformation. The reason I felt absolutely critical to get this book out is that we can innovate as companies and you know, we can try to figure out how to innovate for new growth. That's really the definition of what we talk about when companies need to be more innovative. I think their core business is innovating all the time and they're improving. They're making efficiency improvements. They're continuing to do product development and so forth. They're innovating in the marketing function, but they're really striving for breakthrough growth.

And what I found was a lot of these breakthrough growth efforts would have good ideas, get the right people behind them, but if you didn't have the right leadership, the strategy behind it, if you didn't have the right enterprise strategy, a long term view that was the basis behind the innovation efforts that in the long run or even in the short run, these more breakthrough innovation efforts just didn't keep the commitment of the individuals that owned the purse strings.

Really, the book is an effort to tie vision and strategy to innovation and even further, think about what is it that leadership teams need to do together in the process of developing a vision and converting that to strategy in order to become more successful as in just overall top line growth. But in particular, driving these new and different innovation efforts and the book is an effort to integrate the thinking around leadership strategy and innovation, which I feel is so important, if you're going to create sustainability and success in helping companies innovate for the long term and own their future.

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about how leaders in the organization really need to spend some time in the future, wrestling with the ramifications of what that looks like. I don't know if you can talk about examples of companies you've worked with. I know I've read your work and seen a lot about you, and one of the examples you've shared is around the work you've done with a big car manufacturer and how the process of future-back thinking got them to realign with what they were doing.

Mark W. Johnson: I'll start with that. We worked with the top leadership team of one of the three US-based OEM car manufacturers here in the US. The work there was to look out 10 years into the future and begin to think about what the environment was to be like. This company had been thinking, of course, Hey, we continue to design and develop and produce cars and trucks and other vehicles, but we also have this work around trying to tie into things like connectivity that has become much more of a trend. And how do cars become much more connected in, and of course, that's linked also to autonomous vehicle technology and artificial intelligence and all these kinds of things.

And then that's tied also to new business models like Uber and Zipcar and Car To Go, and it's also tied perhaps biggest towards a technological potential disruption and change around electrification. Much more than just around the fringes. But what if electrification just took over and then you'd be talking about a whole rethinking of the industry since its really founded the whole supply chain and the whole structure is around the internal combustion engine.

We work to help think about all of these critical trends, but we tied it most importantly to where is the customer going? What's the consumer, and what's going to be most important in the context of the circumstances of the future and begin to think about that environment. What can looking out 5 to 10 years out do? Well in this case, they just had a really strong point of view about battery technology and electrification and thought justifiably at least based on today, and kind of extrapolating forward, that their best path is to be a follower as to how cars and electric is going to work out, because there was just not any evidence that people would pay a premium currently to be in electric cars, regardless of the implications of global warming and so forth.

That combined with for the anticipation that regulation would ultimately turn their hand that they would follow that path. But through the course of this discussion and really thinking more closely about technology trends and technology road mapping and what was happening around the world and the implication if they were not just behind but really behind, it completely opened their eyes and it created a whole different view about the future and the implications of electrification. In that, what we would call insight that came from looking out or that change point of view, led to a practicality that there was a complete change in their level of investment and breadth of effort, as it related to putting electric vehicles on the road sooner and not just cars, but trucks and thinking about vans and how that would work in cities and so forth. That was the power of doing this, was to be able to get those aha moments that would not otherwise come again and spend time in the future.

Brian Ardinger: I'm curious of how you get management to carve off the time to focus on that transformation and not the traditional optimization stuff that they're doing and think into the future. Is it having them start with a blank slate and imagining things, or what's the process that companies really need to be thinking about to get to that new level?

Mark W. Johnson: First and foremost, Brian, how do you get companies in general or leadership teams to appreciate the 5 to 10-year horizon? We work to really try to help build a language first, to get rid of biases, that the future's not predictable so why, why bother? And explain, you know, it's not about having a perfect certainty about the future, but it's about building clarity and trying to get and understanding about it is much more informative and much more manageable than one would think. And also, the risks of not looking into the future. It's not just the threats, but it's the opportunity costs and helping them understand the benefits that by looking in the future, you can actually make things less contentious about areas of your business that actually need to be slowed down or shut down, that are easier when you're talking about them first out in the future.

So, we first try to build a language about the importance. Then we talk about the specifics you're saying about it's not 50/50, you still should spend 90% of your time operating and executing the business and dealing with the short term or, you know, the next couple of years. Carve out that 10% to be able to talk about what could and should be in your future and to plan for it. And we say this is more relevant than ever with the COVID-19 crisis. Thinking about the future. So, carving out that time, giving them the case for it and examples, and then putting them in a process and recognizing that that process is different than what happens, are the underpinnings of being able to do this.

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Brian Ardinger: You bring up an interesting point. So, you've been talking about disruption and how companies can be forward thinking and protect themselves from disruptions from outside. Do you think with the coronavirus pandemic and everything ongoing right now, that message has sunk into corporations at a greater capacity and they're beginning to understand that at a fundamental level because everything's disrupted right now, or what are your thoughts on that? I know you've got a Harvard business piece coming up shortly about that as well.

Mark W. Johnson: Yeah. You know, I think Brian it's mixed. I mean, I think there are some companies that are just so heads down with just reacting and dealing with the immediate crisis at hand, and the implications of broken supply chains and moving people to work from home and doing things permanently from a more tele kind of way, whether in healthcare, telehealth, or telecommute or all those kinds of things. Of course, it's critically important to do that, but there are some not all that are recognizing they also need to plan for what's on the other side of this crisis. What's going to be things 12 to 24 months from now.

And that's what we tried to do in the Harvard Business Review piece is to explain...the book talks more about the 5 to 10 year horizon, the concept is the same, it's just that that 5 to 10 now has been moved, because of a major disruption, towards planning for a discontinuity into the future that could play out as early as 12 to 24 months out. But it can also bring opportunity.

The process to envision the future at the right level of, of understanding, you know, not as precise certainty, but with clarity. Because there's a lot of uncertainty, especially when you look this close out, you're going to have to develop scenarios too, but those that can build the discipline to inspire their organization for a better future and a vision that's more than just a statement of what they're trying to make the organization become and make that purpose driven.

Then tie that the next 12 to 24 months in a set of scenarios, of what things need to be prioritized, and then work that back to today to a set of experiments or investments, in addition to just running the core. Those are the ones that are forward looking that are going to be able to take advantage of the opportunities and better address the threats. And I think that's what critically important for companies to be doing is to again, to be doing both. Address the crisis in the short term, but also be planning for this midterm out.

Brian Ardinger: Do you think that portfolio mix needs to switch because of the disruptions going on? So, 90% optimization, 10% future. Do you think that needs to change at all?

Mark W. Johnson: I think the answer likely is yes, but that's where it requires time, not just to be reactive and operating and execute, but being exploring and discovery oriented. Because I think to answer that question, you have to ask, you know, optimization and efficiency improvement is about playing the game better. Well, if that game no longer applies or the rules have changed and you have to play a new game, then you can keep optimizing, but at marginal or no impact or negative impacts. First have the discussion about what's the game to be played. Are there new games to be played? Does the existing game need to be changed?

And then bring that back to implications of portfolio management and talk about what is the right allocation between efficiency or portfolio optimization efforts between core enhancements and real breakthrough efforts to the core, and to things that are, it's going to be totally new and different, that need to be planting the seeds now for. You first have to have that further out discussion and strategically talk about it. Bring it then back to what's the right portfolio mix for today?

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about the core management team having to make these decisions and think about this. Are there things that the rank and file employees or mid-level managers can be doing to both accelerate and understand and take advantage of this particular process? Or is this something that truly has to be driven from the top down.

Mark W. Johnson: Another great question. My view in what we talk about in the book, it's really a partnership between the leadership team, which by the way, I always see often is not involved in things that are about innovation and creative and thinking expansively or less involved. They tend to more just try to operate and execute and be more on the left brain analytical. They need to be focused on learning as much as other groups, but middle managers and innovation teams within those groups and those that are chartered for thinking about marketing and strategy, they need to work as teams and they need to be in concert with leadership teams working on a parallel path together to learn and discover together.

Because these core teams are right in front of the customer. They're going to put more time into really fleshing out the identification and development of opportunities. But then the management team need to be doing their own work and in parallel with them because they're the ultimately the ones that are going to make the resource allocation decisions and they're the ones that are going to have the hard call of how much resources, both people and dollars, are they willing to shift over for things that are a lot less certain and a lot less proven as to what could be their financial and other outcomes. The long answer to your question is absolutely the mid-level has an important role, and in fact it's always had the role. It's more the issue of getting leadership, to be part of this creative process that has existed more underneath the management teams and getting them more tied together and working together.

Brian Ardinger: Right. And so, having all the teams at least be cognizant of the fact that they need to be having those longer-term horizons and trying to understand how that fits into the bigger global picture of the organization as well.

Mark W. Johnson: Yep. Absolutely.

Brian Ardinger: Are there any other trends or any other things that you're seeing with your work in innovation that are changing or have significantly changed over the last 15-20 years that are ripe for disruption, even within an innovation space?

Mark W. Johnson: We would say in our work as consultants, which I think lends itself also to thinking of innovation teams, or professional services in general or even legal services, is that I think a lot of things that were done in a more sort of unstructured problem solving way are becoming more in what I call, you know, pattern recognition oriented, or rules based, sort of the automation, you know with big data, and data management and analytics and automation, key tasks and so forth. These things I think are trending towards a lot of the, if you will, lower value-added things, become automated and it enables the teams and this kind of work to be even more higher order. That to me is the big trend that I think, effects innovation work. There's a whole trend of external innovation and being able to crowdsource and select experts.

I think it all stems...Underneath innovation is...The other side of it is learning. Another huge component of the book is to be able to really get explicit about the learning process, just the way Peter Senge and others talked about it in the early 1990s and truly make it a fifth discipline and get good. at the process of learning because it's going to be the organizations, and especially in a time like this with all this uncertainty with the COVID crisis. No one has a crystal ball. No one can say exactly how things are going to land, even with the vision and the viewed scenarios. The trick is to be able to use that as a direction setter, but then the learning process and being able to test and learn and pivot and be agile, that's what's going to enable the organization to move in the proper, ultimate place.

And so, we say, you know, just like that automotive manufacturer, nobody could say where it all is going to shake out, but the organization, the company that learns the fastest is the one that's going to be the one that comes out top.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's basically how you democratize innovation so that every individual can play a role in and have that capability to learn, be curious and grow. Excellent. Well, Mark, I so much appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to talk about what you're seeing. You've been in that space for such a long time and such a thought leader in it. I really do appreciate you sharing that with our audience. If people want to find out more about yourself or the new book, what's the best way to do that?

Mark W. Johnson: Either email me directly at MJohnson@innosight.com or you could go onto our website www.innosight.com and you'll be able to get access to the book there, or of course go to Amazon and buy the book. It has a lot of what we just talked about right there.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Mark, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the future.

Mark W. Johnson: Thank you Brian.

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On this week's episode, we sit down with Jeremy Blaylock, CEO and co-founder of Adalo. Adalo is the no-code tool that allows you to build functioning mobile apps. On our discussion, we talk about the whole no-code movement, what it takes to build a startup in St. Louis, and some of the trends that he's seeing in the world of mobile software development.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front-row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest coming to us from St. Louis, Missouri is Jeremy Blaylock. Jeremy is the CEO and cofounder of Adalo. Welcome, Jeremy.

Jeremy Blalock: Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: How are you doing?

Jeremy Blalock: Hunkering down but got lots of groceries and ready to stay at home for awhile.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Yes. For the audience out there that may not be familiar with you and Adalo, why don't we get them up to speed? As a lot of people know on this podcast, we talk a lot about some of the new innovations that are going on, and Adolfo, I think is one of those innovations in the no code space. I wanted to bring you on to talk about that. Let's get started by telling us a little bit about what is Adalo.

Jeremy Blalock: Adalo is, as we put it, the easiest way to build a mobile app without knowing how to code. You can build mobile and now actually web apps, apps that do things from being social networks or marketplaces, you know a variety of other types of things. Things like, there's an app that a university built that students use to check their grades for the classes. You can build those apps without knowing how to code, generally through our web editor and then publish them to the iOS and Android app stores.

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in this.

Jeremy Blalock: I'm a software engineer by training. I started writing code when I was in middle school, you know, back in the mid two thousands. I built a lot of websites and a couple of mobile apps and just always kind of was interested in building things that you could watch and have people use. And it always fascinated me. Before I started Adalo, I went and worked at a couple of other companies. I started one startup that I was the head of product for, and then after that, I worked at a company called Synack that we've met along the way, and I led one of their engineering teams. And it was kind of through that process, that I saw that there was this whole evolution of prototyping tools, tools like Envision, Sigma, Framer, that let you build these extremely high fi prototypes that he looked and felt like real apps, but lacking any actual functionality. That was my inspiration to actually go and try to build something that felt like a prototyping tool and was still easy to use like that, but then lets you build a real app with real functionality, you could actually publish to real users.

And so, I started working on Adalo in 2017. And really just started by, looking at what the prototyping tools were doing and taking those functionalities and then building on top of that. We launched to our first-ever users at the end of 2017. We then open up a beta and had a few more users come in and really walk them through the process, intensely with a lot of input from us. As we kept growing, we opened up signups and some are 2019 and then and in Fall we did our big launch and got a lot more people using the products. Now the numbers are 10 times what they were then, but it's been crazy to see that whole thing grow.

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about some of the types of projects that have been built on Adalo.

Jeremy Blalock: I was looking at a really cool one today. It was a guy who built an app for his son to manage his personal finances. That was like, wow, I never thought this was a thing where he is the bank and his son is the client of the bank. There's a wide variety. Like I mentioned, there's been a couple of schools, universities and high schools. have apps where students can check their grades. That's a big category for some reason. Now there's a lot of two-sided marketplaces, things like the Etsy and eBay type of setups. There are a lot of apps in the personal wellness space. Things from psychological wellness to anything related to that. And then there was a lot of productivity apps within companies, so streamlining various workflows. That's what seems to happen within more of the companies.

Brian Ardinger: I've seen some other startups that are using your platform as well Tovala comes to mind. The smart oven out of Chicago who provides meals and stuff through the platform. Let's talk a little bit about this whole no-code movement. What do you think is changing out there? What are the trends that you're seeing in the space?

Jeremy Blalock: When I started working on this, there wasn't really the no-code movement there is today. There were definitely people working on this and thinking about these problems, but it really wasn't at the scale that it is now. There were tools like Bubble that had been around for a while, and I think we see as a competitor, but you know, we're friendly with them. We'd like to see everybody succeed. I think that what's really happened is that people started to embrace the idea that you don't need to have a technical cofounder or technical team to build a product and get your first users. And I think that's a big mindset shift that's happened since we started the company.

Originally it was trying to convince people and now it's just trying to facilitate that. You know, obviously it's necessary for this to get big over time, is that people really embrace this. But it happened first with websites, with Squarespace and WordPress. They became the de facto way of making your startup's website. Tools like Webflow, FirstStudy and Further, but I think now that's starting to happen also with apps. You don't necessarily need to hire an engineer. You can just do it yourself. And then test and iterate.

Brian Ardinger: You're a developer by trade. There's a lot of controversy in the no-code low code. When do you need developers? When don't you, and that? You're building tools to specifically solve that problem of a nontechnical co-founder, spinning some things up. What are some of the objections or things that you've seen that why you should go no code versus hiring your own development team? What are some of the things that you've seen in that space?

Jeremy Blalock: One thing we're really trying to do is make it possible to leverage code when you need to. One thing that we're working on right now, that's the big focus is our component marketplace. So that will let people build, react and react native components that plug into our platform as plugin and then lets you add functionality to it without having to build the whole app. You just build that one plugin and then that will add value for you, but also for anybody else, if you want to share that publicly, you all just do that and share it with the community. But I think that really what people are often worried about is they're worried about the things that you would be worried about if you were hiring a development team and that's vendor lock-in using something that you opt to pay for forever. They're worried about the idea that it will be eliminated, and they won't be able to get around that and they're worried about not having control. Really what's fundamentally different about this is that you do have all the control, even if you're non-technical. And so that's where it's different.

There is certainly still a risk that if you choose a platform and it's not the right platform. Then you could end up with not all the functionality you need and then you could be having to go and build something else. I said, really what we usually tell people is the investment is so small upfront, compared to building a traditional product, that you should just try it and see what happens and iterate over time. Like I was saying, we're adding the component marketplace. We have now support for external API as the whole data end, and then we have a couple of other ways too where you can extend our platform. So that it really isn't the limiting factor. It's just the base that, we're, the platform that you built on top of, so you can build some things with code, but the majority with no code, but if you really need to use the code, you can.

Brian Ardinger: I like that approach and as the no-code tools become more prevalent and people become more familiar with it, and quite frankly, they're becoming much more open to, I'd imagine in your business outside of the product that you built itself, there's probably other no-code type of tools or solutions that you've seen out there that you might use in your startup currently or...?

Jeremy Blalock: Our website is fully built on Webflow, and that was the most obvious one. But we also use things like Zapier to sync data back and forth, a variety of other things like that where, you know, I'm usually not the ones to do that, but a lot of the stuff involved in the marketing automation and that stuff, as well as categorized method.

Brian Ardinger: That's one of the hidden benefits of the no-code movement is it really leverages up your tech talent on your team, and it leverages up their ability to focus on the core stuff, the tough, hard stuff in actually developing real code, but it opens it up to other folks to get some things done or automate tasks or improve workflows that they couldn't do without a developer before and it saves that development team for doing the real work.

Jeremy Blalock: Developers initially tended to be threatened, when I would talk about this stuff, but the reality is we're not trying to take away developers' jobs. It would be really hard to do that. What we're instead doing, is we 're allowing them to do what developers usually want to work on, which is solving more technical problems, building reusable things, and really delving into the deeper, more difficult challenges other than just doing the same things you've already done a thousand times.

Brian Ardinger: What's some of the exciting things that you're seeing with regard to the future of the platform or future of mobile in general?

Jeremy Blalock: It's interesting too, just what people are building, people who are never exposed to this before. And I think there is new design trends. I think there is new functionality. Had of things that are happening that we didn't predict just within our platform, but I think that more broadly as the platform is mature, so as iOS apps are 12 years old now, and Android a little less than that, but they're pretty stable foundations as now the no-code platforms are coming in, we can build on those stable foundations. And we can't let people build apps that are in totally new verticals that never were possible before because they just didn't have the resources. Trends wise, there's definitely new technologies coming out, things like AR kit not too long ago. What I'm more excited about is just having this as a stable foundation that we can then build on going forward to go all the new interesting things.

Brian Ardinger: I'm in the Midwest. You're in the Midwest. What's it like building a startup in St. Louis and with a remote team?

Jeremy Blalock: Our team is about 75% in St Louis and then we have a few who are remote. One actually joined today. We're all bought into the whole concept of being a Midwest startup. The benefits are several. I used to live in San Francisco. I started the company there. I then moved here, because my two cofounders we're already based here, and it made sense to be with them when we were starting to build up the team. But when I looked at where I wanted to be, I looked at what are they good universities, where is there good sources of talent? Where are there community or innovations and programs that will help you and where is their investment available? Those were what would drive me to a particular market.

Obviously, St. Louis looks attractive just because the city of St. Louis gave us a $50,000 dilution free grant, called the Arch Grant. In addition, we have office space that costs around 20% of what it would cost in San Francisco for the same office space, and we have some great universities here you know. St Louis University, SLU, Washington University, they're like top schools, good computer science programs, good marketing programs. Smart kids coming out of those who we can hire, and we have the better chance of hiring smart people from those schools than if we were in the Bay area trying to hire from Stanford and Berkeley because there's so many other companies competing for that talent.

That's what makes this great. And then also in terms of raising money as a startup, that's obviously a concern. We've raised about a third of our money here and about two thirds from the West coast, so it's been a split. But I think that's the right approach is we wanted to raise some money here so that we're connected to the ecosystem here, but also, we want it to be able to access the money on the West coast. And that happened through, and now we're going one of our investors here. It all has worked out organically, but it's been great so far.

Brian Ardinger: I appreciate that and that feedback and insight. One of the things I like about being in the Midwest is that you mentioned the community and being able to get access to people that you couldn't get access to in a bigger, larger tech city or something. Actually, that's how you and I met. We just met on Twitter and I threw up a, I'm going to host a no-code meetup and you saw that and pinged me, and like that's how we connected. It's nice to see that camaraderie and help building overall ecosystems no matter where things are being built. So, I appreciate that quite a bit. The last question, what's next for you? What's next for Adalo.

Jeremy Blalock: Right now, we're really focused on building out this component marketplace. Continue to build on a stable foundation for our platform that will let our users take their apps to the next level. In terms of new features, we're launching a maps component in the next couple of days here. We're launching several other fun things like video support. Really, we're just working on building out this stable platform, the foundation everybody's building on top of, and then we're also working on building out a network of experts that can help build out functionality for Adalo. So one thing that's really important is not only having the knowledge within our company and to build out great apps with our platform, but also having a community be engaged, having people around the world know how to use our tools and be able to help other customers build out their apps and be successful.

So right now, we're, we're working on launching a partner’s program where agencies who specialize in design, no code development, all those things, and partner with us. And then we can drive traffic for them, you know, through our website and through our app. But they can also then help our users by helping them design their apps, helping them add functionality, potentially building out some of these plugins, that they might need and do. Just be experts on our platform. And I think this is something that we've seen work well with a lot of the other platforms that have come before us. You know, things like Webflow, Salesforce and many others have these networks of experts. And that's really what made them successful more than anything else. We're really trying to do that.

So far, we have great community support. If you're an Adalo user and you don't know about it already, we have a Slack channel with over 400 people now who are just talking about Adalo day and night and asking each other questions and answering each other's questions. Now, some of our users are experts, so we're just trying to grow that out more and help more people have this knowledge that they can use to transform their businesses, help other people take this around the world.

Brian Ardinger: Thanks for being on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself directly or Adalo, what's the best way to do that?

Jeremy Blalock: Definitely just head to Adalo.com and follow us there. We're also AdaloHQ on Twitter. We'd love to see you at either of those places.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Jeremy, thanks again for being on the show. Looking forward to staying connected in the whole new world of no-code stuff.

Jeremy Blalock: Absolutely.

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Arlan Hamilton is the founder of Backstage Capital, and author of the new book, It's About Damn Time. This episode was recorded live as part of our IO live event series.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs. Build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, Arlan. How are you?

Arlan Hamilton: Oh yeah. I've only been using Zoom a million times a day.

Brian Ardinger: Thanks for coming on the show here.

Arlan Hamilton: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: How are you handling the quarantine? Everything going well, relatively speaking?

Arlan Hamilton: Not everything, but you know, it's the day-to-day that everybody's saying. It's very true. It's getting me by. I feel pretty optimistic even though there's some incredible things going on right now.

Brian Ardinger: Let's get started. With me we have Arlan Hamilton. She's the founder of Backstage Capital and author of the new book called it's About Damn Time. I am so excited to have you on the show. The question I wanted to start with is last week at this time, you're talking to Mark Cuban and a week later you're talking to us here in the middle of the country in Lincoln, Nebraska, and some other places. What is your impression of the world that's been disrupted? How do you see the world changing and how is that affecting yourself and your portfolio companies that you're working with?

Arlan Hamilton: It's something we've never seen before, and I think a lot of people are, are trying to figure it out. I think a lot of people are giving out some advice and trying to have it all figured it out. And I don't know if we will yet. You know, I think we're still in it. I think we're still dealing with the trauma of it, even though a lot of us don't even realize that's what this is. And so I think for me it's a slow and steady. It truly is a day-to-day. And personally, I feel at my best being a bridge to communication or connecting people, and that's why I'm having so many conversations with people around the world during this time just to kind of keep my sanity and keep me feeling like I'm useful.

Brian Ardinger: I totally understand that. And I'd imagine for a person like yourself who is probably on the road a lot, I know you've been out in the marketplace, not only meeting with startups, but also talking about what it's like out there in the real world. It's probably more challenging to do that from a remote location, but we're all on the same boat. You've got a new book coming out fairly shortly. It's called, It's About Damn Time. Can you give the audience a little bit of background on what the book's about and some of the key stories or benefits that you hope people get from reading it?

Arlan Hamilton: Yeah. It's about Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into your Greatest Advantage. I wrote it because I get hundreds and hundreds of inbound messages per day across multi-platforms. The number one thing I'm asked is, will you invest in my company or my idea? The second most frequently asked question is, will you be my mentor? And that doesn't scale very well. But the way that it can scale is by writing this book and all of the things that I try to do on a daily basis online with all the resources that we give. The book is my way of giving to someone, and I always try to imagine the person, right. Believe in myself in some cases, but given the person that may need it, the same thing that I received when I picked up Brad Feld's book, for instance. Venture Deals 101 in 2013 or so, and all of these books that I've read along the way in my journey from going from broke and homeless on food stamps to raising more than $10 million and investing in more than a hundred companies. There's so much in that journey and packed into the last five years that I think is relatable, believe it or not, relatable to a lot of people, because I've had all kinds of jobs and all kinds of obstacles, and it's a relatable story.

It's that, and it's also the fact that when I was looking for these types of resources. They were mostly from white men in the business sections of these bookstores at the airport. And the information was fantastic, and the people were fantastic, and I even know Brad now, which is such a wonderful journey. But it's the same thing that drove me and still drives me to invest in underrepresented founders, is there should be better representation in business books that are written for multiple people and profiles, but by a black woman.

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about that journey. I know a lot of folks are familiar with your story. Tell us a little bit about, it really has been an amazing five years. I don't know if you remember, but you and I actually met via Twitter probably about four or five years ago when we were spinning up the IO Summit, which was our first event. It's been going three years.

Arlan Hamilton: I do remember, yes.

Brian Ardinger: And you pinged me, making sure that I had representation as far as audience and speakers, and you've got me connected with a couple of your portfolio companies to bring into the show.

Arlan Hamilton: I remember where I was sitting when that happened. That's so crazy.

Brian Ardinger: What I found so interesting about that. You weren't popular or big or you hadn't been on Fast Company at the time, but you reached out and you were living what you talk about now, like being engaged in the community, helping your portfolio companies and fighting the good fight. That always impressed me about you, that you were out there telling the stories and making things happen. Even at the very early stages. Why don't you tell the audience about what that journey has been like over the past five years? Going from quote nothing to being on the cover of Fast Company being at South by Southwest, all these kinds of things people aspire to, that most people don't have a chance to do.

Arlan Hamilton: It's funny because as many stories as I tell in the book, I haven't gotten to all of them. There are many that have happened in the last, and that you just reminded me of one. In 2015, in March, which is like five years back. Right. I slept in a car with my mom, who was in her sixties at the time, so that I could attend the fringes of South by Southwest. Right. And nobody knew it. But that's what I did. And it was not, because you know, to be kind of cool, it was with my mom. We didn't have a place to live, but I want it to be there and try to meet people to raise the fund.

And this year, if it had gone on as planned, I would have spoken seven times in keynote positions. It's just so intense to think about that. And then the Fast Company, I was on the cover of Fast Company, which is still crazy to say, the October, 2018 issue, I was a first non-celebrity black woman to be on it, and Oprah, Serena Williams, and Beyonce had been on it before as black women celebrities.

Brian Ardinger: Not bad company.

Arlan Hamilton: Not bad at all. And I wouldn't have been able to afford a copy of Fast Company in 2015. I talk about all of the buildup to that and how that was and why that was in the book. Obviously, I am still feeling it. I tend to feel things and understand things logically about a year after they've happened, especially when it's good and I think that's okay. I think that's a good thing that my mind does because it allows me not to get too caught up in things that are too terrible, and also does it have me feeling and believing all the hype. I'm just doing the work and I have been doing that since day one. I did it before anybody knew my name. I did it when I had no money. I'll continue to do it no matter what happens next. It is what drives me. I don't know anything better than actually executing on the work.

Brian Ardinger: So, we are experimenting with this Inside Outside podcast. Today's our first live event. We have a number of people in the attendee’s things. If anybody from the audience has a question, you can go into the Q & A and then type it in there, and we'll have Arlan have a chance to answer that as well. So, we wanted to make this engaging as much as possible. A couple questions as people throw in their questions. How can our community of innovators, we have an audience of corporate innovators, entrepreneurs, investors that pay attention to this, how can we become more focused and adaptive to both identifying and fostering underestimated founders in our own communities?

Arlan Hamilton: Yeah, I think it's more about, to be honest and frank, I think it's more about identifying rather than fostering. I mean what I found, and I've been to hundreds and hundreds of events across the country. I've been to almost every city I can think of. Still more to go though, when this is over. And what I've found is that they're there. When I go to these events, usually I'm paid to come speak. I am treated very well, and it is very earnest from the host, very earnest we want you to speak.

But what I find when I get there is that the haves, the people have the capital, the resources, the people who are working in corporations, from the government, policy makers, angel investors, fund managers. There is a complete disconnect from the founders of color or women or LGBTQ, et cetera, who already exists within their ecosystems, but they simply either are willfully ignoring or are just missing out on. And they're there.

And that's what gets me because I'm like, oftentimes there'll be a bridge to them. The founders will pull me to the side. They know they can talk to me very candidly. And they'll say, we've tried to get a meeting here. We've tried to do this, we've done this, and that. They're just not taking us seriously. And it could be that the people who are in those positions. They don't know how to recognize it. They don't understand the value that they're looking right through. On paper it may seem more philanthropic to them or something less than to them, simply because they're used to something else being the status quo. That's simply the point. I think it starts with like awareness is straight up being in the room wanting to change.

I always say, when I do speak at these events, I look around to the white men who are there. I say to them, the fact that you're in the room, it's like, you got my vote. You know what I mean? Like we're cool because you're here. A lot of people wouldn't be here. I said awareness first, and then it's like not feeling like you are the savior, the White Knight, so to speak. It's saying what am I, as this person with some sort of means, what am I missing out on? Where is your competitive spirit? Where's that competitive nature that I know you have, that curiosity I know you have to dig deeper.

And usually in most of these cities I've been to big and small, there are founders, and there are usually people who are founders and also hosts of things and key makers, as we call them, and collaborators, who have been doing the footwork for years. I don't think it's about reinventing the wheel or having to figure out how to completely change the way you act. I think it's simply opening your eye, going to the first layer of who can I reach out to, but I can just simply ask what they need and how I can be helpful and how that may, if I'm lucky, bring me return.

Brian Ardinger: Flipping the coin, as far as like what do you look for when you start talking to founders? You know, you mentioned curiosity and that grit and that, but what other characteristics make you sit up and take notice when you're talking to a founder?

Arlan Hamilton: Yeah. I'm always looking for, I'm pattern matching. Well, just like any other investor, I'm looking for someone who feel like they're made for what they're building or what they're running. This, this founder fit that I like. That is just…you feel it. I do at least, and it just makes sense to what they're doing, and it is part of pattern matching and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just think that the people who had been pattern matching for so long, we're very homogenous.

So, I'm pattern matching. I'm also looking for someone that reminds me of myself in that they are, I call it hungry, not thirsty. They have a very specific level to them of what they are willing to do for their company, what their ideals are, what their abilities are, and they won't cross the line. And there is a professionalism there and there's this, but there's also a creativity. I look for all of those things in a person. I think there's a question, actually. Should I read it? Are we?

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, go ahead.

Arlan Hamilton: Jennifer says, beyond just being more aware, what are you telling the money folks? VCs, Funders. That they need to do to widen their pipeline to include companies outside their traditional investment lens. I said it starts with being aware. I also try to, I don't consider myself a diversity expert, especially in the corporate world. I think there are a lot of those who exist, but it starts with awareness. Then it goes to a curiosity and an openness. And he willingness to be a little uncomfortable. You can be uncomfortable for a day or for a week, knowing that the people that you're looking to find may have been uncomfortable their whole life, or their whole professional career, like opening that up a little bit more.

And I try to be really realistic and I think that helps me too, because I'm sitting in these rooms time after time, after time or on these phone calls or in these meetings. I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the guy. Usually it's the guy. Who has that kind of role and that kind of power and that those resources or a perceived power in some cases? And trying to think what is an incentive for that dude to get outside of the box? You know, there's a Pollyanna way of thinking about it and talking about it and like we all should get along.

There's also this realistic way of like what part of his agenda could we open up. It's about humanity and talking to the person one by one and figuring out what is helpful to them and their circumstances. It's also really important to understand that black people, brown people, women, people who consider themselves underestimated, as I call them in my book, they're not going to sit around forever and wait for somebody come by and get them and understand them and save them. Very few have I seen sit around and wait.

They won't even wait for the few months that it takes me to raise money to put in my money. Well, they're certainly not going to wait around for the person who didn't believe in them to get it. You're going to be left behind. I've been kind of waving my arms for the past nine years saying this, but it's true. You're going to be left behind. It's already starting to happen. If it were me, I'd rather be on the side of, of getting the upside.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned the pattern magic. Is there a different type of pattern that you see versus what the traditional pattern, obviously you hear about venture capital folks in the Valley and they're matching to Stanford, white guys and that, but what other patterns do you look for that may be different?

Arlan Hamilton: Well, a few things. I mean, it runs the gamut. Things that I relate to, so I relate to, for instance, overachieving quote unquote women of color. Women who have been giving the guys the answers for a long time. Whether it be them writing over their reports or you know, their tests or not. I didn't personally go to a great college, but I was accepted into some and was on that path, were it not for resources, but people who are considered gifted and are in those colleges and don't quite understand how much of a microaggression they had to deal with on a day to day basis in most cases to get into the college, to get through the four plus years in that college. So those types of things. That woman who walks into the room, who has a company would normally have to spend at least 30 minutes explaining to the traditional quote unquote funder is now able to just be themselves with me and just start by telling me about their company.

There's also another one again, as not directly matching, because I've never had a child, but I tend to have a bias towards any person, man or woman or other who is either holding a child, nursing a child, dealing with two children in the background, while they're talking to me about their company. Because when I look at that, what I see is someone who can multitask, who can lead, who has a lot of drive. And where that may be like a traditional, again, quote unquote investor running for the hill or asking very uncomfortable questions about their abilities, because they have a child in front of them. At one point about four years ago, I was meeting back to back with women who were pregnant, who were hiding their pregnancy while they're on the funding, and I couldn't, I say I couldn't believe it, but I could believe it.

But it was just shocking that they would think they would have, did hide something that is not a bad thing. You know, to be shamed into hiding something that they felt would hurt their chances of raising money for their company while they're producing life. Just by the way, I've seen about 20 live births happen, because I used to be a production assistant for a TV show that was called One Born Every Minute. In a two-month period, I watched 20 live births happen with 30 cameras. I have so much respect for women. I like I have respect for every person. But I have so much respect for people given birth because I've seen it and I'm like, how are you? What's going on? Oh, how is that possible?

There’re just different patterns that remind me, either of myself or the women, or the people I grew up with, grew up around. Forty-year-old black woman is to me, an expert in most things. And I say that now. I used to say that as a 30-year-old, but now 40 or 50-year-old black woman. That's what I remember my mom being. Whereas it could be seen as, Oh, that must be someone's secretary. Or that's someone's head of people - HR. That's a CEO to me.

Brian Ardinger: I think we might have time for one more question from the audience if somebody wants to type in an audience question. The last question I'll ask is, what are you most hopeful for going into this world of disruption, what are some of the positive things that you're looking forward to in the next six to nine months?

Arlan Hamilton: I don't think that everybody has to jump up and be everything to everyone right now, but I am looking forward to the innovation that comes from this. I'm looking forward to what will be the new norm, the new creativity that comes from this. I'm also looking forward to the creative ways and sustainable ways that people figure out to take care of themselves. And in an even better way now, because we're having to figure that out immediately and right acutely as a species right now. And so, I am not only looking forward to like what new innovations and what new apps and products and this and that come out, but ways that we treat ourselves and treat each other. I think we'll be interesting.

Brian Ardinger: That's amazing. And you've got some interesting portfolio companies already so I'm excited to see where that goes. One more question from the audience. Lillian asks, thank you Arlan for being outspoken about this. As a black female founder, I totally understand and feel all of the pain points you mentioned. A lot of people don't take us seriously. I try not to flip and stay calm. Any thoughts on the mental game or mental toughness for black founders who are currently experiencing this?

Arlan Hamilton: Oh yeah. I mean, imagine if you're not in that position. Every single day of your life. Someone gaslights me. Yeah. Someone trying to make you think you are crazy or imagining. I call it paper cuts, the microaggressions. I call them paper because when you get a paper cut, you don't run around and say, Hey, look, I got a paper cut on my finger. You know, it's not the same as slamming your hand in the door or something bigger. But paper cuts hurt like hell. If you have that happen to you every day, it's torture. And we are not as humans, we're not meant to constantly, always be on guard and constantly always be in trauma and mode. Right? But black people do and are always. And the biggest insult to that injury is in people not believing or thinking we're overreacting or that we're aggressive or we're this or we're that.

For me, I, I try to use humor. Humor helps me. It's saved my life, has helped me through things. Just like music has, the arts. Yeah. I try to use humor though to diffuse what can become a tough situation. Doesn't always work though. Sometimes I do flip. I don't ever physically flip, but you'll see me on Twitter cussing someone out because I'm grown, and I can. Also, because sometimes, I deserve it. And I think there's that fuse. You have to let that steam out every once in a while. You have to. I said, so I think if you can let the steam out on your own terms, on your own schedule by maybe blogging, by having a podcast. That's why I have a podcast, so I can say my piece without anybody editing me. I'm saying what I need to say.

And have that vent that just helps you out every once in a while. I think that's the way you do it. And then ultimately, if you have routine your group, play It squad. That you can vent to privately. Maybe it's every month. You all get on Zoom, you know, together 6-10 of you, you get on Zoom. I think those things help so much too.

Brian Ardinger: Arlan, I know you've given us more time than actually we allotted. I appreciate you so much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or get in contact with you about the book. Yeah. What's the best way to do that?

Arlan Hamilton: If you go to, Itsaboutdamntime.com you can pick up the book, you can pick up the hardcover, the audio version, eBook. I know there are different ways people are trying to get books these days, but there's a way to get it. And you can reach me online. Twitter, Instagram. I spend a lot of time on both platforms. I really enjoy connecting with people - ArlanWasHere, on both platforms.

Brian Ardinger: Arlan, thank you so much for being on Inside Outside innovation. Hope to have you back sometime in the future to talk about all the new things that are happening, and I really do appreciate you coming on here and being our first IO Live guest.

Arlan Hamilton: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

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Alex Goryachev is the managing director of Cisco's Global Co-Innovation Centers and author of the new book Fearless Innovation. Alex and Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder talk about a variety of innovation initiatives going on at Cisco. We talk about the power of the individual innovator to drive corporate change and the many benefits of creating a strong ecosystem of partners outside your organization.

Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that we recorded a number of interviews before the Corona virus disruption started. Wanted to give some context before we jump into some of these shows. Thank you very much for listening. Being part of the Inside Outside innovation community. We look forward to talking more about the disruption of the Corona virus and other things. Stay safe, be well.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, I have another amazing guest. Today we have Alex Goryachev. Alex is the managing director of Cisco's Global Co-Innovation Centers and author of a new book called Fearless Innovation: Going beyond the buzzword to continuously drive growth, improve your bottom line, and enact change. Welcome Alex to the show.

Alex Goryachev: Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about being here today.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. Cisco's one of those companies that you hear over and over again about the types of things that they're doing when it comes to innovation. Let's talk a little bit about what's your role at Cisco and what are some of the amazing things that you're doing when it comes to the world of innovation?

Alex Goryachev: When I think about Cisco, you are absolutely right. There's a reason why we are world's best workplace. To me, it comes down to the fact that we have so many innovators in the company. I'm a bit of a matchmaker, I think internally, trying to ensure that our innovators know each other and they're able to connect them, bring their ideas to life. We do have about 74,000 employees in the company, and I would say, each one of them is an innovator. And when we connect, the magic happens. So that's on the employee side. And then connecting to the outside world is another priority of mine. And we have a number of co-innovation centers around the world. Getting our employees and our teams plugged in and working together with universities and other ecosystem partners is another part of my role.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about what Cisco's co-innovation center is. We hear a lot about hackathons. We hear a lot about corporations that are trying to do startup corporate matchmaking and that, what makes your program different? And tell us a little bit about the co-innovation centers.

Alex Goryachev: When we think about going innovation centers, they exist in different parts of the world. For example, we have centers in Tokyo, we have them in Australia, we have them in London. When we think about that flavor, that flavor changes depending on the geography. Because what we do well in one country is not necessarily what the need is in another one. I think what's really important and what is the common thing is our ability to listen to our ecosystem and then figuring out joint solutions. And when I say solutions, I use the term broadly, right. It could be a joint research with the university, could be an internship program, could be a way for us to partner with a local startup, but it's all about let's stay connected with others and let's move the technology or business models forward by working together. We'll look at this as a win-win for everyone who is participating.

Brian Ardinger: Was there a standard way to engage with these partners? Do you have particular quarterly or monthly get togethers, how do you go about finding the right partners and then working with them.

Alex Goryachev: That's an exceptional question. And again, it all depends where we are locally. For example, in Australia, we are right on the university campus. We are right in the middle of innovation, and we're right in the middle of staying connected with a lot of the startups that come from university or students themselves. Right. And then in many other countries, we've been a very active player in the local startup ecosystem for many years. We obviously know our solution partners as well. We tend to be the partner of choice for them to connect with. The one interesting fact, we do encourage our employees to volunteer and gets engaged with the ecosystem as well. Some of those connections, they just happen organically and that's what the magic of it is.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I love that part about it. I've read a lot about yourself and what you do at Cisco and that, and I think we have the same feeling that corporate innovation is great, but at the end of the day, it's about individuals that are innovators within that organization that really make it or break it. What are you seeing when it comes to what makes a great innovator within a company to actually drive change and innovation?

Alex Goryachev: I think it's someone who wants to win together, because at the end of the day is the lonely innovator is a myth, right. When we think about companies, especially large companies, there's just so much knowledge in the organization and obviously there are great opportunities for scale, but what often happens is people are just not connected, and it's not because they don't want to, but because there's so many things to do. Look, the larger organizations tend to be siloed just simply because they're large. When people look at a cut across functional approach, when they want to win together and get others on board, I think that's when magic happens. If I think about innovation leader and people that are really making a difference, they're the people that are out there connecting their teams with other teams across the company and seeing what the win could be.

Brian Ardinger: From a practical perspective, it probably it didn't start out that way where you're thinking from a perspective that everybody within Cisco's an innovator. What are some of the grassroots things that you did to start that ball rolling or get people engaged in this process?

Alex Goryachev: It did start that way in terms of...there are tons of good innovation programs around Cisco, but what happened is they were typically very much function based. Their work was programs for engineering or IT or other functions, but they typically focus on the scope of the organization, as well as what should happen. Then what we did is we took a very cross functional approach. It happened organically because for a number of years I've been running startup competitions for Cisco and the way we go and engage with the outside world, and every year there would be employee or two or three or more or a dozen that are applying and saying, Hey, we want to be a part of this. There wasn't necessarily a cross-functional vehicle. And then the other thing is the nature of the business obviously. The more removed you are from technology, let's say you were in finance or in some other field, probably there are less opportunities for you to innovate on the new products for obvious reasons again. But what we found out is when we have an engineer and a marketing person and the finance person and people from different backgrounds and roles and responsibilities, cross functionally, that's where the magic happens because they all get to work with each other.

Brian Ardinger: What are the biggest challenges that you've had, or you've seen…case studies within Cisco, that have made it either more challenging or more productive?

Alex Goryachev: Anytime that people begin to work cross functionally in a large organization, there are some challenges because there's always a political process in the larger organization, but once people get passed through that, that's the real advantage. So again, when you think of a startup…startup is a team sport. When you think about any larger organization, be that a city or corporation, nonprofit, or United Nations for that matter, it becomes a political process. Once people are connected on the individual level, that turns to be an opportunity, then that turns to be the advantage.

Brian Ardinger: Let's switch gears a little bit and talking about your new book that's coming out called fearless innovation. Let's talk about why you decided to write a book and and what's in it for the reader.

Alex Goryachev: Thank you for asking this. The first thing is when I talk to others and I say, look, I'm working on innovation, such a broad topic and hard to explain to others, but at the same time, each one of us is an innovator. When I look at my five-year-old son, Matthew, he's the innovator because he's unstoppable and he questions authority. What I really wanted to do is to create a very simple and very pragmatic guide for people, and especially middle management and midsize and large companies, to go and get started with innovation activities. Because often they hear be innovative, but nobody really explains what that is. Nor do people that are saying it often know. So that's the first part.

And then the second one, when we think about innovation, innovation is always about growth. And we as humanity survive, then we will continue to survive and thrive through innovation. And innovation is not always about new products. Could be about business processes. It could be about saving money. And that's why I really talked about growth and I talked about bottom line as well. You do not have to come up with $1 billion idea to save $1 billion if you're a large company.

Brian Ardinger: When you're in a corporation, you see yourself as an innovator. What are some of those first steps that a person can do to start the wheels rolling within their own management team or within their own group that doesn't require the CEO mandate to say, Hey, we're going to be innovative.

Alex Goryachev: I talked about the win together approach, and I think there's power in numbers. I would bet that if you look at any organization, there are plenty of innovators and there are people that are doing things differently in every organization. I think the first, and the most important thing is discovering the people that are innovators, that are trying to change the system or they're trying to do things differently and connect with them and do things differently in the company. If you look at the large company, of course CEOs, they have a lot of authorities and so is the board and the other executive leadership. But at the end of the day, all of us are employees and we all have a say.

When people are connected cross functionally, they can go in, they can drive the agenda, and they can put those proposals in front of decision makers, or they can have some proof of concepts of things that are already working. In essence you do not need to have a CEO mandate to start doing things differently. I think it's important to find people that are like minded and then figure out what is the small and measurable milestones that they can deliver it, and what are the things where they can demonstrate success.

Brian Ardinger: Do you think there's a disconnect between corporations on how they incentivize innovation and how that impacts a person's willingness to throw up their hand and say, Hey, I want to try something. I want to do something.

Alex Goryachev: To be honest, I think it's not even around incentives. It's really just about the time of the day. Because generally speaking, in a large company, especially in public companies, we are all measured on the results of today, and that is normal. But sometimes when you don't create space for other things today always gets in front of tomorrow. It's the same thing in what happens in the busy household. It's all about prioritizing, and I think incentivizing investment for the future is a great way for the companies to grow innovation and the innovation mindset.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned the types of folks that are out there. We term those folks the curious and the restless. Are there other skill sets that you're looking for in an innovator that helps a bigger corporation to be able to move the needle more?

Alex Goryachev: When we think about the essential skills, just communication. These are the people that are evangelists, that can communicate and communicate not on behalf of their big egos. It's not about them, it's about the team. And it's really enabling the team. And on that team, there's all sorts of personalities and skills, but it's almost like there needs to be a business development person or an ambassador or an uber project manager. And we think about most of the projects we've probably seen that moved flawlessly or appeared to move flawlessly, it's because we have that uber project manager, somebody who was humble and who really worked very hard to make the team successful. And that's the same type of personality that's required for the innovation programs.

Brian Ardinger: If you had a couple of words of advice for folks that are trying to get started in this particular space, what are some things they should definitely avoid or definitely should include in their processes or spinning it up.

Alex Goryachev: I think they need to avoid ambiguity, and I think they need to find the metric because at the end of the day, when we're a part of a large company or a small organization, for that matter, we're measured on something. And by itself, innovation is not a metric. Innovation is a vehicle to get more happy customers, right? To save money, to offer new products, to save the world, whatever that is. But it's very important to find an area. That they'd like to move through innovation and not be limited to technology or a business process, and just focus on the problem that they want to solve. And then solve it through small measurable milestones and demonstrate success to others.

That is the best way to approach this. The flip side of the coin is we see more often hear about people that are saying, well, just give us money and leave us alone. I don't think that's a good idea. Innovation must be measured, and it should be measured, and small and measurable milestones are great.

Brian Ardinger: The last core topic I want to talk about. You deal a lot with the outside world when it comes to innovation. You know, there's a lot of folks that run programs within the four walls of their corporation and that, and there's other folks that do corporate venture and that's their way of innovating and they look to outside startups to invest in that. You obviously seem to have a preference for both inside and outside types of approach to innovation. Talk a little bit about building that ecosystem outside when you may not have that native desire in that to move beyond your existing walls.

Alex Goryachev: I'll talk about the small measurable milestone that companies could achieve. And if we think about innovators, the innovators are the employees of the company and each one of us has the potential to be innovator. And again, I look at my son and I'm...We were all innovators at a certain point, maybe in the larger organizations, we just become content, right, or we're too busy. What's worthwhile is getting in touch with the community. When we think about just employees on the grassroots level, being involved with the academic community or being involved with startups, with accelerators, just mentoring, right, getting out there, getting to know people. Magic happens. The magic happens because they come back to their workplaces.

They talk about what they're seeing and then they want to stay connected, right. We all want to be a part of something bigger, and if we can make our communities be more innovative, if we can have more startups to be more successful at generating workplaces, we're happy and obviously every company wants to be a part of that. Going back and just starting this on the grassroot levels and incentivizing that community connection, I think is essential to success.

Brian Ardinger: Great stuff. I appreciate that a lot because it's one of the things that we talk about quite a bit. Obviously, the Inside Outside approach to innovation is about finding innovation no matter where it happens, within your own walls or outside, so appreciate that insight as well. If people want to find out more about yourself or your new book, what's the best way to do that?

Alex Goryachev: AlexGoryachev.com and in the book I do talk about the success stories of many companies and how they've approached innovation, and I've purposely stayed low tech. There's a lot of technology out there, and at the end of the day, it's all about what we do with them. What is the mindset that we have? So definitely learn more at alexgoryachev.com.

Brian Ardinger: Well Alex, thanks for coming on. I encourage our listeners to pick up fearless innovation and I look forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

Alex Goryachev: Thanks for having me.

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Fearless Innovation: Going Beyond the Buzzword to Continuously Drive Growth, Improve the Bottom Line, and Enact Change

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Hey listeners, before we start this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that we recorded a number of interviews before the Corona virus disruptions started, wanting to give some context before we jump into some of these shows. Thank you very much for listening, being part of the Inside Outside Innovation community, we look forward to talking more about the disruption of the Corona virus and other things.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stefan Thomke. Stefan is a Harvard professor and author of the new book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. We talk about why experimentation matters, how to overcome the fear of failure and some of the latest trends that are driving companies to include a rigorous experimentation process into their business.

Inside Outside innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consultant services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stefan Thomke. He is a Harvard professor and author of a new book that just came out called Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. Welcome to the show.

Stefan Thomke: Thanks Brian.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show because obviously in this corporate innovation space and even in the startup innovation space. Experimentation has gotten a lot more buzz as people try to understand how to navigate the world of uncertainty. I wanted to start the conversation by talking a little bit about why is experimentation so important.

Stefan Thomke: Brian, I mean that's a great question, and in fact, it's the uncertainty that makes experimentation so valuable. If you think about uncertainty, you can think about different types of uncertainties that companies face every single day. At one level there's R & D uncertainty. You know, I've had the pleasure of working with lots of R & D organizations over the years. I've been at this for more than 25 years. And there the question is, it could be a product, a service, or a new customer experience, does it work as intended? Another set of uncertainties is what I call scale up uncertainty. If I'm sitting on a scale upside where I have to scale up the service or scale of production, I worry about a different set of questions. I worry about whether something can be effectively made or scaled up. You know, worry about can it be done at high quality, low cost, large volume, and so forth. And if I'm customer facing, I worry about yet another set of questions. And that is, does anybody want it? If they say they want it, do they really mean it and are they willing to pay for it.

And then finally, if I'm running a business unit, of course, I need to make an investment decision, and the question here or the uncertainty here is the opportunity big enough? Does it justify the resource investment? And the problem, of course here is that the tools that we have, like, you know, calculating an ROI on net present value and also all these kinds of wonderful tools, they start breaking down, when you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty, when something is really novel, you know, how do you put a net present value on something that doesn't exist yet? And so these are the sets of uncertainties that we face every single day. My argument is that experimentation is really the best way to address it because it gives me information about cause and effect, which a lot of the other ways of approaching this problem don't do.

Brian Ardinger: Experimentation...A lot of people think about it as the scientific method and get scared from it. A lot of folks in business world are not necessarily scientists and that, talk a little bit about what are the major barriers to business folks understanding what experimentation means and then how to adapt that.

Stefan Thomke: That makes sense to do a quick detour and ask ourselves, what do we really mean by experiments? And let me tell you what I don't mean often when people talk about experiments, what they're really saying is, I've tried something. It's often the way you use it in the English language or in companies what I've always run into is we've tried something, and it didn't work and therefore it must've been an experiment. Right? That's not really what I mean. I mean, a much more disciplined approach, like the scientific method, which by the way was essentially conceived 400 years ago, almost exactly 400 years ago in 1620 by Francis Bacon when he wrote the book Novum Organum, which was a new instrument for building an organizing knowledge. Now, it was done for science back then, but my argument, it's the same thing for knowledge about management and knowledge about behaviors and so forth. The experiment is at the heart of actually finding or building this new knowledge and organizing knowledge.

Now, what is an experiment? Let me give you the gold standard. And then we can work from there. In an ideal experiment, you've got to test. And what you want to do in an ideal experiment is you want to separate what we call independent variables. This is the presumed cost, and it's something that you're trying to change from a dependent variable, which is the observed effect, while holding everything else, all the other potential changes constant. Here's an example, so imagine you've got a sales force. And you're coming in and you want to give them a bonus. The independent variable is the bonus. And the dependent variable, the observed effect, would be a lift in sales, for example. And what I want to do is I want to understand whether one causes the other to happen, so causality again. Without having the experiment polluted by a lot of other things that are changing. For example, you know, whether the salesperson doesn't appeal well that day or so on and so on.

So that's really the gold standard that we're after, and in a real-world experiment as opposed to science where I can create a laboratory where I can control a lot of these other things. We randomly distribute all the other things that could influence the experiments evenly across the people that we're testing on. And we want to do is of course blind, so we don't know who we're experimenting on and they don't know that extra, they're being experiment on. But ff course, in the real world, there are some limitations in terms of what we can and cannot do. The hypothesis, of course, is at the heart of this, and your listeners may remember that the scientific method maybe from high school science days.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about how companies can start both identifying what to experiment on and the process to begin putting that into their culture.

Stefan Thomke: The process of beginning putting that into their culture begins with an awareness that experimentation matters. That this is really important for the reasons that we just discussed. You know, the uncertainty. Once you're aware and you understand sort of that in fact, experiments or experimentation is the engine of innovation. You want to then think about what kind of framework do I adopt? You want to have a rigorous framework around it. A little bit light on the scientific method, but that the other factors, in a sense of what makes a good experiment. And in fact, Brian, I have a whole chapter dedicated to this one question, what makes a good experiment.

And then from there, once you decide that we've got a good framework, we've got the tools in place, then the next step up would be to commit to it, and that is allocate the resources, change the organization. There are actually organizational questions that you need to address, like who owns, for example, this experimentation capability. Then once you've got that in place, you need to diffuse it, widen the scope. We give people access to tools, and then you've reached the final stage, which I call embeddedness. It's about democratizing experimentation. That is anybody in the company ought to be able to run an experiment without red tape or running it up, sort of the corporate ladder. And so, you've got awareness, belief, commitment, diffusion, embeddedness, failure.

Brian Ardinger: This concept of fear and failure where executives conflate failure with incompetence, versus the idea of a failure of experiment may be just the fact that your assumptions didn't hold true to what your original thoughts or beliefs were. And so creating a culture that allows that and an opportunity to really provide the executive or the team an opportunity to have the market or data help make those decisions, oftentimes makes it easier for teams to take away the biases and take away the politicalness of a lot of these decisions because you're letting the data and the results help drive that.

Stefan Thomke: Absolutely Brian, and that's a word in the community before that is called the hippos, right? The highest paid person's opinion. Anybody know that? Hippo is a very dangerous animal. Nothing stalls innovation as a powerful hippo. Now, the way I usually think about failure is in a somewhat of an interesting way. I draw a distinction between what I call failure and mistakes. Even though they're semantically very close to each other. And a mistake for me something that produces no useful information because there is no question that you're trying to answer here. Like an operational execution, like if Amazon builds yet another distribution center. There is no real question that is being answered here.

Failure on the other hand, usually proceeded by a question. That's why failure is so important to innovation because in innovation, we're trying to answer questions. Good failure, that's absolutely sort of essential to this because it allows us to make progress. There's a great story. I don't know if you've heard this before, Brian. Old Watson Senior, who at the time was chairman of IBM. Young manager at IBM had just loaned $10 million and was asked to come into Mr Watson's office and tell him what happened. And the young manager walks into the office, then of course, he's shaking his shoes, and before Watson could say anything, that young manager says, Mr. Watson, I take full responsibility for losing $10 million for IBM, which was even then a lot of money, and he was ready to resign, and Mr. Watson looked at him and said, young man, have you lost your mind? I just spent $10 million on your education. Why would I want you to leave?

The point here is that Mr. Watson, even way back then understood that success is not about getting it right the first time. Success is about iterating fast. I call it a high velocity experiment. The ability to iterate fast, to learn from this, to try again, to have another hypothesis, and we kind of work through this as quickly as we can and success is about getting there first before anybody else, and that involves experimentation driven approach to solving innovation problems.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk a little bit about how to prioritize which experiments to run or quite frankly, even what to experiment with?

Stefan Thomke: That's a really great question. That's a question that I get a lot. The problem, of course with experiments is that at the outset you don't know what happens. Otherwise it wouldn't be an experiment. And so sometimes experiments really surprise you. I mean, this is what you're looking for. Now it helps though to have some sense of direction. When I talk about the role of senior leaders in organizations, one of the roles of senior leaders is to set a grand challenge. Some big goals, such as we want to be number one in customer experience in our industry, or something like that. And that grand challenge then ought to be broken down into testable hypotheses and performance metrics. When you think about what kinds of experiments to run and what not to run. That should give people some sort of guidance, some direction in terms of where the experiment should head. Otherwise people are just running these things Willy nilly without any sense of direction. So that then becomes part of an experimentation program.

Then of course you have different kinds of experiments, Brian. The other kinds of experiments that optimize something like for example, a landing page. If you go to Amazon, for example, or to a booking.com or any of these companies, everything that you see on these landing pages Brian, has been optimized for experiments. And in fact, these companies run tens of thousands of experiments, live experiments on you and me, every year. And everything has been optimized. You have these kinds of experiments moving the position of a button, the size of the font, the color, all of these kinds of things, and always have the same objective. And that is to create stickiness on their websites and get us to convert.

Brian Ardinger: Obviously with the Amazon or booking.com whether they're getting thousands and thousands of customers that are coming to their websites and they can very easily A/B test and they've got enough throughput and people to experiment with. Are there things that like a startup or company that's just getting started on this, are there best practices to focus on when they're starting to develop these experiments.

Stefan Thomke: First of all, let me remind everybody that even these big companies, that we talk about now, they all started small. And at some point, an Amazon and a booking.com, they were all startups. And in fact, when you look at what they did, even as startups, they started out with experiments. I mean, they had built their capabilities gradually over time. And you're listening to Bezos, for example, and he's been talking about experiments almost from day one. Just read the annual shareholder letter that he personally writes, and he's been talking about experiments forever. He understands this, you know, even a booking.com started early on. They have a lot of traffic and that helps. They can run a lot more experiments, but you don't always need a lot of traffic to run experiments. You can actually work with a lot less.

There is of course, something in statistics called the power of an experiment, and so you need to have enough sample size to power an experiment, but it turns out that is influence. The sample size is influenced by, for example, the size of the change. It turns out that if you make bigger changes, you need smaller sample size. And if you make very small changes like the color of a font or something like that, you need bigger sample sizes. And the intuition here is you've got a lot of background noise, right? There's stuff going on in the background and you've got a signal, which is the change that you make, and you want to have a sample size that's big enough that allows you to distinguish the signal from the noise. There are also lots of experiments that are run in brick and mortar. And brick and mortar of course, you're dealing with very small sample sizes. Sometimes a small sample sizes are only as big as 50 or even a hundred or so, and there, you can use big data methods, others, algorithmic solutions and things like that, increase the power of the tests. Given a smaller sample size, for example, focusing on better controls.

There are lots of methods around Brian, that can help you to operate even in an environment where you sample sizes are smaller. Described them in the book as well. What you can do if you're, for example, sitting in a startup or so. It turns out that, by the way, Brian, and a colleague of mine has looked at this in a one form of experiment, A/B tests. You know, it has been adopted quite a bit in startups. In fact, they've been all over it. And one of the reasons I think why they're adopting, and it's first of all, the tools are fairly inexpensive nowadays, so you can get good tools. They do have enough traffic that helps as well, and it actually helps them to save on a lot of the marketing costs, market research costs. It turns out that market research is really expensive, so what they end up doing is why not just run the experiment? Why waste all that effort on market research and focus groups and all these kinds of things that don't work often anyway.

Brian Ardinger: I like that point too. We oftentimes think that we need a data scientist and a person on staff that can help us create these experiments, and obviously there are problems if you create the wrong experiment or do surveys, you can get bad results in that, depending on how you develop surveys. But like you said, there's a variety of different tools out there that are making it more accessible for folks to start experimenting. Tools out there, help the person walk through designing an experiment that can work and be scientifically valid and things along those lines. Are you seeing any other trends out there that are making it easier for folks to make experimentation more important in their company?

Stefan Thomke: Digital businesses are growing even for non-digital businesses. The digital component is growing as well, we just get a lot more traffic. And when we get more traffic, we can run more experiments on our customers and also, we're more direct, which is another advantage. It's not so easy to run a good experiment, say in our retail store, because we're often not so direct, and sometimes they're intermediaries and all that. But the beauty, of course, in online space is that we have a direct interface to our customers, and they can respond very quickly, so we can pick up the effect on our customers almost right away. There's a lot of trends that we're seeing that go in that direction. And in fact, and I've talked to a number of CEOs about this, and the ones who really jumped on the bandwagon, got it. I mean other than, you know, the Bezos's of this world. They tell me and they said, listen, in an increasingly digital world, you have to do this. If you don't do large scale experiments, you're going to be dead.

I think the time has come here where experimentation is not something that just scientists do now, or engineers do. This is already an important corporate capability that gives you a competitive advantage. And the reality is by these big companies that are super successful, that at one point were startups, they all do this at massive scale. Pretty much everybody on, who's listening right now, has been on these platforms in the last 48 hours. Well, if you were, you are part of their experimentation ecosystem, whether you like or not. They're running things all the time and that has given them a big edge over some of their competitors.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I encourage people to pick up this book called experimentation works. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Stefan Thomke: I have a website, you know www.THOMKE.com, which takes you directly to my Harvard Business School website. Send me an email T, just the letter t@hbs.edu for HBS for Harvard business school. You can send me something on LinkedIn. Just tell me that you were listening to Inside Outside Innovation, so I know where the connection comes from. And there's also a new Harvard Business Review issue, just came out. On how to design an innovation culture. So that's going to be all over the place. This is a great time for experimentation right now, and I invite everybody to be part of the movement.

Brian Ardinger: I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your insights about what the new world of experimentation is all about. And I appreciate you being out there and fighting the good fight around that. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Stefan Thomke: Thanks for having me.

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Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kaihan Krippendorff. He's the founder and CEO of Outthinker and author of a new book called Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. Kaihan and I talk about how companies are embracing internal entrepreneurship and some of the barriers, skills, and motivations needed to foster innovation within your organization. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Kaihan Krippendorff He is the founder and CEO of Outthinker and best-selling author of a new book called Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. Welcome Kaihan to the show.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Had a chance to take a look at the book. It's near and dear to my heart, it’s a lot of stuff that we talk about on the show and we do in real life. I wanted to start by asking, what made you decide that you wanted to write a book about internal innovation?

Kaihan Krippendorff: I have spent most of the last 15 years helping people inside companies generate ideas through methodology, like a ideation, design, creative thinking methodology, and often when you generate an idea from inside, that goes nowhere, right? Once the bureaucracy and all that stuff, then a couple of my clients started actually driving these innovations through, and so I said, Hey, you know, is this an abnormality or can it be done? I started researching it and I found that actually the majority of society's most transformative innovations were conceived of by employees innovating from within. And so that just captured my attention. I want to understand that if that's really an important task.

Brian Ardinger: What makes innovation so hard for corporations to get a grasp on and why do you not hear more success stories coming out of it?

Kaihan Krippendorff: The second question is really the big one. That is difficult, but being an entrepreneur is difficult, right? The failure rate tie is a lot of work and eating ramen noodles and all of that, so it's not that it's easier and it’s just difficult in both cases. But I think that the reason that we don't hear as many stories of internal innovators is that it's not an easy story to tell. It's not the person who went to college gets an idea and goes to the West coast and goes into a garage. We love that Elon Musk, love that Bill Gates, love that Michael Dell story. Its that hero's journey that we like to tell and the story, the internal innovators, its more complicated.

Brian Ardinger: It makes sense also from the standpoint of it's not typical for corporations to necessarily want to air their dirty laundry or the 10 times that it didn't work before the time that it did work. I think there's probably a little risk from that perspective. Let's talk a little bit about the logistics. In a big corporation, oftentimes you're working on your existing business model, and that. And all your resources, all your people, all your metrics and that are driven around maximizing and making that existing business model go. What's some of the key things that you've learned about how you can actually innovate within the company, change that mindset or move things forward differently?

Kaihan Krippendorff: There are a whole bunch of things like summarize into seven, but if I were to summarize them all, the one thing, it is to think of yourself. If you're innovating from within as pushing a B to B to C innovation. In other words, seeing your company as a customer and not being frustrated when your customer rejects your innovation, but just as you would as an entrepreneur, you know that customer centricity that you talk about that customer centric design. See the business as a customer? Try to understand what is it about this innovation that they are not thrilled about and then re-engineer the innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Do you see B to C types of companies being more innovative because they have maybe more of that direct customer feedback and focus, I suppose, compared to B to B companies out there. Is this happening across different industries and that.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Definitely it’s happening across industries. I looked at 367 companies that have appeared on most innovative lists in the last five years. And I looked at which one of these innovators are really outperforming their competition. And I found that there are only 13 that do. Yeah. Most of them are actually B to B companies, MasterCard, Alibaba. Amazon is a B to C company, but they're very much a B to B company like on a platform. So definitely your point of having that customer centric view, having the voice of the customer there and really ensuring that employees are in touch with the customer and market. That is it. A very important factor.

Brian Ardinger: You've been in this space for a while. You've both consulting and working directly with corporations in this. What has changed over the years that's made it easier or more willing for companies to take an innovative approach to changing the way they do business?

Kaihan Krippendorff: Two things. One is removing from a focus on competition. In the 1980s you have Michael Porter. We shifted towards a focus on the customer with Amazon and all the client-customer orientation that they inspire. I think were shifting now towards a focus on the employee, and increasingly we see successful companies saying, really the employees are customers. What we are is a platform that helps create great work for employees. Starbucks, for example, they view their primary customer as the employee that's working in the store. And so there is this paradigm shift and that's driven in part by the pace of change. It's accelerating and by the time new signals make it up to the top of the hierarchy a decision is made and it gets pushed back down, it takes too long. Companies are really recognizing that the key to surviving this fast paced, agile, digital world is to push innovation outward to employees and liberate them to innovate.

Brian Ardinger: We've seen this rise of startups and the rise of brand-new companies that are using some of the same methodologies now that are now being deployed and used within organizations. What are some of the core differences between startups and corporates and how they're using these methodologies?

Kaihan Krippendorff: Did you see a lot of these agile and business model canvasing methodologies being adopted inside large corporations, and these are strategic tools and concepts that corporations have been slower to adapt. For example, if you use the business model canvas, which many entrepreneurs are well familiar with, but I've found that executives in established companies are less familiar with. You can use that to not only design the business model around your innovation, but to look at and isolate where you're going to face business bottle conflict with your current business model.

You have also Agile teams that are those methodologies being adopted by established companies and even companies breaking down their large hierarchical, siloed organizations into more of a network of independent teams. Just those three which are really propagated by entrepreneurial-ism, Agile teaming, and design thinking around business models. You see larger corporations starting to embrace them and they adapt them a little bit for internal use.

Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the case studies you address in the book or some of the folks that are doing it well.

Kaihan Krippendorff: One company that's really interesting that's doing it well is a Chinese company called Haier or Haier, that is the largest producer of appliances. They bought GE appliances. What they've done is they've taken a hierarchal organization, they've broken it down into 4,000 what they call microenterprises, and each micro enterprise has own CEO and that CEO can be voted out by the people that work in that micro enterprise. And even their support functions, even finance, and IT and HR. They become micro enterprises that are seeking to sell their services into the company.

Brian Ardinger: It's the extreme example like where they've literally deduced their business down to like microenterprises and each particular group is making particular decisions based on the economics of the market for that particular business unit. If a company doesn't want to go that extreme, so to speak. Are there other examples out? There are companies that are adapting these particular models to their existing business model, existing business structure?

Kaihan Krippendorff: If you look at what the correlates are of organizational factors and high or low levels of internal entrepreneurship, there's actually a lot known. There's a whole area of entrepreneurial intensity and optional orientation, and we actually know a lot. You take all those things and they're really four different factors. There's leadership, there's talent, there's organizational structures and culture. And in each of those, there are certain things that we know, like you mentioned, that customer orientation and market orientation. You want to have a culture that encourages that, you want talent that has that, and you want organizational structure to support that.

There's the approach to risk. MasterCard is a great example. MasterCard begins as an association of. Thanks. It then becomes a fairly staid financial services company, and then it transforms itself into a technology company that views themselves as a technology company and they started implementing interesting kind of cultural norms like for example, at MasterCard, they say. We're a force for good. And what they mean is we're driving for a world beyond cash. That's our business rationale. But by the way, a world beyond cash is a better world because you know, a world beyond cash...Let's say a drug dealer won't be able to sell drugs to your child without that being traceable. A world beyond cash creates accountability and transparency.

And they start also changing the physical space of their interior. They start hiring people who have the right attributes to the internal innovators that combine that creative thinking and proactivity of an entrepreneur with people who understand how to manage internal politics of getting intrinsic value of innovators. Across all four dimensions they do, but the bundle of things that they put in place to really start increasing their level of internal innovation.

Brian Ardinger: I'm curious to get your opinions around the concept of can this corporate innovation, it does have to be delivered top down, bottom up, a combination of that or what works kind of best?

Kaihan Krippendorff: When I started working on this book, my mission was to say, Hey, don't wait for your leader to start making the changes that you know we need. You should already start driving innovation from inside and actually there's a lot that you can do bottom up. For it to be really systemic, it needs to be leadership. Leadership that really prioritize innovation recognizes that the pace of change makes it such that the traditional decision-making structures are too slow and are willing to turn those other leverage points, the right talent, the right culture, the right structures. It's definitely both bottom up and top down, but if we're to really be sustainable, I think leadership really needs to take it seriously.

Brian Ardinger: If you're in one of those organizations that are not as forward thinking, or you as an employee want to juice some innovation within it, what are some of those low hanging fruits or what are some of the skillsets that a person should be building so that they can start making that innovation journey possible?

Kaihan Krippendorff: It starts with activating your intent to innovate and getting excited about it. And what I found is that almost always gets successful internal innovators. They look for a certain type of problem that meets three criteria. One, there's a market need. The other is it's something that they're passionate about. But the third lens is it's something that their company cares about, that they understand what their company's strategy is. And that is a big gap. Like for example, there's one woman who has become a good friend of mine, a former client of mine at TIA. Her name is Heather Davis, and I won't go through the whole story, but she runs a huge fund that owns lots of agricultural real estate. They're having trouble finding workers for their farms. The largest private owner of farmland in the United States and she goes, just like a good entrepreneur. The answer is not in your office. She goes to one of these apple orchids that they own, and she recognizes the kind of work that's done there is the perfect kind of work that is for people with autism, because her son has autism. And she creates this program called fruits of employment that helps people with autism get work on farms. They don't just get a job, they get a driver's license and they get their own money and they become independent.

What you see, is it something she's passionate about because she cares about autism. It is something that the market needs and she knows that it's something that needs a strategic priority or dilemma of the company. I would say understand what the market needs. Only innovate where you're going to be passionate, because you would want that passion to drive you through. But really spend the time to understand what your company's strategy is so that you innovate in the spaces that generate ideas that they are most likely to embrace. And then you throw in what we talked about, throw in the design thinking, throw in the teaming, throw in the business model design, and those things will help you get the idea, get traction on the idea.

Brian Ardinger: In your book, you talk a little bit about some of the differences between an outside entrepreneurial versus an internal entrepreneur. Obviously, some of the skills are the same as far as adaptability, curiosity, proactive, going to action and that, what are some of the things that make an internal entrepreneur different than maybe an external startup?

Kaihan Krippendorff: It's interesting. One big one is political acumen. That successful internal innovators, they view the political challenge as part of the problem-solving process. It's not, Oh, I wish I didn't have to work through the politics, but I have to, and I can learn to do that. It is more of an interesting additional problem to solve, that they enjoy the political part of it. The other element is that it's unlikely as an internal innovator that you are going to become a billionaire from your innovation. The corporation is going to primarily financially benefit. And so, some internal innovators that are frustrated, they say, Oh, I can be making lots of money if I were an entrepreneur, but the ones that are enjoying it and doing it repeatedly. They get intrinsic value for innovating. They appreciate that they can impact the world at a scale that would be difficult to achieve if they were doing it as entrepreneur. They also don't have to eat ramen noodles every day. They kind of get a paycheck. Those are a couple of differences.

Brian Ardinger: What are some of the ways that you can either both measure as well as reward this type of innovation within a company.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Well, there are measures as a CEO, you want to start measuring your level of internal entrepreneurial intensity. There are tools that you could use to measure and track overall. The way I think to encourage it is since you don't have these financial awards, you can give a business plan competition and give a prize. A lot of our clients like this idea, Michael Schrage, his concept of the 5-5-5 experiment, five people, $5,000 five weeks, so you can do those kinds of things. I think a big thing is telling the stories. Tell the stories of successful internal innovations. Celebrate them. Because so often by the time the idea gets out into the market. No one knows who was the person that took that baton and started the relay race that led to that. That pushed the first domino. It becomes, Oh, GE launched this, or Amazon launched this, or Jeff Bezos did this. We need to start telling the stories of that internal innovator. You know, the guy that 10 years into Ikea's founding suggested that they try the flat pack box.

Brian Ardinger: I love that idea because it helps provide context for employees from the standpoint of what is innovation. Oftentimes, I think innovation doesn't happen because it's like, well, we can't create the new Uber within our own company, or they think that it has to be 100% disruptive innovation in itself, the creation of value. Whether that's an H1, within the core type of innovation, which is more accessible and understood by everybody, and everybody can be an innovator within their organization if they just look for problems and ways to solve those problems within the marketplace.

Kaihan Krippendorff: For me, innovation is, it's different, it's adopted and it's valuable, and you can generate a lot of value in each one. Innovation

Brian Ardinger: And then telling those stories helps define that as well as provide a path for role models, I suppose, for folks to execute on that.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah, because I think as humans, we know what to do by the stories that we hear. We fulfill on stories that..my wife's a Hispanic Latina from the South, she's a very successful high-level executive now, but she didn't grow up here in stories of Latin women becoming big time. And that's a problem. And I think it's a similar problem that we don't tell enough stories about internal employee innovators.

Brian Ardinger: I appreciate you telling some stories here and I encourage people to take a look at the book. If folks want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that?

Kaihan Krippendorff: You either go to Amazon driving innovation from within, or my website is Kaihan.net - K-A-I-H-A-N dot net.

Brian Ardinger: Thank you very much for being on the Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation and thanks for sharing your insights.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Thank you.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Tendayi Viki. Tendayi is co-author of the book, The Corporate Startup. He's an Associate Partner at Strategizer and one of the major influencers in the world of lean startup and corporate innovation. On this episode, we explore the evolution of the lean startup movement, how corporations are developing the skills to compete and become more innovative, and we talk about Tendayi's brand new book called Pirates in the Navy. Let's get started.

Find the Interview transcript and more at insideoutside.io.

Interview Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, all the way from across the pond in London, England, we have Tendayi Viki. Tendayi, welcome to the show.

Tendayi Viki: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had you out in Lincoln at the last IO Summit. For those folks out in the audience, that have not heard of you. He's an author, innovation consultant, Associate Partner at Strategizer. You're the coauthor of the book, The Corporate Startup, which took a lot of the Lean Startup stuff and applied it to big organizations. You've got a new book coming out called Pirates in the Navy, so I could go on and on, but welcome to the show.

Tendayi Viki: Thank you, man. Thank you. no, it’s an honor to be here. And I had a lot of fun when I was in LIncoln. It was a fun conference and good people all in.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think I want to jump in. You've been in this space, this lean startup movement for a long time, and you really did open the door to a lot of this lean startup stuff that started in the startup world. I think applied it to bigger corporations, this whole innovation process, whether you're doing it in a startup or you're doing it in a bigger company, a lot of the same principles apply. What are the biggest challenges or changes that you've seen over the last decade of how this movement is evolved and what's gotten better? What's gotten worse in the whole process?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so it was a really interesting movement because it came out with an interesting philosophy, which is that one of the reasons why any innovation, either from a startup or from a large company, any innovation fails when people that are working on the innovations starts scaling their idea prematurely. Which means they start building the full product and launching it and investing a lot of resources and taking it to market before they really understand who the customer is. What the customer wants. How to reach that customer. How to earn from that customer repeatedly. How to retain that customer. How to create value basically in a sustainable way. And also, how to deliver profits and whether customers are willing to pay. And how much they will have to pay. So that was the philosophy meeting, which was test your ideas before you scale them.

The big challenge then became, well, we understand, we agree. How do we do that? And that's where the movement has been sort of incrementally building all the tools and resources you need to be able to do that work over the last year.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about now where you're at. A lot of the times at the early stages when I started consulting or you started consulting, you had to explain the process. You had to get into the weeds of why this was even important. What's changed from that perspective? It seems like people have at least heard of the movement and heard of some of the processes, but maybe they're doing it wrong or there's different assumptions that they've made about the process in the first place. What are some of the things that you're seeing that are challenging in today's world?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so I mean, it's not, it's not as hard as it used to be to convince leaders inside established, successful companies that they need to innovate. I think what's harder is getting them to change how they run their companies day-to-day because some of those processes are so calcified. It's so hard to break into those and have them change. I mean, one of the habits that companies have, for example, it's an annual budget cycle. Things that are on road maps that I executed against. You need to complete a five-year projection with a business case in order to get investments. Those are things that have been harder to break down.

How do you have a conversation with the head of finance that they should invest in an idea, but that idea is not promising them any return. What is the sense of comfort that you can give them with that? You have to sort of take into them like a newer tool that was created to say, think about your investments as a portfolio of investments and think about your returns as returns from a portfolio rather than retrench from one idea. That's the way you allow these to fail, but these are concepts that are just emerging. That we're going to have the conversation with leaders around inside the company.

Brian Ardinger: I'm curious to get your insight into whether you think this problem should be tackled across the entire organization. Should it be siloed? We've heard experts in different areas tackle this from different sides with different areas of effectiveness. What's your thought on how innovation should be attacked from an organization perspective?

Tendayi Viki: So that's interesting, especially when you're talking about the Lean Startup Movement, right. One of the problems we had at the beginning of our movement was being allowed to do the work. How do we even get the space to be allowed to test ideas, run experiments, do Agile, Design Thinking? And so what we did was we fought really hard to get these spaces created for us because we needed to show that you can actually work this way. And now I think we have a different problem. I think the problem we have now is what we call the problem of success.

If you are in a discussion of whether innovation should happen inside or outside your organization, you have to ask yourself a question. What happens when you find something that works? What happens when you find a business model that works? What happens when you find that idea that works and now you need light resources to scale. And you know what? I've heard people flippantly say, well, the company will just spin me out. Creating a spinout, it's actually more difficult. And requires much more leadership, attention, and legal and procurement than actually just scaling a product. And so even getting spun out requires some integration back into the company so that these decisions can be made.

This decision of whether or not you should do it inside or outside the organization is whether or not if did you do it outside the organization, the organization is also empowered you and giving you all the resources to scale up front. If they haven't, then eventually, even if you're an innovation lab outside, you have to bring all those ideas back and so why don't we just start collaborating from the beginning?

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing it, these processes being used primarily under the H3 - Horizon 3 stuff. Or H2 - or how are you seeing the processes of innovation playing out across the different horizons of innovation? You know, optimization of existing stuff, all the way to creation of brand-new stuff?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah. I think that depends on the maturity of the organization. Very few organizations have H3 projects that they're working on. That's a big ask, you know, sometimes terms of attention and resource. I mean, you find examples like Amazon or Google or Facebook that might be working on like really groundbreaking H3 stuff. A lot of companies are working on H2 stuff, and so Horizon 2 stuff is what people tend to apply lean startup and innovation processes to, creating net incremental innovation, et cetera.

You can apply the same processes when you're just improving your core products and you should, but sometimes when the movement is just starting inside a company, it's better to say, give us these things that are risky and let's show you how it works, and then you can see which of these techniques you want to then take and apply to your more mature products. .

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about who's doing it well out there. What are some of the case studies or people that you've worked with that seem to be on a little bit better track than others out there?

Tendayi Viki: It's interesting, right, because there's a balance of what's being done well. I think it's rare to find a company that's doing everything well. You might find that companies like Ping An, the Chinese conglomerate. They do really well in terms of having a diverse portfolio, so they're not really focused on just doing like one thing. They're building a portfolio of very many different business models. Even though they're like a big insurance company. They also like always exploring new business models in their portfolio of products and services is pretty wide.

And then a couple of companies that we work with at Strategizer we published a blog post on that and a Harvard Business Review article on it. you know Bayer and Bosch and what they have are their innovation growth fund or accelerator programs, where they constantly taking in 10 to 12 ideas per cohort, investing a little bit in those ideas, seeing which ideas are going to work out and see which ideas are not going to work out and then doubling down investment on the best ideas. And what they're doing is they're living this philosophy that as leaders, you can't pick the winning idea on day one. You have to select a whole bunch of ideas that are aligned with the strategy and then create an environment for the best ideas to emerge. And win.

Brian Ardinger: One of the questions I get a lot, and it seems to be one of those areas that is not as covered as much in the lean startup books, and that is around this idea of motivation, compensation, incentive systems to make this work in a bigger corporation. What are some of the things that you've run across that seem to be better at putting that incentive system together for how to make this work?

Tendayi Viki: The classic one that everybody fights all the time is 3M and their stretch goals. One of the problems that teams have is that there's an incentive misalignment with leadership, and so the CEO is talking about let's innovate, let's innovate. But the middle managers that run the teams are being incentivized through returns on currently successful products, increasing sales, increasing profits. The way 3M handled that is that they give their leaders three, what they call stretch goals, which is this idea that the 25 to 30% of revenue in the last year must come from new products that have been launched within the last four years. And so what that does is that it incentivizes leaders to start managing their teams to create new things. And so you have an incentives alignment there. So that's one really great example.

Another one was the bank that I can't name for NDA reasons. But what they do is they have an innovation lab and then the teams that apply to join the lab are invited to come to the lab, but they have to take a 50% pay cut. And when what they get in exchange, is a stake in their own idea. And so it's a way to turn them into mini entrepreneurs and align incentives again in that way.

Brian Ardinger: I would imagine that would probably also weed out the folks that wanted to do more innovation theater around it, but also wanting to keep their safe job in the process.

Tendayi Viki: Exactly, exactly. There are people that are slumming it, right? Like if I spend three months in the innovation lab, I can then come back to my company and go I'm an innovation expert. I was in the lab. Versus people that are really interested in creating net new business models, you know, for the company. So that's a way to incentivize them and keep those things in line.

Brian Ardinger: That's brings up an interesting point. At the end of the day, organizations, it's difficult for them to innovate because it all comes down to the individual. Are there particular core skill sets that folks should be considering and developing to become that innovator within the organization?

Tendayi Viki: The thing about innovation, right, is that there's a part of innovation that is a personality thing, you create it. Are you comfortable with ambiguity? Are you open to new experiences? And all of that is really great. And you do need folks that are comfortable with ambiguity because a lot of the time you don't know what's going to work and what isn't going to work. But what I'm actually learning is that the core skillset that innovation teams need to grow is management. Innovation is management. They have to be systematic. After you've generated your ideas and you've designed your ideas, you then have to systematically test them. You have to do this in an honest way. You have to really look at the assumptions you're making and run experiments to test those assumptions and come back with that data and really review it against the business model that you're designing and make iterations.

Keep going back and forth and back and forth and make real progress towards finding a business model that works. That's a discipline, right? It's not something that you can just do in a hap-hazard fashion. I think that's the one thing we still don't really have embedded yet in the way that people talk about innovation. It's not as commonly discussed. It was more about creativity and design sprints and hacks and all of these things far more than they are the day-to-day discipline and systematic approach to making the product.

Brian Ardinger: It talks to the difficulty that organizations have having that ambidextrous hat on where half of them, if not more, are focused on existing business models and optimizing that versus the new and the same thing would apply in the innovation space. You have to think new and differently about what you're doing, but also have the discipline and the rigor to make something happen around it.

Tendayi Viki: Exactly. I mean, we have a lot of rigor in the way we run our core business. I mean, we count every cent and penny. And we measure every little metric, but when it comes to innovation, we try to treat it like a black box, like go over there and do some cool stuff and then tell us what you've got. One of the conversations I have with leaders all the time, if asked to pull out 10 or 12 of the innovations that are being worked on right now in your organization, to what extent do you have a handle on how much progress those teams have made towards finding something that works.

And a lot of leaders don't have the handle. They don't have any handle on that at all. They're waiting for the teams to come and tell them after three months what they've done. We could be measuring and tracking progress very systematically with innovation. We have the tools now.

Brian Ardinger: That brings me to the next topic. I want to talk a little bit about your new book Pirates in the Navy. You're a prolific author. You've written a number of drum books. Tell us a little bit about the new one that's coming out and why you to write it.

Tendayi Viki: Pirates in the Navy, the title, is based off the time when Steve Jobs said that it was better to be a pirate than to join the Navy, and he was talking about the difference between large companies and startups, right. It was like it's been to be a startup that you joined the Navy. As we've been doing this work and working with innovation teams inside of large companies. They have to be pirates in the Navy. And that's where I got that. The book really aims at like heads of innovation and innovation teams working inside large companies. And it challenges them to say, you know what, you want to be a pirate, but you're a pirate in the Navy. And so what you're trying to do is to make innovation a more systematic and accepted part of the culture of your company. And so the question is, how do you do that? How did you start to make sure that the practices that we're teaching and using become more widely accepted?

How do you address that concern that when you finally find something that works, you may have no one in the company, that's ready to take it to scale. Well, how do you build those bridges and how do you work inside the Raj organization to make sure that innovation becomes a repeatable process? And so the way I did it was I took the pirate metaphor and I said, actually, you know, not all pirates are the same. When you look at the history of piracy, there's actually like pirates and Buccaneers and privateers, but the key distinction there between a pirate and a Privateer, the typical pirate or Buccaneer is just a criminal basically on the high seas, unaffiliated living, their best life looting and raiding. But if they're caught, they get into real big trouble.

Whereas a privateer is a pirate that is commissioned by a state to attack the ships, of an enemy state. They go out on the high seas and they do their pirate thing, but they can bring all the stuff that they've gotten back home to the home country and they'll be accepted and that stuff will be celebrated and they'll get their share or whatever it is that they've done. And so when you're thinking about being a pirate inside the large company, you want to be a privateer rather than just a straightforward, buccaneering, free spirit, because if you are straightforward buccaneering free spirt, you're likely to get fired. Will need to walk the plank. But if you're a privateer, you've built the relationships. You have a charter to do the exploration work? And people are interested in the results? What's your exploration? And the question is how do you create that interest? And that's what the book is about.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about some of the case studies or skillsets that you cover in the book that people will be excited to find out about.

Tendayi Viki: The first thing I say is like, you have to be authentic. You have to be genuinely interested in creating business models that work. You have to be genuinely interested in developing skills and tools to do that. Not innovation theater, right? Not just like hanging around and doing sticky note stuff that doesn't create value. You have to be authentically interested. The biggest piece of advice that I give people in the book is that you cannot start by targeting the entire company. If you do that, you are dead on day one.

What you want to do in every large organization that I worked with, is a small group of people, small group of leaders that get. There's always a division or a department where there's early adopters that are trying these methods, right? And so that's the way you want to go. You want to start working with early adopters. Just like we tell startups and our teams to go find the early adopter customers. When you're trying to implement an innovation process inside your company, you also want to start working with early adopters inside your company. You know, leaders that get it. The cool thing about working with early adopter leaders is that they're more tolerant of the mistakes you make. And at the beginning you can make kilos of mistakes. But the goal of working with early adopters is to get an early win.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely

Tendayi Viki: The early win is then what buys you legitimacy to then start talking about innovation inside the rest of the organization.

Brian Ardinger: I can't wait for it to come out. If people want to find out more about yourself and the book, what's the best way to do that?

Tendayi Viki: You go to TehdayiViki.com and the book will be there. There'll be links. Pirates in the Navy is also just on Amazon, so you can just Google that as well and you can preorder. So yeah, I'm looking forward, the book is coming out. I think its May 14 I've already submitted the manuscript. It's just going to final editorial now.

Brian Ardinger: Well, Tendai thank you again for jumping on the call early in the morning here to tell us a little about what's going on in the world of innovation. Appreciate you being on Inside Outside innovation.

Tendayi Viki: Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sonja Gittens Ottley. She's head of diversity and inclusion at Asana, one of the best work management platforms out there. Recently, Asana has been highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. And Sonja and I talk about diversity inclusion within Asana, how they hire, and some of the trends that she's seeing in the world of technology. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io. a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Sonja Gittens Ottley, she is the head of diversity and inclusion at the company Asana. Welcome to the show Sonja.

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian Ardinger: I'm super glad to have you on the show. You're coming from a company called Asana. If you're involved in the startup world, and have seen the growth of what you're doing, it's pretty amazing. It's a work management platform that helps teams collaborate. Asana was highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. That's no small feat, so congratulations on that. Sonja, let's talk a little bit about Asana and what you do at that company.

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Sure. I've been at Asana for four years. And during that time we've grown from a company just about 150 when I started, to over 700 people across many different countries. And one of the things that really drew me to Asana and has really made me stay at Asana is we've consistently, and from the start, been really intentional about diversity and inclusion. Approaching it in the way that we would any other business strategy. We recognize it as something that not only is the right thing to do, but it's also something that brings value to our business and to our workplace. Meaning our teams, our employees, everyone. We're really focused on creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.

If you do that, and if you are approaching diversity and inclusion as an aspect of your culture, you're not only able to recruit top-quality employees who come from a variety of backgrounds, you're really ultimately able to retain your employees. That is one of the things that we've always been focused on, and it's something that as we continue to grow, we've really scaled in a way that makes sense for us as a company.

Brian Ardinger: It sounds like Asana has had that DNA or that desire from the beginning. How does a company, that it's leadership is maybe looking at this as a way to improve theirselves? How can they start that process of making diversity and inclusion a more impactful part of the business.

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Part of it is really recognizing that culture and having a culture that is inclusive, ultimately benefits your company. If you think of culture as just something that's add on or something that just happens. As you build your business, you're not going to be doing this well. If you think about culture in a different way, which is that it allows you to achieve what you're trying to do as a business, your missions and your goals, and you recognize I need to have values that support that mission and that goal. How I want my company and my employees to show up and I think about values in a really intentional way. I don't think about values as something that, hmm, it might be nice to have this as a value. It's also being really intentional about what are the things that we absolutely are going to value as a company.

Then you're able to think about, well, what are the programs and policies that need to be in place to support that? And some of it are really foundational. Thinking about having a policy that creates an inclusive workplace means that you have an anti-harassment policy. You're thinking about the fact that you could have people of many different agendas, so you need to think about a parental leave policy. You need to be thinking about policies that support all of the work that you're doing and the environment that you're trying to create. And also give signals to your employees, these are things that we stand for as well as these are things that we will not stand for right. So part of it is having that culture built in and having policies that flow from that.

Alongside that is really thinking about how are you training your managers who in addition to trying to figure out how they're having impact and making their teams grow, how are you training them to build and to empower inclusive teams? How will you give them skills that they probably have not picked up before? Managers do not come...As soon as they get appointed manager, they do not then magically get a set of skills. They have to be trained. So you have to really empower them to do that work well.

And then alongside that is this piece around how are you essentially hiring and building a diverse team? How are you thinking about recruiting? How are you assessing people? How are you interviewing people and what are the policies in place that really look at creating a fair and level playing field? So thinking about it. Alongside the lines of not just recruiting and not just culture and not just policies, but really thinking about it along a really integrated model is ultimately how a company begins to have diversity and inclusion become a core part of their company and their company's DNA.

Brian Ardinger: How can a company get started? Is it first taking a level stock of the diversity that they have within the organization already? Does it start with hiring? Does it start at upper management defining those values in that? What are some of the starting places that companies can look at to start building this?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: It's really a combination of all of those things. To me, it's a Yes and. First off, what does our company even look like? Who's here? Who are the people that exist in our neighborhood, essentially? So it's really taking a stock of what are our numbers. What's our demographics? Some companies have done this through a survey of employees at Asana we did it through our HRIS where people could self-report how they identified, and we gave them a lot of different ways that they can identify in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, citizenship, a number of different ways, and they self report to that information. That's one aspect of it. So you get a sense of who exists. But the other, and just as important part is really understanding, well how do you feel. Do you feel as though you belong? Do you feel as though you have a voice? Do you have a sense of psychological safety. That gets into what's our baseline at our company around that sense of belonging and inclusion?

Those two bits of data really allow you to understand both qualitatively as well as quantitatively, where you are as a company and then decide, well, what are the next steps. The layer on top of that that helps to inform those next steps and helps to solidify those data points is having that buy-in. When companies are not thinking about diversity and inclusion in a really holistic way, meaning that it's either driven because employees want it or it's driven because leadership thinks that's the right thing. They're going to be blockers. They're going to be gaps because people are not understanding that this is something that's really important across the company.

At Asana, one of the things that I tend to say a lot is diversity and inclusion is a team of everyone. And by that I mean it's really about ensuring that everyone knows that they have a role to play. Everyone is bought into supporting this. Leadership is giving direction, meaning that knowing that leadership supports this, people know that this is something that's a company priority. And it also empowers the employees at all different levels to understand that this needs to be a priority. So it takes work off, particularly amongst those groups that tend to be underrepresented in tech. It takes work or the load of doing this work off of my minority groups, my black employees, or my Hispanic employees, for example, because everyone understands that this is something that they have a role to play.

And by doing that, having that leadership buy in, it gives the authority or the empowerment around crafting those policies that support the fact that we want to have an inclusive workplace. Where companies sometimes get tripped up is that they're trying to do all the things. They're trying to solve all of the problems. And you really have to be intentional about it. And that's why that data piece allows you to really understand where are the critical gaps and what you should be focused on. And it informs the goals that you set and then having leadership and support throughout the organization allows you to understand where are the levers that I need to focus on. Most importantly.

Brian Ardinger: And it sounds like it really does need to be an ongoing process where I think a lot of corporations and that understand the core importance of it, but they circle back to it once a year with the annual employee survey and realize, Oh yeah, we probably should think about that or focus on that. It seems to be that a core competency of having a diverse and inclusive company is to make it an ongoing part of the business and an ongoing training, ongoing metrics, ongoing analysis of where you're at and where you're moving forward. Is that correct?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Absolutely, and part of it is if you start to think of this work as you would any other business objective that you have as a company, you will approach it in that way. Meaning that you will stop and assess. You will iterate as needed. You will check and you will be accountable to other stakeholders. You have to approach it in a way that is really intentional. Otherwise you're just going to be doing a number of different things without seeing the value or the impact or being able to measure that work. So it really cannot be a jump in and jump out kind of situation. It has to be continuous and it has to be continually assessing what works and what doesn't.

Brian Ardinger: So what are some of the biggest or most common pitfalls or challenges that you've seen companies fall into when trying to build out their diversity inclusion programs?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: I think the biggest thing is really that point of doing it without a real strategy, not really being clear on what are you trying to solve and how are you measuring progress? Ultimately recognizing that a lot of this work needs to happen in parallel, but at the same time, companies often don't recognize that some of this requires change management. You are requiring people to change behaviors. You're requiring them to look at things that they have done for a number of years or things that they have learned as the right way to do things. For example, one of the things that you need to encourage people to do is, as a hiring manager, how are you assessing employees, new candidates?

What you may have seen in the past is that companies that, well, this person worked at company X, therefore they're just the right person that I'd need from my team, right? That actually works against diversity and inclusion. Whereas if you're doing things and seeing, okay, this is the role that I have, what is the skill set that I need for that rule? Just that's simple change management in terms of really sitting down and thinking about what are the actual skills and competencies and how am I assessing for that opens up the pipeline, requires you to think differently, requires you to understand that you need to be thinking differently to do this work well and really working with, in this case, highing managers or employees or team members on recognizing how bias show up, recognizing that change starts with them as well.

That's some of the work that needs to be happening. So I think that is one of the biggest challenges that I see companies having because they are trying to do all of these things without that strategy and then not spending that time on doing that shift in culture and really having employees recognize that this work is important.

Brian Ardinger: So are there particular processes or training programs that seem to have really resonated within Asana or other places that you've worked that seem to be well received and helpful in moving the organization forward?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: One of the things that we've seen really have impact is really doing training that's focused on inclusive leadership. And by that I mean company is, particularly over the last three or four years, had started to do bias training, right. Which was we all have biases and these biases are unconscious biases, but really having people recognize the impact that they have. Things that are really working now is that training is good and it's useful, but it's just the foundation. It's the start or starting point. Now we are asking you to recognize those biases, but also shift into how can I proactively ensure that my team is inclusive. What am I doing to ensure that I'm building an inclusive team with my direct reports? So really for us focusing on training that is really team specific and really focused on managers and how they are empowering their teams and creating that sense of belonging for everyone on their teams so that everyone can do their best work. That I think is where we've seen some of the greatest impact.

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned hiring. I know that a lot of companies out there have talked to me about how they're struggling to find the right talent, or they don't have the right network to tap into a diverse employment base. Are there particular tips or suggestions for companies trying to expand their reach into different markets and people that they may not have normally work with?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: One of the things that I've mentioned before is really being clear on what you're looking for. I cannot tell you how many times I've heard, highering managers say I'm looking for somebody who came from this company or that company and automatically assuming for them, they might be releasing that having worked at company X, you have this set of skills, but a hiring partner cares, usually, I am looking for somebody from company X and just having two things happen. Having hiring managers work with their talent acquisition or recruiting teams to really be clear on what skills they're looking for opens up the pipeline, opens up the pipeline in terms of somebody who came from a completely different company or a completely different sector, might have also developed those skills. So just being really clear on the skillset that you're looking for helps to make a big difference.

One of the other things is really being able to clearly assess how somebody is performing, meaning assessed during the interview process. Whether through competency interviews or behavioral interviews and having clear rubric and greeting that assures that that assessment is fair and unbiased makes a huge shift. I think third and most important thing that I think any company can do and can do this week is really build relationships and partnerships with organizations that support talent that comes from underrepresented groups. These organizations tend to have direct connections. They have par threes. They literally are trusted names within communities, and by partnering with them, first of all, you're going directly to the communities you're working with organizations, that can educate you can help you to create a narrative that is attractive to the communities that you're trying to reach, and really get your roles in front of really great talent. There are so many great organizations that are doing this work and I'm doing this work well, and companies should not feed as though they need to figure this out on their own.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's a great tip too, because a lot of times we think we have to do it ourselves. We use the same methodologies we use to attract a certain group of folks that may not communicate well with or might not resonate with it. That's a very important point, I think, to understand that there is additional help out there and that. Do you have particular organizations that you use at Asana or particular groups that you would recommend people look to?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Sure. Some of the organizations that we've worked with here at Asana, Techqueria, which is an organization that's focused on Latin X tech professionals. We've worked with Jobwell, which is focused on talent for minorities specifically black, Hispanic, and woman. Those are the two that come to mind. /dev/color as well is a really great organization that's focused on supporting black software engineers in tech. There are so many organizations that I feel as though we're just calling those three, I've forgotten about 10 others, but what I would say is one of the things that companies often say to me is, but we have a great company. We have a great culture. Why don't people want to come over here? To your point. How are you reaching out to people? Why is your message, or why should your message be attractive to someone who does not know about your company and really doing that work to build a brand that is attractive to everyone?Recognizing that what might be attractive to one group might not be attractive to another group.

Brian Ardinger: How have you seen Asana's focus on diversity inclusion affect innovation and creativity and the performance of the organization itself? What are some of the big wins that you've had?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: The quickest example that I could think of was when we introduced the pronouns into our product. Our product is, you know, as a work management platform, and our mission is really allowing teams to work effortlessly together. In Asana, you sign up, you identify yourself. My name is Sonja. I can identify the team I'm on, how I want to be contacted, but I can also identify my pronoun. She, her, hers. You have to work with team members and some team members use binary pronouns and some use non-binary pronouns. A simple shift, allowing people to include their pronouns sounds really easy. But the impact that something like this has is huge. Because when you're addressing people, whether in writing or in person, and you're not acknowledging their pronouns, so you mis-gender someone, that changes how people work with you.

But just being visible about your pronouns and also normalizing it and an organization allows people to feel recognized, allows people to feel seen, ultimately allows them to feel, you know what? I am included here. I can now do my best work. It sounds really easy, but the feedback that we got from external organizations, from other companies about seeing it, about knowing that it existed within our product was huge. And it was just another way to allow teams to just work really effortlessly together because I'm seen.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. It's a great segue too, because the last topic I want to talk about, you're a tech company out there, and what are some of the new trends or tactics that you're seeing from companies that are changing the way people are working together or building diverse and inclusive companies?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: The biggest shift I've seen in the last four years is recognizing that this has to be data driven. Particularly in tech. We really spent a lot of time digging into both our engagement surveys and digging into that inclusion and belonging sense. And companies have shifted from looking at it in terms of how are women in our organization feeling, but really looking at it in really intersectional ways. So how are woman who identify as black who are in engineering feeling, versus how are woman who identify as white in our engineering department feeling. And you're able to see nuances, trends, and you're really able to action this and spending time looking at those intersectionalities makes a huge difference because people are not just one thing.

They're made up of a multiple of things. The other big shift is something that we touched on, which is around training. Recognizing the training needs to be continuous. Training needs to ultimately serve that sense of inclusion and belonging. And it's an ongoing process. It cannot be something that just is done and dusted. You have to keep it iterating on this.

The third biggest thing is something that we've been doing at Asana for quite some time, which is creating space for employees to talk about the issues that matter to them. We don't just live in our workplaces. We also live in the real world and creating a space to talk about the issues that are happening outside of the workplace, inside the office, allows people to really feel seen. It allows them to really feel as though they belong, and they don't have to be someone else inside versus outside. At Asana, for example, we do a series called real talk, where we have those conversations. We talk about what it's like being black in America or being black in tech or what it's like to be Muslim.

And we have those conversations because these are issues and challenges that are happening outside of the workplace, but it's also an opportunity for other employees to understand what others might be facing. The other big thing, or the big shift that we're seeing is really having people understand that diversity and inclusion is not just about groups that have typically been underrepresented in tech. This work impacts everyone. And if we do this right, and if we do this well, everyone has a role to play. Having that shift come from, well this work just smartest to that particular group, so I don't need to be involved because I'm part of the majority. That's not how we make a change.

Work that is focused on ally-ship and advocacy is really one of the big trends that we're seeing, particularly coming from leadership and leadership and understanding the rules that they have to play where that is concerned. I think that's where we are really having some of our biggest wins. Creating a culture where we can show up. Both in a way that's vulnerable, but also in a way that is curious and really willing to learn, and grow is really where we do our best work because that allows us to collaborate better. It allows us all to grow, and I feel as though that's where the value of having diversity in two separate places really shows up.

Brian Ardinger: Sandra, I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share these insights with us. If people want to find out more about yourself or about Asana, what's the best way to do that?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Best way is through asana.com diversity and inclusion. That's our website where we share a lot of the work that we're doing. We also have a regular Asana blog. Just search for any tags marked culture where we talk a lot about our diversity and inclusion work or talk to me on LinkedIn.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alexander Fleiss. Alex is the founder of Rebellion Research, which is a research advisory firm, and also an artificial intelligence expert and robotrader. Alexander and I talk about the Corona virus and its impact on the market, how artificial intelligent traders are faring in this, and some of the differences between what's going on in Europe, China, and the United States when it comes to artificial intelligence. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and with me today is Alexander Fleiss. He is the founder of Rebellion Research. Welcome to the show.

Alexander Fleiss: Thank you so much, Brian, pleasure for having me on.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, Alex, I am excited to have you on. For those who may not be familiar with Rebellion Research, why don't you tell us a little bit about the AI platform that you've got built.

Alexander Fleiss: RebellonResearch.com offers managed brokerage accounts in 40 plus countries. Whether it's a small $5,000 account or a gigantic pension fund, we deal with everybody, every type of institution out there. We also are a think tank, I teach at a number of schools, constantly working on artificial intelligence and applying artificial intelligence to our strategy and the movement of the economy. We publish research on AI, machine learning, automation. We've published a lot on the Corona virus, and in January we actually had 100,000 readers. We tried to just be all things AI. We develop AI and we write about AI. It's definitely my life's passion.

Brian Ardinger: We are recording this on March 20th as most folks know, markets are down 30%. I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with you to not only talk about the markets, but some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to... This trend of AI has permeated the financial services market. You have all these new robotraders or things along those lines, different ways to try to take a look at data and manage it. What are you seeing out there when it comes to trends around this?

Alexander Fleiss: Everybody is rushing to get all the data they possibly can to be as first as possible in understanding where the economy is going and where the markets are going. Clearly, we just experienced a terrible market crash. The American mid cap index is down 40% as of yesterday. So everybody loves to throw out the S and P, which is Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, but the other 2000 stocks that are, the overall U S markets, those are down 42% you know, we've had a significant crash. We've never had a virus related sell off. In the last 30-40-50-60 years. I can't think of even the last time, I'd probably guess 1918-1919 Spanish flu, last time the markets got hit. Everyone pointed to H1N1 / Swine flu and when this came out, nobody thought much of it. Seemed like a Chinese thing or some type of bad soup disease. Turned out to be a bad virus because the city of Wuhan was not locked down.

Brian Ardinger: These black Swan events, we can't always predict, and that's why they're black swans. From the perspective of artificial intelligence, were there any signals or how did the artificial intelligent robotraders react to something like this versus what you've traditionally seen in the marketplaces?

Alexander Fleiss: Bridgewater apparently got annihilated down between 5%-10% for their various funds, and they are a no exposure hedge fund. Rebellion research, we have a multi-asset strategy, and we have an equity index. The equity index has done better than the market. We're an economic based system, and so we feel that during times of recession...But so far the U S economy is still very strong. Most of the economies, employee default rates are low, people have money, can pay for things, and also the risk-free rate is very low. When you have a 0% money, it's hard for risk to not start to bubble up again. And Covid-19 is obviously a great excuse to make money very cheap, not an excuse. It's what they should do. They're doing all the right things. The great depression happened because we made money expensive, and the federal reserve made a huge error, and they stymied the financial supply.

Brian Ardinger: From a technology perspective, did you see anything different versus the way we traditionally look at markets and that? Does AI give us any insight into are these technologies getting better, worse. It is what it is an in an environment where nothing can be predicted.

Alexander Fleiss: Our AI is getting better. Our AI has been learning. Our AI makes like 11,000 predictions a day. Stock market when 80%-90% of managed funds lose. The house always wins, and so we never have too much conviction in one stock if it's really done through the aggregate. But…Well, I'll tell you, it's become a very tough environment where you have a lot of fear, but the fact is, you know, the economy is strong, so we should have a gigantic rebound. The stock market should soar, and you know, things should get a lot better. But in terms of seeing this ahead of time, no, there's only so much.

I mean AI and machine learning is a lot like Dustin Hoffman from the movie Rain man. It's great at counting toothpicks, it's great at counting cards, but it really can't do a whole lot else. It's got no social cognition. It's got no idea really what's going on. It's great at its specific tasks, but you move it from the task just one or two degrees and it's useless. Right? So what we have at rebellion research is an economic forecaster, and so we're really good at calling the economy, and that's what we first got pressed for in 08' and it was the financial crisis, and then in 2010 was the Greek debt crisis. Those were economic situations. This is not an economic situation. This is a classic black swan. It's not like looking for gold or smelling for gunpowder. What is there to smell for, that a weird virus strain will spread to the U S and infect tens of thousands of people. It's truly the manifestation of a black swan, and it's interesting, obviously it's no fun now, but I mean very educational.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about some of the trends that you're seeing in different markets, U.S. Versus China. Not necessarily even from a financial market perspective, but when it comes to technology and who's winning, who's losing, what are some of the trends that you're seeing out there?

Alexander Fleiss: I think that's a great question. And a really awesome topic because as a teacher in AI, I have to admit that by far most of my students are Chinese. The native Chinese-born Chinese speakers. Because for whatever reason, AI intrigues China and the Chinese people more than any other country. I don't know why. It is the fact that teach us five different schools and it's just what I come across. In terms of the AI - China versus the U.S. There's not going to be a competition because every great Chinese engineer wants to get out of there and move to America. But in terms of Europe, Europe's nowhere near us.

America's dominating AI. We're dominating AI because we have a lot going on. We have a lot of universities working on it, but we also, most Chinese want to come to America, not Europe. Let's look at the biggest tech companies they're all American. In the U.S, the most capital in technology and we are more attractive. A lot of my friends are Eastern Europeans. One of my best friends, this guy named Dean McCorliv is a Ukrainian AI engineer. He's one of the first actual members of Google Brain, super brilliant guy actually. His company Mit Friendly Data was bought by Apple, I think. And he loves Ukrainian and his Mom and Dad, but he's in the U.S. as much as possible. Engineers typically want to live in the U.S. You've got some in Amsterdam, but very, very, very, very few. U.S. dominates.

Brian Ardinger: It seems to be two camps on the AI front, some that believe that AI is summoning the demon, as Elon Musk talks about, and very negative towards the possibilities of what AI can eventually be done. And there's another camp, more along the lines of there are things that it can do, but we're definitely not where all the apocalyptic thoughts are. Where do you fit in that range?

Alexander Fleiss: AI is a tool. Yeah it will be used as a tool is used. For good, when in the hands of good and for evil when in the hands of evil. Will an AI system be used for evil purposes? Everything is used for evil purposes when in the hands of evil. Will companies screw up their AI system? Everybody screws up every system. Am I as apocalyptic as Elon Musk? No. Will I take notice of the fact that the most optimistic man on the freaking planet is like a doomsday naysayer, about AI. Yeah. I'll take notice about it. Is he right in that? Will there be some despot, some awful warlord who entrusts his nuclear weapon systems to an AI and screws up applying the AI, because AI is very hard to apply. And if he screws up he launches his nuclear weapons, but at the same time a despot could do other things. But yeah, no, this is a very good chance that crazy dictator screws up using his AI and it can cause a nuke to launch one day.

Brian Ardinger: A lot of our listeners are probably not technologists, but they're always trying to figure out the next thing that they need to do to either protect their company or make their company better. For our listeners out there that want to find out more about artificial intelligence, what are some of the sources that you go to or some of the things that they should be paying attention to.

Alexander Fleiss: Really remarkable how few sources there still are. It's very hard. Google keyword searches for a lot of keywords. You know, Bayesian, machine learning, artificial intelligence, no great source yet. I'm going to plug my own rebellionresearch.com as a significant source. AI is our concentration, but. No, there still isn't a good AI source. So my buddy Dan Faggella started something called Tech Emergence. It's another AI research and contract company. I think It's still a very, very, very highly fragmented industry, but already you have the dominant players, which are Google, Facebook, and Amazon, because data is what fuels AI at the end of the day. And whoever has the best data has the best AI performance. You build an amazing AI system, but if your data's not great, its going to be hard for it to do much. And so, since Google, Facebook, and Amazon and Apple, those four guys just have so much more data than everybody else... Tesla's great value is that they have all this driverless data. They're really far ahead there. I don't know if it'll monetize. I don't know if that'll work out. I've..I'm a terrible stock picker. I keep all my money in the AI Research Strategy Fund. If I get inheritance, if I get money, I win the lottery, I just put it into the market. I don't ask. I don't try to time the stock market.

Brian Ardinger: Well Alexander, if people want to learn more about your research what's the best way to do that?

Alexander Fleiss: Go to RebellionResearch.com and you can sign up for our research for free, or you can open an account there. They're very easy steps. At the same time if you have a question for me, Alex@RebellionResearch.com. We're very friendly and I have so many students asking me so many questions all the time, I am a machine when it comes to answering questions. Happy to field anything.

Brian Ardinger: I appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation.

Alexander Fleiss: Awesome.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Zainab Ghadiyali. Zainab is a product lead at Airbnb. She used to work at Facebook, and she's the co-founder of Wogrammer, a nonprofit showcasing amazing women in technology. We talk about the power of curiosity and persistence in building a career in today's environment of change.

We talk about Zainab's journey from coming to America with $107 in her pocket, to working some of the best and biggest tech companies in the world. And we talk about the power of finding mentors, telling diverse stories and the new trends that you're seeing in the world of technology. Let's get started.

For a full transcript, check out insideoutside.io.

Interview Transcript

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Zainab Ghadiyali. She is an amazing woman who came out to our IO Summit. She works at Airbnb currently, but has had an extraordinary career and we're excited to have her on the show. Welcome.

Zainab Ghadiyali: Hi.Thanks Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you back on the show. You were one of the first persons I thought of to bring out to the IO summit last year. I saw a blog posts written by First Round Capital. It was basically an interview with you talking about curiosity and the secrets of designing a curiosity-driven career. And after I read that and got in touch with you, I said I had got to have her at the show. You've had a pretty amazing career. You came to America with about a hundred bucks in your pocket and have managed to work at great places like Facebook and now Airbnb. You started great programs like Wogrammer. Why don't we talk through what it's like to come to America and kickstart a career?

Coming to America and Kickstarting a Career

Zainab Ghadiyali: Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing that I talk about a lot is the importance of ignorance. For me, for example, I had no idea what living in U.S. Would be like. Of course, I was familiar to some extent, based on media outlets and looking at life, watching Friends or Seinfeld or like, you know, some of the more famous American sitcoms. I'm like, that's America. Cool. Once I landed here in a small town in South Carolina, obviously a very different world, but I could not have been more excited. For me, it was just such an adventure. I had no idea about how anything would be. No expectations, which meant it would be hard to get let down. On hindsight, had someone told me about the challenges of like, Hey, a hundred bucks doesn't go a long way, which in India, that's a lot of money. So for me, that was like, Oh yeah, that's like one month expenses, and then I'll figure it out.

Had someone like told me about that and some of the other challenges along the way, I would have probably been apprehensive about, oh my gosh, there is no way I can do this right. When someone tells you this and they're well, meaning, but when you learn about these challenges, about like how they find it hard or they could not do it, you start telling yourself that story, that you can also not do it, or you start validating and saying yes.

Brian Ardinger: And you have managed to build a career in technology. Maybe tell the audience about how you even got involved in your first hack-a-thon.

Finding a Path to Facebook

Zainab Ghadiyali: When I thought about my career. I honestly didn't know what I wanted to do, like what role I wanted to do. I knew that I'm someone who is very curious. I like to learn about new things. Like I'll read anything, even like I'll sit and read like something on a cereal box. I'm constantly reading, and I know I'm like very curious. I knew that as long as I was learning new things, I would be happy. And the second thing I knew was that I wanted to have a lot of impact in people's lives. Like I wanted to my world to reach as many people as I possibly could. And do as much impactful work as I possibly could.

I knew these two things, but I didn't know what role I should really do. I signed up as a theater major. Cause I just love arts and I love acting. It's more of a hobby than thinking of my career. And then I also signed up for the biology program because one idea was just something my parents were really excited about was me becoming a doctor. I started those tracks, realize that really like being in a theater major, like it's quite expensive with like you have to buy the props and the equipment, and I was like, I have no money for this. Doing theater was just not a realistic option at that point and continued along with biology, chemistry. I loved our chemistry department so much. I love the professors there so much that I decided to take on the chemistry courses.

I did that. I realized that, you know, I wanted to get some more hands on experience and working in a hospital. I learned that to apply to medical schools, you needed to have volunteer experience, have some experience working in hospitals. But I did not have a car or any means to get to a hospital. I was like, well, how will I do this? And I was also working as much as was possible. And I was also taking classes and I was feeling burnt out as well, three years in. So long story short, I found an opportunity to go and work in Germany on research projects with doctors there. And I thought, well, this is cool. You know, I don't have a car to get to a hospital here. Maybe I'll just stay in Germany and go work in hospitals there.

And I found this opportunity and applied. And became one of the few research scientists chosen from North America, and that's where I learned that I don't necessarily enjoy the life of a doctor. Instead of being the one on one with patients, I wanted to do things that would reach more people, and so I thought maybe public health might be a good option then. Because then you're building programs and you're thinking about how you help a wider population. And I started volunteering and working with a nonprofit and after I graduated, worked with them full-time to build business models in some of the remotest parts of the world. Like this was in South America, in the Andes, remote parts of South India.

I realize two things. One is to make a difference in those communities, felt like there was a need to have power or influence in other words and/or money. And then I didn't have any of the things. I thought, well, if I really want to have an impact and maybe I have to figure it, how can I influence and how can I build something that will reach more people and actually have meaningful impact. And so then again, I started researching. And I knew that technology was changing people's lives and that networks were very powerful. Even when I was on site, the community leaders were really influential. So when I think about influence, there's like your family. But then there's also these leaders who the community accept as the source of truth and the go to place for guidance on how to do things. So in partnering with these community leaders, we had these network effects where the community leader would work with their network to help us with our public health programs.

So I thought, well, if networks are powerful and if technology is, changing people's lives. Can we have large networks? Like what about the largest network and how can we use that for social good? And that's when Facebook came to my mind as like the world's largest network at that time. And I thought what if we use Facebook for social good? So then I became quite like obsessed with, Oh, how do I get into Facebook and how do I figure it out? How can we use social networks for social good? So that's when the hack-a-thon came into my life. I visited a hack-a-thon and started meeting more recruiters and employees from Facebook and trying to understand what would be the process for me to join the company.

Sponsors: Husch Blackwell

Brian Ardinger: Hey listeners, I wanted to pause this episode for a brief word from our sponsor, Husch Blackwell. Get Started Omaha is the premier startup event for the Omaha startup community, providing an opportunity for startups, investors, the business community, and others in the entrepreneurial ecosystem to come together to celebrate Omaha's startup scene. As a supportive member of the startup community Husch Blackwell is proud to be this year's presenting sponsor with prizes for each of our industry track winners and a final grand prize. Over $75,000 in cash and in-kind services will be awarded in support of the startup community. We're looking for startups, sponsors, and everything in between to help make this event a success and we hope you'll join us. Learn more at www.Getstartedomaha.com.

Wogrammer: Telling Stories about Women in Tech

Brian Ardinger: Technology has become a bigger part of your life, obviously working at Facebook and now at Airbnb and that, but also through that path you created a nonprofit with some folks called Wogrammer. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how it's telling stories about women in technology?

Zainab Ghadiyali: Wogrammer is a nonprofit that my co-founder, Erin and I started when we were at Facebook. When I joined Facebook, I was one of the first female production engineers there, and I got asked to talk at events a lot. Initially it was very exciting because I was new to the field. I didn't know anyone, nobody knew me, and I was being asked to speak at events and I was like, wow, how flattering, right?

This is amazing. And then soon I realized that it wasn't so much about me, it was more about my gender, not for all the events, but for a lot of them. And I started thinking, well, logically it doesn't make sense because nothing about my gender effects my ability to write code.And I was very surprised at why my gender all of a sudden, which had never been something that was brought up or thought of, is now become the center of what I do and how I'm known.

And I shared this with Erin and Erin who, she's an amazing engineer. She worked at NASA, she's built rockets, she's built amazing products at Facebook. And she told me about her experiences growing up as an engineer and not feeling always that she belonged in that field, which was very surprising to me because here is Erin, who's like my role model and she's such an amazing engineer. For her to not always feel like she belonged took me by surprise. And you start thinking, well, how frustrating it is to be talking about agenda in a field where we want to talk about technology, and we want to talk about the impact of technology in people's lives.

We started thinking about how in the media there is a lot of representation around women in tech, but it's mostly focused on the negative side of things, which is around the wage gap, the gender gap, the harassment, things that are important to talk about and are obviously issues that, you know, collectively, as the tech community we need to work on and we are. But also, that there are amazing women doing amazing work. Why don't we talk about that as well? The idea being that, you know, we can't bridge the gender gap if we are asking men and women different questions, we have to treat them really the same. When you're interviewing men and you're interviewing women, ask them the same questions. Ask them about their ambitions, ask them about their life and balancing time.

If you are a young girl and are researching women in tech online or like careers about women engineers, you're not flooded with just negative stories. You also have role models that you can look up to and get inspired. Since we started the project five years ago, we've showcased over 250 women engineers from all over the world. We have 4 million readers, so it's been a great journey, and we recently got acquired by AnitaB.org which is the world's largest women tech nonprofit. Joining hands with them we can just do more and amplify our mission of info.

Ignorance and Curiosity

Brian Ardinger: It's a great resource out there. Some of the other things I want to talk about you mentioned this idea of ignorance in your career and being naive to certain things in that, what other skill sets helped to propel your career or the people that you've worked with or talked to.

Zainab Ghadiyali: The number one thing I think is being curious or like willing to constantly learn. It doesn't matter which field are given sort of the growth of technology in the last 25 plus years. The way we work, how we work, what we value in work is like changed so dramatically than it ever has in any decade in human history. As technology continues to evolve and change the way we do work, I think it's really important to have this mindset of like, Hey, I'm going to constantly learn from things, and if you have that sort of mindset, it doesn't matter even if you fail because the mindset is, Oh, I'm curious, so I'm going to figure it out what happened here and I'm going to learn from it. And if you learn from it, then you know, I think you've succeeded by default.

Persistence or Not Having Other Options

Brian Ardinger: The other thing that you talk about a lot is this idea of persistence. It seems like you have this dogged opportunity to continue on through difficult or challenging times. Can you talk a little about how persistence has played a role in your life?

Zainab Ghadiyali: For me, I think some thought of persistence came from originally not having a lot of options, so it wasn't like I had another option that I could do. I needed to pay tuition. I needed to find a house to live in. I had no other option. It wasn't like I could go somewhere else or do something else. I tried to think of how much of it was mental, where I believe I didn't have options where I actually did, or I genuinely didn't have options. I don't know that, but I know that for me, the way I perceived it for the most part was like, I have no other option. I need to do this and I'm going to figure out a way to do this. Over time. I've built this habit. For me, being persistent is constantly about learning and growing, so I know like, you know, if I fail again, I'm going to figure out what I learned from it and I'm going to apply it to the next thing.

Innovation for Efficiency

Brian Ardinger: You've had a chance to work at some of the biggest companies or most well-known startups in the world, Facebook and Airbnb. What are some of the biggest things that you've learned from working within those companies that people may not be familiar with or have heard about?

Zainab Ghadiyali: It's a good question. As technologies evolve and change, it's very important for the companies to constantly innovate, to stay ahead or stay relevant in the fields that they do. As a result of that, how that translates into how they operate or like the culture is this notion of efficiency and how can we, for example, make our meetings more efficient? How can we look at all the things that you're doing? That could actually be things that you don't have to do manually, but you could build a process around it to make yourself more efficient. For example, if I'm someone who writes a lot of introduction emails, let's just build a template so the next time I'm asked to do it, I just copy paste that template instead of writing a new introduction email.

If something asks him that, to something like, well why should all meetings be 30 minutes or 60 minutes? Well, how about we try a 15-minute meeting, a 20-minute meeting. Can we still get that stuff done? Like just to focus on how can we be more efficient and use our time to think more creatively about the future and how we can use that time to innovate instead of using that time on things that are not really efficient, has been a great learning and also seeing how we could really, irrespective of the industry. I mean, Airbnb is obviously in the travel industry, Facebook is sort of the media. Industry and how they view sort of technology to scale themselves and how you can use technology no matter which industry you are in to amplify your work.

What's Next? New Trends

Brian Ardinger: I think it's interesting you talked about some of the things you learned around Facebook or Airbnb around this idea of efficiency and optimization, and oftentimes we think about innovation as being something creation of new stuff, and you oftentimes think of the opposites of, you know, optimization is innovation. But you're saying like some of the things that you learned is really that culmination, or how do you create optimization that allows for additional innovation? It's quite an interesting take on it. The last thing I want to talk about is you've had a varied career and done a lot of different things. What's next on your horizon or what are some of the new trends that you're seeing out there that you're going to be trying to take advantage of in the future?

Zainab Ghadiyali: That's a good question. I think it's really interesting right now to see some of the things happening in the technology space. Obviously, I'm someone who's really interested in the travel industry and how we could use technology to do things that are there, whether it's trip planning, something that most people don't enjoy that part. Vacationing and sort of having to plan all the shots. It's not a matter of could actually. It's a matter of how are we going to use technology in that space. How are we going to use technology in this space of how can we get people to start getting more like connected or like getting more information in a way that is actually contextual and personalized to them is really an interesting space because we do have a lot of content online, but how do we find the right content? How do we serve it back to people who need it, who might not find it? I think content discovery is interesting.

How do we apply technology to climate change is extremely important and interesting? Another really interesting area is aging population and how everyone like we are just going to on average, live longer and what does that mean for the labor market? And how can we use technology because people that have 20-30 more years now of working time that they could use. How can we tap into that resource more efficiently and how can we use technology to help the aging population is, I think a really interesting space and a really important one given how everyone on average is going to live longer?

Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing some of your thoughts, and I'm very excited to see where you go in the future and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Zainab Ghadiyali: Yes, thank you for having me. Thanks Brian.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Paul Powers. Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Physna. They talk about innovation in the manufacturing space, 3-D data, trends Paul is seeing from the CES conference, and building a startup outside the Valley in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

To read the interview transcript, go to insideoutside.io

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Paul Powers. Paul is a Forbes 30 under 30, a graduate of Heidelberg University with a law degree. He is an astronomy and astrophysics alumni at Harvard. He's a serial entrepreneur, and his most recent startup company is Physna, which he started in 2015. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Paul Powers: Thank you.

Brian Ardinger: You've got a pretty extraordinary background. I wanted to have you on the show for a couple different reasons. One, because you're a young founder out there in the world building some interesting things. Your company Physna is in the manufacturing space, and we haven't had a lot of folks on the show to talk about manufacturing innovation. I thought it'd be a really good opportunity to start the conversation with, tell us a little bit about Physna and what does it do.

Physna and 3-D Data

Paul Powers: So Physna is short for physical DNA. And what we do is we take three-dimensional data and we normalize that down into something that software can actually read. And we help to bridge the gap between software applications that are tech space of two dimensional, and the real world essentially, which is obviously physical and three-dimensional. We do that through a series of proprietary algorithms and we applied machine learning to our technology so that we can actually not only break down and comprehend what we're looking at, but also make predictions about how humans might classify that, that might be used for, how you might make it, what are my costs, how's my performance, certain situations, et cetera. The most common use cases for the technology are to use it to help with engineering, to speed up the process so that you're not redesigning things from scratch and helps you make predictions about what you're trying to design and speed it up.

It helps in procurement by understanding what options you have. What suppliers might be able to provide the components that this thing has inside of it and who might be able to manufacture it, at what costs, et cetera. And then under the manufacturing side, understanding how to manufacture those, how it might turn out qualitatively, predicting quality, and a number of users out there who use it for a couple of other things marked miscellaneous use cases. We do have some work that we do together with the military, for example, to identify parts in the fields that aren't necessarily even a CAD model at that point. They can use AI or an image or even a 3-D scan to figure out what something is and more information about it.

Journey to Finding Patent Problems

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about how you got started in this space. My understanding is you started with a law degree and a law background. How did you get to designing software to attack the patent problems and everything else in the physical world?

Paul Powers: It's not obviously a very direct line between those two things. What happened was I studied law because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I thought that might be given me an edge or it might just be a different way of looking at starting a business. I focused on intellectual property. That was the closest thing to technology it felt like. It was cool. You got to see a lot of neat things, but I knew that being in that field bet, it was really easy to find a patent, like, you know violations of people's logos or music, texts written as a book or whatever. It's easy to find digital copies of that, that are not legally obtained. But as soon as it comes in those 3-D models, it was very difficult. We can never really predict violations that might be about to occur, and that really is because it was hard to even search for a 3-D model with a 3-D model or with other input.

They're hard to identify. They're hard to understand. There's so many file formats out there, and you certainly can't really find it without like a perfect match of a 3 D model, it seemed. We started the company for that because there's so much cost to that problem. It's trillions of dollars annually and global loss for patent violations. And we thought if we can tackle that problem, that a benefit to society, not just because you can make more money off of your ideas, but also because it helps promote research and development by lowering the likelihood of the theft of your IP. We launched the company, we tried out everything in the world we could find that had geometric search or shape search or anything like that that we thought would be relevant. And we tried out a lot of stuff and everything was extremely disappointing to us.

Everything in the market, we always keep an eye to trying out other tools, but they were very disappointing because they didn't really do what we thought. They weren't actually breaking the stuff down into 3-D. We found a way after a lot of time, but eventually we figured out our own way to break down through the models and to truly break them down so that you could find parts with a subsection. For example, let's say you have a screw and you want to use that to find a machine that it goes into. You can do that, or if you have half of a part, you can use that to find the rest of it. You can identify what's inside of the part even if you don't have data like this is the parent file these with the children's files, but you don't have to have that. We can figure that out.

Once we had that, we went out to conventions and started telling people about this technology, and very quickly we started hearing about all these other issues that existed that, frankly, I had no idea existed, right. That engineers, manufacturing, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, anyone who engineers something physical, you know, not a software engineer, their productivity is only 20% of what it should be. If you compare how effective software engineers are compared to engineers of physical goods, that's over a five to one ratio actually. That's because these tools are missing. They redesign things from scratch, etc. We also found issues in quality control and inspection automation, and even in healthcare, and all these other areas. And we got overwhelmed and realized that, wow, the reason that we're finding so many issues and people are coming to us with them, we weren't thinking of problems they were just showing up on our doorstep, very quickly and we realized that there was this big gap between the 2-D world of, software, where most innovation seems to take place and the physical world that we live in where most of our economy is actually based. And most software doesn't deal with the physical 3-D world in a 3-D form.

If you look at those top five companies in the U S right now, they're all tech companies. There's a lot of money being made in software, but software is actually a very small portion of our economy. The majority of it's still in physical goods and will be for as long as we are human physical beings. To bridge that gap you would think would be very tantalizing to these companies. But the technology gap is pretty significant, and less than 1% of software actually deals with 3-D data. And because of that, the software that is actually used for most of our economy is way behind the software that's used for things like social media and stuff like that. And we decided that because we had figured out this really cool way to approach this problem over a long time with a lot of effort, we thought, why don't we go ahead and change our business model of that so that we really bridge that gap versus just trying to solve IP in and of itself.

Sponsor: RSM

Brian Ardinger: Hey listeners. I wanted to pause this episode to talk about a new partner, RSM. In this fast-paced environment, you need an advisor who thinks ahead and rapidly responds to your challenges and changing needs, and RSM is that partner. As your business advisor, RSM will work with you to turn innovative ideas into reality. Go to RSMUS.com/io

Innovation in Manufacturing

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned manufacturing and the majority of the world's economies built on manufacturing and physical goods, and that. What are the trends that you're seeing when it comes to manufacturing innovation? You see a lot of innovation, a lot of talk about different industries that are being disrupted by innovation. How's that compare in the manufacturing space?

Paul Powers: Manufacturing is about to undergo what a lot of people would call the fourth industrial revolution. In Germany it's Industry 4.0. Right. Which is basically the digitalization of it. You can use that definition if you want. I think there's a more substantial change that's going to happen here in the coming years. I think we're going to be a big part of that, I hope. And that is the democratization and consumerization of physical innovation. Right. What I mean by that is if you think about the ability to design like an app or software, in the 1980s very few people knew how to code, and it was very hard. It was a small percentage of our population that did anything with the actual coding, and not many people would actually write software that other people would be using.

If you look at. 2020, right now everybody, if they want to, can get online and go to Code Academy or another website and learn how to code for free and very quickly figure out how to actually code applications, that your friends can start using. That same capability does not exist yet in manufacturing. If you have an idea for, let's say a mechanical watch, for example. First of all, you have the 3-D model, which is going to be really hard compared to a lot of other per suits. But let's say you create that 3-D model and it's perfect, and it's ready to go in every way, shape, and form. Well, it's still going to take you on average, a pretty long time I'd say over two years right now, before you've actually found all the distributors, suppliers, all the different pieces that have to go together to actually produce that watch. What if you could do that automatically? Now, 3-D printing is part of that, but you can't 3-D print an entire watch today, right. Because there's so many mechanical parts and they're all different materials. It's very complicated. You'd have to use the supply chain.

Well, the big trend that I think we're going to feel the most, you know, there's definitely small trends about machines and stuff like that, but I think what every, the average person's going to feel, and what's going to matter the most, is that people will, over time, start to be able to create things more simply. Work with existing data more easily, so if somebody designed a screw you don't have to redesign it and be able to quickly turn that idea into reality by simplifying that process, which right now is very manual. We're finding all these suppliers and how things go together. But artificial intelligence, let machine learning figure out how to do that. Automate the process for you and simplify that so that anyone, with just a little bit of training can innovate new products and have them manufactured for much less than now.

Because even though you might not have a $2 million, 3-D printer at home, that can make all the parts for a watch. It's pretty easy to imagine how, if there are large distribution centers, which we're already seeing with those kinds of machines that are really good at changing their settings for a new type of product on the fly. If you can order something from down the road that has the rest of the parts that you need, you could have that watch in a very short period of time, maybe within days or hours and at a fraction of the cost you'd see today.

Democratization of Manufacturing

Brian Ardinger: Right and the ability to prototype and build things and test things in the physical world. If you can even just speed that up a little bit, the ability, just like you see in software where you can test things and throw things up and see if there's a market available or whatever the case may be. That democratization is, I think, going to be quite impactful.

Paul Powers: A big part of what we're doing this year is we're going to be releasing a project we've been working on for a while. We haven't made a formal announcement of it yet. I wouldn't count this as one, but the project is called Thangs, T. H. A. N. G. S. I know that that's kind of a funny name, but it seems to work and all of the studies we've done, and that really is our project to try to do everything I said. Over the course of the year we're releasing features to automate that process, to be almost as straightforward for innovating parts and also simplifying supply chain like that outlined there.

Brian Ardinger: That's pretty crazy. I think you've just got back from CES. Anything you saw there that was interesting.

Paul Powers: I think there's a lot of stuff at CES that's worth talking about and looking at. I'm talking about a very, very large convention with a lot of different products, but I think is more important than any individual product that was on display was just how it reinforces that there are certain trends that are going to matter in this coming decade, which I think can be simplified into basically two categories.

One being artificial intelligence or machine learning. The other one being 5G, and the reason that those two are running matters so much and why those two I think are logical. And it's definitely confirmed that suspicion seeing the products that are on display there. Machine learning can do so much for you. I mean, it really helps to customize experiences for users and adds value in a way that would otherwise require lots of algorithmic input. You know, think about it, like if you wanted to figure out how to create the ideal prescription for a patient based off of body rate and all this other stuff. There'd be a lot of other rooms you have to write. You probably get it wrong, but with machine learning, there are ways that you could figure that out automatically and the more cases, the process is more accurate. It gets so it gets more accurate over time. And you can customize an application like that without having to actually write it up from scratch. And we're going to see so many use cases for that that just don't exist today. We already have a lot of machine learning and AI in our lives, but we'll see a lot more of it because of 5G.

5G is going to connect to everything better, right. So 5G is just much faster form of internet. The simplest version I can give is think of their internet on steroids, right. Much faster than what we're used to. And when you get to speed like that, that's what I still allow things to happen that weren't really possible before. You can have data being transferred mobilely, wirelessly, that in the past it would just be impossible. And that starts to mean that it's cheaper and more realistic to have more types of devices connected, which means there's more types of information that you have, which means there's more that machine money can learn from and learn for. So I think what we're going to see is that between those two areas of technology our lives are going to see a lot more physical devices being connected to the internet and experiences with and software, and maybe even within that hardware, software bridge there, they're going to become a lot more customized.

Building in the Midwest

Brian Ardinger: Paul, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk more about your company. And one of the interesting things about it, not only is it in manufacturing, you started the company in Cincinnati, Ohio, so in the Midwest, and obviously I'm a Midwest person here, and we talk a lot on the show about what it's like to build a company outside the Valley. Let's talk a little bit about what the Cincinnati startup scene's like and what it was like to build a company in the Midwest.

Paul Powers: Well, I lived in Germany for a long time. You mentioned that I graduated from Heidelberg. I lived in Germany. or over in Europe in general, for about 10 years. And when I moved back, or when I was going to move back to start this company, if you told me that I was moving back to Cincinnati, I would have laughed cause I was like, yeah, there's no way I'm moving back there. That's where I was born, and I thought there's no way I’m moving there. And I was 100% sure I was moving to San Francisco. I was looking for apartments there and everything. I thought for sure I'm going be in the Bay area. Because if you're going to start a company, that's where I going to go to succeed.

The more I read, the less I believe that. And the more I read, the more I'm realizing, Oh, well maybe I actually am going back. I wouldn't necessarily say that just Cincinnati specifically. There are, I mean, Columbus has an amazing ecosystem and we've got an office in Columbus now too. And there are other cities, many cities throughout the Midwest that have just great ecosystems that are starting to pop up. The reason that Silicon Valley made less sense, and keep in mind when you're flying over from Germany, it doesn't matter so much if you're flying to California or Ohio. Right. It's really based on hard data.

The reason why Silicon Valley became a thing, you know, it was largely because of Stanford University and also because it's called Silicon Valley, because back in the days before the cloud, you really need to be out there if you're going to have a large data center to have help setting it up and that's just where you would have to be essentially for practical reasons on the tech side. Nowadays we're so much further with technology and so much more as on the cloud that the arguments for why you have to move out there, they've really shifted to, that's where the money is, right. When people say you have to go to Silicon Valley, they don't talk about the server knowledge, there's so much, much more because of the access to capital, and that's still true, although that is starting to change a little bit.

Trends have started to show that a lot of the VCs out in the Valley area have started to look for companies that are not in the Valley area because the expenses are so high to start a company out there. And also, it breaks the first rule of business, which is always be close to the customer. If you're out in Silicon Valley and you're like in manufacturing like we are, for example, our areas, engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. So if you look at where the HQ of the companies doing that in the U S would be, that's in the Midwest, you know, it's the rust belt, that still has, and will have for a while, the center of gravity for manufacturing, engineering and supply chain. This is where you want to be, but costs are lower for one thing, but more importantly, you're closer to the customers. Out West, you're around a lot of tech companies.

If you're going to build a product for software companies, you probably should move out there. If you're building a product for non-software companies like we are, then you probably should not, just because it's better to be close to the customer physically. You can store stuff on the cloud now that you can get employees to work for you from abroad or remotely, that's fine. But when it comes to customers, especially if you're in B2B, you know, or even business the enterprise, you'd be surprised how often you still really have to meet with them to close certain types of deals. And there's something about that physical proximity. You know, even though we have Skype and you and I are doing this call remotely, there's still something to be said for being physically present. And so, it made sense for us because of that to be out here in the Midwest.

Physna’s Future

Brian Ardinger: Well, Paul, what's next for you and the company?

Paul Powers: We're focusing a lot on THANGS and creating this public platform that'll serve as the combination of Google, Get Hub and Amazon, but more specifically for 3-D models, right. Where it's got the ability to find 3-D models. You have the ability to collaborate in 3-D models, but also make your 3-D models private if you want, and you have the ability to use it for automating the procurement side of things. If you have an idea, being able to let the AI figure out for you who really needs to be involved in supplying those parts to you, what it should cost and figure out all the formalities and the logistics behind it. And let you just order it with a click of a button. That's something that is for us, a very big priority this year.

We're adding a lot of new technology that we've been working on for a while. A lot of, 2-D to 3-D. things like being able to search for complex model with pulling a subsection of a part of a picture. Being able to help 2-D image recognition through 3-D AI by understanding that a picture of the bottom left corner of something might actually correspond to a larger item and understanding scale and stuff like that. From a tech perspective, that's what we're focused on.

And then from a hiring perspective, we're bringing on some really, really world-class talent. We're bringing on some really all-star household names to really take this to the next level. And surprisingly enough, even though these people are from the West coast, moving to Ohio was not as big of a challenge as you might think.

Brian Ardinger: That's awesome. Well, Paul, thank you very much for being on the Inside Outside Innovation, sharing some of the insights that you had in this space, and I look forward to everything that's going on in the future.

Paul Powers: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

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Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Ward Sandler, cofounder of MemberSpace, a company that helps turn any part of a website into members-only. They talk about the no-code movement, what it takes to build a remote workforce, and all things entrepreneurship.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation.

To read the full transcript of this interview go to insideoutside.io.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me this week is Ward Sandler. Ward is the co-founder of MemberSpace. Welcome to the show Ward.

Ward Sandler: Hey Brian, thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the board. I actually got connected with you because I had written a blog post about the whole no-code movement and how there really are no more excuses that people can have about, I can't find developers. I can't find different ways to build my stuff. And I mentioned MemberSpace as one of those no code movement platforms out there that's making this democratization of innovation a little bit easier. I want to have you on the podcast to talk about this whole no-code movement.

Ward Sandler: We started MemberSpace before “no code” or #nocode was like really a thing. We've been around since 2015 and no code I'd say has come up more in like the last two years really. But that being said, we've always been really focused on non-technical entrepreneurs. Especially for what our software does, we allow you to turn your website, any part of your website into members only in a few clicks. Like that's what we do. And for a lot of folks, that's what they want, but they don't want the headache of having to hire a developer, dig into code or anything like that. So we've been quote unquote no code from the jump. And that's always been an ethos of ours, is we want to make this really easy for anyone to use.

Brian Ardinger: So tell me a little bit about MemberSpace and how did it get started and your journey as an entrepreneur.

Ward Sandler: We used to be a consulting company. We did everything from custom software or to eCommerce sites. Then we narrowed in on Squarespace just building, designing, and supporting Squarespace websites. Funnily enough, it was very specific, but it was a huge need. Lot of volume of customers. And from there we found that one of the biggest requested features was membership because Squarespace doesn't have it out of the box. So people wanted to have member only pages on their Squarespace site. We figured that out by visiting the Squarespace forum and sorting the list by most voted. And that was like one of the top features. And we read through the comments and basically realized, you know, there's no real good solution for that. So we built a real quick MVP in like a month or two launch that had great feedback and then kept iterating and adding features. And it's taken off since then and we've expanded outside of Squarespace. Now we're available on basically any website.

To read the full transcript of this interview go to insideoutside.io.

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memberspace.com - Link to the podcast in resource section
@wardsandler or @memberspace

If you want to learn more about the Inside Outside team, content, or services, check out insideoutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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This is a special bonus podcast episode with RSM's George Casey. George Casey is the Microsoft Innovation Leader and Leader of RSM's Technology Experience Center. RSM provides audit, tax, and consulting services to help middle market leaders succeed. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with George about RSM's Technology Experience Center, collaborative partners, innovation, and digital transformation.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside, a provider of research, events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation.

To read the interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: George, welcome to the show.

George Casey: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had a chance to meet a couple of weeks ago, and I had an opportunity to see firsthand what the RSM Technology Experience Center is all about. George, tell us who you are, what's your role at RSM, and then we can talk a little bit about the Experience Center.

George Casey: I've been with RSM about five years, but been with this kind of organization that joined RSM through acquisition for almost 20, so been doing this type of work for awhile. And my role at RSM, you described, I'm a partner with the firm and I lead this Microsoft innovation function, which is really helping customers understand from the innovation ecosystem or broad capability set what's possible? How can we look at blurring the lines between what we used to think of as systems or functions or technologies into an overall ecosystem or platform approach to solving business problems? And a lot of what we talk about isn't very technology focused. It's more around digital transformation and business transformation. And that's where the Technology Experience Center really comes into play in giving us a platform to host people and to innovate and ideate and think about real world problems and look around the corner.

RSM on YouTube - A playlist with 15 different videos that focus on technology highlights like AI, blockchain, and augmented reality.
RSM Technology Experience Center - Videos and case studies
RSM Innovation

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io Please subscribe and leave a 5-Star Review to help us connect with more innovators.

Learn More - If you want to learn more about Inside Outside Innovation's team, our content, our services, check out Insideoutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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Lori Bush is the co-founder and executive chairman of Solvasa. Prior to that, she was the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields, where she grew the company to over $1 billion in sales. She's had experience with Nu Skin, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena and Avon. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Lori about her 30 years of experience in the beauty and skincare space, entrepreneurship and her move towards integrated beauty.

Interview Transcript. To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lori Bush. Lori is the co-founder and executive chairman at Solvasa. Prior to that, she was the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields, where she grew the company to over $1 billion in sales. She's had experience with Nu Skin, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena and Avon, and we talk about her 30 years of experience in the beauty and skincare space, entrepreneurship and the move towards integrated beauty, pulling together beauty, mindfulness, and wellness. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is Lori Bush. Lori is the co-founder and executive chairman of Solvasa, an integrative beauty line, which really pulls together beauty, mind, and wellness. Lori, welcome to the show.

Lori Bush: Thank you, Brian. Humbled, honored to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because while I gave your current title, I'm very impressed with your background. Thirty plus years in the beauty space, and you have quite an impressive resume. Folks who are not as familiar with you. You were the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields. You grew that company to over $1 billion in sales. You were the President of Nu Skin. You have worked at Johnson & Johnson and Neutrogena, and you're chair of the board at Avon. You pretty much got it all covered. Startups, corporates, innovators. So I thought I'd start with the fact that you've had a career spanning a number of different years in an industry that's changed. What has happened over the last decade or so that's really changed the beauty industry and what are the things that are most impressive.

Lori Bush: A great question because when we were launching Rodan + Fields March 1, 2008, I was standing on a stage in front of about a hundred people, which reflecting on that is funny, because today Rodan + Fields fills stadiums basically with people for meetings and events. So at this point, I stood in front of the stage and I boldly proclaimed that five years from now, both beauty skincare and direct selling, we're going to look different than they look today, and the people in this room have an opportunity to watch it happen, wonder what happened, or be part of it. And as I was standing there saying it, what was going through my head is we had lofty goals, but we were a brand new startup effectively, doing a complete pivot from pulling out of department stores where the brand had actually been owned by Estee Lauder for a period of time and relaunching. And as I was standing on stage saying that my website was melting down, we were one of the first companies, in direct selling to really launch as a purely digital eCommerce transaction model, which we did for a number of reasons. And what was really an unexpected outcome of the Rodan + Fields experience was it wasn't even just about taking significant market share, which we were able to do to become the leading. Independent skincare brand, and then ultimately the company became the number one skincare brand in North America. We actually, and significantly grew the skincare market in the United States. Materially grew the skincare market. And a lot of that had to do with bringing the right channel strategy and being innovative in that channel strategy to the product value proposition and marrying the two and aligning them appropriately, in ways that were leveraging a lot of other things that were happening in the ecosystem around us at the time. Not the least of which, of course was social media.

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

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Audrey Crane is author of the new book, What CEOs Need to Know About Design: A business leader's guide to working with designers and a partner at Design Map. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Audrey about some of the trends in Design Thinking, how to hire better designers, and what are some of the differences she's seeing in the Midwest versus the Silicon Valley design scene.

Interview Transcript. (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Audrey Crane. Audrey is a partner at Design Map and author of the new book, What CEOs need to know about design: A business leader's guide to working with designers. We had a great conversation talking about some of the trends in Design Thinking, how to hire better designers, and what are some of the differences she's seeing in the Midwest versus the Silicon Valley design scene. Now on with the show. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Audrey Crane. Audrey is a partner at Design Map and author of a new book called What CEOs need to know about design. Audrey, welcome to the show.

Audrey Crane: Thank you so much Brian

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show because you've been recommended by half the people that I know in this design and lean startup space as a person I should have on the show to talk about what's going on. For folks who may not have heard of you, give us a little background on you and how you got into this design space and what's keeping you busy right now.

Audrey Crane: My background goes back a while, actually. I studied math in theater in college. I was actually in college when I saw the Mosaic browser for the first time. I was using muds and like old fashioned nerdy stuff like that. I had always worked in high tech though my father and my mother were both computer programmers and so my summer job was QA and stuff like that. I came out to California to act and got a day job at a little company called Netscape. So yeah, happily, most people have still heard of it. I'm still waiting for the day when some young person has not. I was there and I met Hugh Deverly, who was a huge influence on my life, a really big deal. He's not great at self-promoting, but a really big deal inside the design world, and he was a designer by trade and training and kind of showed me the world of design and marriage of right brain and left brain, really worked for me. It really resonated. When he left to start Deverly design office, I went with him and was incredibly lucky to be the first employee there. Was there for quite a while. I left and went internal and ran my own design team and then left again and joined Design Map as a partner nine years ago now. I head up the research arm of Design Map. Many people with lots of experience and skills there, but I pitch in there where I can and then do show up in client engagements when I'm helpful and try to go away when I'm not. That's my job.

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io Please subscribe and leave a 5-Star Review to help us get the IO podcast heard. Thank you!

What CEOs Need To Know About Design: A business leader's guide to working with designers

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Raz Razgaitis, co-founder and CEO of FloWater, talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about the disruption that's happening in the water business, what it's like to be working in a big company and move to a startup, and everything in between.

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we interviewed Raz Razgaitis. He is the co-founder and CEO of FloWater. We talk about the disruption that's happening in the water business, what it's like to be working in a big company, and move from there to a startup, and everything in between. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest today with me is Raz Razgaitis. He is the co founder and CEO of FloWater. Raz, welcome to the show.

Raz Razgaitis: Thanks Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board because you're trying to disrupt this new world of water. So let's start there and talk a little bit about FloWater.

Raz Razgaitis: Well, Brian, our whole mantra is really around changing the way the world drinks water. The foundation of our company is to provide decentralized distributed water purification wherever consumers work, rest and play. So that they can have what we believe is the world's best tasting water, on tap, wherever they are. And the purpose behind that is to completely eradicate, not only single use plastic water bottles, which are the new environmental cigarette, but also to provide a pathway to eliminate all packaged water. Because not only does it end up in oceans, lakes, rivers, and landfills. For example, right now, Americans are drinking the equivalent of two credit cards worth of plastics. Microplastics. Wow.

Every month as a result of their tap and bottled water. It's not just bottled water, but they're actually drinking their bottled water that's in now microplastics in their tap water. Exactly. We're literally now drinking our plastics, and the whole idea of our company is to completely eradicate that. And what we're doing is we've built a piece of technology and a piece of hardware that right now, it's primarily available to businesses and companies and organizations. And so that's generally hotels, schools, corporations, gyms, retailers, where we provide a FloWater refill station that has a very powerful purification system in it, that takes any tap water effectively anywhere in the world and turns it into something that will be better tasting than your favorite bottled water brand. But it's available in a refillable format so that you are reusing either a multiuse bottle or a refillable bottle, or even a single use bottle that you're refilling. So if you end up having to buy a single use plastic water bottle, but you get to refill that five times, we've just seen an 80% reduction in the usage of single use packaging, which is a great thing.

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io Please subscribe and leave a 5-Star Review to help us get the IO podcast heard. Thank you!

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Stuart Willson is the CEO and founder of Radicle, a research and advisory company that has worked with great companies like Lego, Diageo, Proctor and Gamble, and more. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside founder talks with Stuart about the new trends in the world of research, how companies are using information and data to make better decisions, and about the new venture model that companies like Prehype are using to create startups from scratch.

Interview Transcript - To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stuart Willson. Stuart is the CEO and founder of a company called Radicle. It's a research and advisory company that has worked with great companies like Lego, Diageo, Proctor and Gamble, and more. In our interview, you'll hear some insights about the new trends in the world of research, how companies are using information and data to make better decisions, and we talk a lot about what's the new venture model that companies like Prehype are using to create new startups from scratch. Have a listen.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of inside, outside innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest with us today is Stuart Willson. He is the cofounder and CEO of Radicle, a new research and advisory business. He's here to talk about some of the changes and trends that he's seeing. Stuart, welcome to the show.

Stuart Wilson: Thank you for having me.

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you back. You were at the IO Summit and you had a great talk about some of the new trends that you're seeing. Before we jump into that and talking about Radicle, I want to talk about how you got into the innovation space cause it's a little bit different than your traditional entrepreneur.

Stuart Wilson: I like to say I have a fairly nontraditional background relative to my peers and by which, I mean I had a pretty traditional background for most of my career. I worked and investment banking out of college. I went and got my MBA and then I was looking for a job where I've been learning a lot and be challenged and get paid to be right. And I ended up at a hedge fund and for 11 years. I was an investor investing everything from media to ski resorts and ultimately starting my own fund with a partner.

But then as is often the case in New York, my circle of friends shifted somewhat and I was introduced to and became friends with a group of people that included folks like Ben Leventhal who just sold Resy to Amex and my friend Josh Abramson, who had started College Humor, friends who were at places like Spark and Union Square, and I was the only person sitting up on Park Avenue, looking at a Bloomberg machine. And the more time I spent with them and the more I listen to what they're doing, the more I felt like I was really wasting my time and that there was this transformation happening as waves of new technologies created opportunities and democratized business building.

But I wasn't participating in that and I wasn't really doing anything that I felt was driving value or utility for our customer. And so I decided to leave and I was introduced to Henrik Berglin, who started the incubator Prehype. And cofounded Bark, a dog focused startup, formerly Bark box. I told him what I wanted to do, which was to build something like pretty abstract.

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

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Tim Campos, former CIO of Facebook, is now founder and CEO of Woven, a startup tackling the world of calendaring. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder had a chance to talk with Tim about the future of innovation, how IT infrastructure has changed, what it's like to work in a high growth startup, and what it's like to rebuild a company from scratch.

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io )

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tim Campos, the former CIO of Facebook and new entrepreneur with a company called Woven that is tackling the whole world of calendaring. We had a chance to talk about the future of innovation, how IT infrastructure has changed, what it's like to work in a high growth startup, and then what it's like to rebuild a company from scratch. Inside Outside innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO. A provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today is Tim Campos. He is the former CIO at Facebook from 2010 to 2016 he was a VP of it at semiconductor company, KLA-Tencor, and he has recently jumped back into the startup scene with his own company called Woven. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Campos: Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board because I think you can speak to a lot of the things that our audience is interested in hearing about. Everything from startups to corporate innovation, and you seem to have played a role in a variety of those different types of spaces and are continuing to do so. Let's start in the Facebook world. How you got there and what's it like to work with a high-growth company when you have to double the productivity of employees when they're growing at 20 X growth rate.

Tim Campos: It gets crazy enough just to double the number of employees. And to do that time and time again every year. Yeah, so I got to Facebook. It was really a big culmination of a lot of aspects in my career. When I started, I was an engineer, software engineer, and I've always loved technology and building. I spent the first half of my career in software engineering and then got exposed to IT at a startup when I was working in a software as a service company. And that really taught me. Two things. One, what you build and what people use those different perspectives and technology as you do that. But also there's a business around technology and that's really what got me interested in information technology and how I became CIO. And ultimately that landed me at Facebook. But my life has very much been defined by building things that help make people more productive, help people get more stuff done and that taken care of steer through what I'm doing today with Woven mind startup as a productivity software company and this is what we exist to do, is help people spend time on what matters most.

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, IO Founder, sat down with Katherine Radeka, author of the new book, High Velocity Innovation. They talk about innovation and Agile and specifically how it fits into the hardware space, why everyone needs to be involved in the innovation process, and then most importantly, how companies can better align their innovation efforts with their core business.

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io.)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Katherine Radeka. She is the executive director of the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute and author of the new book High Velocity Innovation: How to get your best ideas to market faster. Welcome to the show, Katherine.

Katherine Radeka: Thank you. Innovation Journey

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on to talk about your new book. You have a varied background. I want to talk a little bit about the differences between innovating in the real world versus in the software world. Why don't we give our audience a little bit of background about how you got involved in innovation?

Katherine Radeka: I was working for Hewlett Packard and their inkjet printer division, and I made the transition to working with the blended teams that it takes to put together a printer is a printer, is a blend of the hardware and the ink cartridges and the firmware and the software drivers. And so program manager in that space has to be familiar with all of those different disciplines. What I learned very early on was that hardware is hard. That the reason why we were always being told to fix things in software is that once they had released something to the manufacturing environment, it was very, very expensive thing to fix. That became a passion for me, was to figure out how do we deliver hardware more effectively? How do we eliminate the problems that tend to arise in late development? That tend to make hardware programs disappointing. Either late or if they can't be late, they might be down scope, so they're disappointing. Or they might cost too much. To try to figure out how we could make it so that a person that had a great idea for a new physical thing, a new tangible thing, could be just as successful with innovation as a person that has an idea for new software.

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, IO Founder, sat down with Brendan Synnott, a serial entrepreneur, having cofounded companies like Bear Naked, which he sold to Kellogg, Evol Foods, and now Pact, an e-commerce organic fashion brand. In this interview we talked about Brendan's opportunity to become an entrepreneur early on in his life, how he grew his company from zero to sell to a major corporation, and how he thinks about creating new innovations and new spaces.

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io.)
Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sat down with Brendan Synnott. Brendan is a serial entrepreneur, having cofounded companies like Bear Naked, which he sold to Kellogg. He's found companies like Evol Foods, and he's now working at Pact, a brand-new e-commerce fashion brand. In this interview we talked about Brendan's opportunity to become an entrepreneur early on in his life. How he grew his company from zero to sell it to a major corporation. And how he thinks about creating new innovations and new spaces.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Brendan Synnott. He is a serial entrepreneur having cofounded the companies like Bear Naked Granola, which he sold to Kellogg. He started companies with Evol Foods, pet companies, candy businesses, and now he's in the fashion space with a company called Pact. Welcome to the show Brendan.

Brendan Synnott: Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to talking about innovation. It's my favorite subject in business.

Brian Ardinger: You have got a lot to talk about and you've had a very eclectic career over the course of the last decade or so, starting and forming businesses that have gone from nothing to something. Have you always been an entrepreneur and what led you to the path of entrepreneurship?

Brendan Synnott: I think I've always had that spirit in me. I was blessed by having two grandfathers that both had started their own businesses. One was a printing brokerage and one was a engineering firm. Both small businesses, but I grew up with that culture within my family about saying, you can do what you want. You can see it go after it. And then that led me to always starting little businesses growing up. I remember going to the Costco when I was a kid and buying 150 lemon heads or you know, for $8 and then go sell them on the street. Or go sell them in school or whatever it may be. And I had a number of businesses before I hit my first big one. But it was something that I was always just like, ah, let's go try it, let's go get after it. let's go see what happens.

Brian Ardinger: I think you got your big break when you've cofounded Bear Naked in the granola space and you eventually sold that to Kellogg. What were some of the early lessons of entrepreneurship that you can share with our audience?

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io.

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Gleb Tsipursky, Author of Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Avoid Terrible Advice, Cognitive Biases, and Poor Decisions). They discuss bad business decisions, why they go wrong, emotions impacting decision making, making best case plans, iterative planning, great leaders, and high-impact shortcuts

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io.)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Gleb Tsipursky, he is a cognitive neuroscientist, an expert on behavioral economics and decision making. He runs a company called Disaster Avoidance Experts. He's worked with companies like Aflac and IBM and Honda, Wells Fargo, and many, many others. Welcome to the show Gleb.

Gleb Tsipursky: Thank you so much for having me on, Brian. It's a pleasure.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because you've got a brand-new book out called Never go with your gut: How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters, and it's also very pertinent to our audience. This whole world of innovation and how do you make decisions in a world that's constantly changing. Let's start off with a little bit of background about yourself.

Gleb Tsipursky: I was fascinated by how my parents made some bad decisions with each other, and it got me fascinated in decision making. You know, my dad, he was a real estate agent, so he had the variable income and he hid some money from my mom and bought a house on the side. And when she found out she was really pissed. And that led to a big blowout fight, which led to them separating for a while and then they got back together. But you can never really rebuild the trust again. And then when I was growing older, I came of age. In 1999 is when I was 18 and all the dotcoms were booming. WebVan, Pets.com and so on. All of these businesses, which. By the time I was 21 they all went bust. And that was really frustrating for me as someone who was observing it and seeing all these people who are supposedly smart, wealthy people, investing ordinary citizens, you know, people whose retirement went down the drains when things went bust. And I'm someone who really cares about people. I have utilitarian values. I want the most good for the most number. And so that's really motivated me to study decision making. What causes people to make bad decisions. What caused them to make good decisions and how we as individuals, leaders, investors, innovators, can make better decisions going forward. Why Decisions Go Wrong

Brian Ardinger: Why do decisions go wrong?

Gleb Tsipursky: The most important reason why decisions go wrong is that we don't notice how our emotions influence our decisions. The research on this topic and cognitive neuroscience shows that our emotions drive about 80 to 90% of our decision making, and we don't realize how much we're driven by our emotions. People make their decisions often based on their best reactions. They feel something is right and therefore they do it. They feel this information is true and therefore they believe it.

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

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As one of Inside Outside's most listened to podcasts of 2019, enjoy our interview with Jeff Gothelf. It was originally published on July 16, 2019. Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about building a culture of innovation.

Key Ideas
- Shifting from outputs to outcomes.
- Changing incentives.
- Find the person and team with the political capital to prove out the validity and scalability.
- Reward learning in a way that focuses on ideas that are likely to succeed.
- Incentivize learning and being transparent.
- Story telling and marketing of efforts.
- Overcoming national cultural traits.
- Language and ideas are universal, but hard to implement.
- Failure of the Corporate Innovation Lab. Create an innovation path.

For More Information

For more information, check out Jeffgothelf.com.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:
Ep. 37 – Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf, authors of “Sense and Respond”
Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres w/ Product Talk Ep. 103 – Andi Plantenberg on Entrepreneurial Capabilities in Teams
Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE at Insideoutside.io

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As one of Inside Outside's most listened to podcasts of 2019, enjoy our interview with Olivia O'Sullivan of Acceleprise. It was originally published on June 18, 2019.

Olivia O'Sullivan is the Head of Corporate Engagement at Acceleprise, a B2B SaaS accelerator. Accelerprise invests in early-tech companies building enterprise technology. Olivia's focus is on mid-market and enterprise companies interested in collaborations with startups. Her background includes work in advertising and on product and innovation teams for McDonald's and Dow Jones. Olivia spoke with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about corporate/startup matchmaking, trends and Acceleprise's future.

Key factors in selecting startups include:
- Understanding the founding team. Can they solve the challenge?
- Traction and product market fit. Want to accelerate growth.
- Thresholds and levels of expectations.
- Collaboration on the product. Emphasis on the initial period where you make introductions. The missing piece is how to transition into providing impact.
- Make sure two groups of people are set up to participate with each other and engage in a partnership.
- Provide long-term strategic support.
- Innovation doesn’t happen in a silo. Need a long-term strategy. Participate in the ecosystem before you see change. Corporations are in different places in innovation
- Companies wanting roundtables and market intelligence.
- Companies with established processes and venture teams.

New Trends
- Ten years ago, there were lots of corporate accelerators. Now a lot of established independent accelerators doing great work.
- Now more meaningful partnership doing co-collaboration with startups.
- Financial services companies are partnering with startups.
- Health tech
- Unlocking the power of data in the health world. What are the core skills for entrepreneurs?
- Long-term vision and steps to get there.
- Someone who will get the work done to get over hurdles.
- People who are connectors on the corporate innovation side. What’s next for Acceleprise
- Kick off upcoming programs in SF and NY
- Investing in another 20 companies. Already invested in over 100.
- Opening office in Toronto.

For More Information

For more information on Acceleprise or to connect with Olivia check out https://acceleprise.vc

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:
Ep. 139 – Northwestern Mutual’s Vivek Bedi on Digital Transformation in the Financial Industry
Ep. 137 – Deloitte’s Michael Frankel on Growth, Hybrid Talent & Corporate/Startup Collaboration
Ep. 127 – Vanguard & CEC’s John Buhl on Lean Startup at Scale

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Jennifer Brown, Author of How to be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive and host of the podcast The Will to Change. They discuss talent recruitment and retention, approachable diversity and inclusion, leadership practice, well-intended obstacles, case studies, and recognizing biases for AI.

Interview Transcript (to read the transcript go to insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is Jennifer Brown. Jennifer is a leading diversity and inclusion expert. She's host of her own podcast called The Will to Change, and I wanted to have her on because she's an author of a new book called How to be an Inclusive Leader. Welcome to the show, Jennifer.

Jennifer Brown: Thanks so much, Brian, I'm happy to be here.

Brian Ardinger: The topic of talent and diverse talent, especially when you're talking about innovation that comes up over and over again with our audience. Let's first talk about your background. Then we can talk about the book. Talent recruitment and Retention Jennifer Brown: My background is eclectic. A lot of people that do this work had winding roads. We like to laugh about the fact that there's not a lot of professional degrees to study diversity, equity, and inclusion. I was an opera singer and I ended up having to leave the field because my voice kept getting injured and I found my way to the world of leadership development because as a performer it was clear I wanted to be on the stage and needed to be on the stage, and so I found my way to become a corporate trainer. I eventually got a second master's in HR, change management, organizational development. I was an HR professional internally for awhile. And then I really got the itch too, worked for myself, and also be able to have the freedom and the agency to tell the truth as a sort of third party. And that was all 13 years ago. So since then, I've had my own company. I've built my team. We have about 20 to 25 folks. Today we consult mainly large organizations. Big household name kind of companies on their diversity and inclusion strategies. And within that, there's training services that we provide. We work on affinity groups and we do consult on talent, both the recruitment of that talent and also importantly, the retention of that talent, which honestly is in many ways where the rubber hits the road. It's sort of, if you can get them in the door, can you keep them question, but I'm also a member of the LGBTQ community, so I have my own powerful diversity stories as a woman in business.

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on the show to talk about the book, because unlike a lot of diversity books out there, it felt very approachable. It set the stage that, Hey, you're probably gonna mess up with this stuff as you're trying to learn it, and that's okay. The topic of diversity and inclusion is sensitive for whatever reason, and you laid it out there like, Hey. That's okay to feel awkward or not okay with all of this at the very beginning, as you grow your skillset and grow throughout that. Why did you try to write a book and how did you come about bringing this topic together?

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Gregg Garrett, Managing Director of CGS and co-author of Competing in the Connecting World: The Future of Your Disruptive Industry is Already Here. They discuss innovation both inside and outside, disruptive forces, ecosystem commanders, maturing models, and leadership skills.

Interview Transcript (to read the transcript go to insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. I want to welcome again, Greg Garrett. He is the MD at CGS advisors. He's a coauthor of a new book called Competing in the Connecting World: The Future of Your Disruptive Industry is Already Here. Welcome back, Greg, to the show.

Gregg Garrett: Hey Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: It's been a couple of years since we talked last. Obviously that's a long time in this world of innovation, so I want to get you back on to talk about some of the things that you've been doing. The new book that you've got out called Competing in the Connecting world. Let's start there. Give the audience a little background, what you were doing and then how you got to this book.

Gregg Garrett: Yeah, so the book is a culmination of experience over probably decades really, but about six years ago. I started teaching a course at a university here in Michigan called Oakland University, and they asked me to develop this course and we called it competing in the connecting world because I was noisy in an advisory session one time and said, are we really preparing students and future leaders to compete in this connecting world, in this future world? Are we just doing more of the same? They said, well, we probably aren't, or we could do it differently. Could you help us to develop the course? Taught it for a few years. This is an MBA and graduate engineering course and realize there's really very little written. A lot in the media world and article world, but very little written formally around it. So my coauthor, Dr. Warren Ritchie and I grabbed a lot of what we were teaching in the classroom, a little bit while we were speaking a publicly, and also what we've been consulting on, living ourselves around digital and transformation in general, and put it in a book.

Brian Ardinger: So let's unpack that a little bit and give our audience a background about yourself. You've done a lot of time in Fortune 100 world as an executive. You've done a lot of consulting and investing in that. So you've seen a lot from both sides of the puzzle, both inside organizations and outside of organizations. What made you decide that this was a topic that you wanted to dig into and and what have you learned?

Gregg Garrett: Yeah, so you've got the history right. Bunch of years with large firms, and then the last nine years being a very small firm, 20 person boutique transformation organization, working back with some of those large firms, but then also working with the medium size and scaling. And do a lot of mentoring inside of different accelerators and whatnot. So I've got one foot in each of those camps, the startup, the scale-up world, and then the large entity trying to transform world.

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Aaron Hawkins, former Head of Global Prime, now Whole Foods and Fresh Last Mile Delivery Strategy, at Amazon. And currently the VP of Digital Product at Northwestern Mutual. They discuss eCommerce retail at Kohl's and Amazon, drop shipping, customer experience, PR-FAQ, customer truisms, financial services at Northwestern Mutual, and Agile.

Interview Transcript (Read the transcript at insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we are recording live at the Fall Experiment conference here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.And with me today is Aaron Hawkins. He is the former head of Global Prime now Whole Foods and Fresh Last Mile Delivery Strategy at Amazon. And he's now currently the VP of Digital Product at Northwestern Mutual. Welcome to the show Aaron.

Aaron Hawkins: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm super excited to have you on the show for a couple of different reasons. One, you've been in this space of innovation, obviously working for Amazon in the retail space, and all the disruption that's going on. Love to talk a little bit more about your experiences there, and then obviously you're now to a new role, moving back to the Midwest, where you're from. Let's start the conversation with talking a little bit about your background and how did you get into innovation.

Aaron Hawkins: Yes, my background is that I really have been permanently in eCommerce retail my whole career. I started at Kohl's working for their website, and when I joined Kohl's, they were about a $15.5 billion retail business and that was primarily through their stores and their website was doing about $140 million at the time. When I joined it, it was way under penetrated and they were looking to expand and I sort of just lucked out and got an opportunity to really start up in a scrappy kind of pilot mode, a drop ship program, which is a direct to consumer model where they leverage suppliers and manufacturers and distributors capabilities to ship in individual units to end consumers. And it was a great opportunity for Kohl's to expand because it was pretty low capital investment on their part. And so piloted a program there in 2007. And that really grew.

I think by the time I left Kohl's to go to Amazon, their website had grown to about $1.7 billion. And so it was basically doubling itself every two years, which was incredible growth. And that really afforded me the opportunity to go to Amazon and work for their North America drop ship program, which was really how they got started. They started drop shipping books way back in 1995 and so it was a pretty mature program, but it had gotten a little stale. And so they brought me in to think about ways to refresh it a little bit and also to start leveraging some of their fulfillment capabilities that they had developed over time and you know, two day prime shipping had been a pretty well established thing at that point. I think they had 55 fulfillment centers by the time I joined.

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Swetha PB, Head of Product at Brilliant Hire, an SAP startup. They discuss hiring screening, SAP support, innovation talent, and building a startup within a large company.

Interview Transcript (Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io)

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and we have another amazing guest. Live today from the Fall Experiment conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with us today is Swetha PB from Brilliant hire. Welcome to the show.

Swetha PB: Hi everyone.

Brian Ardinger: Swetha thanks for coming out. You are with a company called Brilliant Hire, Head of Product, and Brilliant Hire is a startup, but it's an interesting startup because it's spun out of SAP, which is a large corporation. So we want to talk a little bit about that particular process, but before we dig into that, let's talk a little bit about how you got involved in innovation in the first place.

Swetha PB: Yeah, definitely. So since college days innovation or problem solving and trying to figure out creative ways of doing things with something that interested me a lot and being part of SAP, there are a lot of opportunities being hackathons or a lot of different ways that we could explore that part of us. And I think that was what brought us together even to start this brilliant hire and what it is today.

Brian Ardinger: Tell the audience a little bit about what Brilliant Hire is all about.

Swetha PB: Brilliant Hire is a screening as a service. We provide a SaaS based software that helps reduce the time and effort involved in the hiring process in an unbiased manner. We all know that hiring is broken and we hear to solve the first part of it by, you know, what do using your time, effort involved in that.

Brian Ardinger: How did it come about that you wanted to try to solve this particular problem and how did SAP become involved in this?

Swetha PB: So that's a very interesting part of our journey. It came out of what is called today in actual terminology, as user innovation. So I and my colleagues, the two other co founders of Brilliant Hire, would ask to take part in interviews. We were asked to scale a team from four to 40 all in a month. So that was a challenge for us. So we had to go on weekends. This is all back in India. Go on weekends, take interviews for these roles. And what made us realize, though we were spending so much time interviewing candidates, only 30% were going into the next round of interviews. There's a 70% rejection rate right there. So this kind of shocked us. We started one like, you know, explore, is this a problem just with us, just within our company or is it present over the, you know, all industries. That's what we tried to solve and we started on, we started to explore, we started talking to lot more recruiters. We did a lot of research and understood, yeah, this is a problem all around and hiring is clearly broken. And that got us excited and we're like, okay, let's see how we solve the problem. And inside SAP, there are a lot of hackathons that keep happening. And good for us that one of the hackathons hired smart HR as the topics. So it was a great time for us to like, the problem that we faced, how do we solve it?

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Nancy Wang, Head of Product at AWS Data Protection and Founder of Advancing Women in Product (AWIP). Brian and Nancy talk about women in tech, a Midwest AWIP chapter, mentors, diversity, and product development.

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products launched new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week will give you a front-row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends and collaborative Innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always we have another amazing guest. This week we are live from the Fall Experiment conference here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And today with me on the show is Nancy Wang, head of product AWS data protection. She was formerly with Google and she's the founder and CEO of a nonprofit called advancing women in product. Welcome to the show.

Nancy Wang: Thank you Brian. Thank you for having me here. As some of you may know Wisconsin is where I grew up. So I grew up in a small town in Upper Northwestern Wisconsin called Menominee and it's there that I grew in love with the midwestern lifestyle. And also with the Midwestern culture. So part of me working out in the west coast and coming here is that love to bring more of the West Coast mentality in Silicon Valley entrepreneurship to the Midwest area Brian Ardinger: You've been doing it for a number of years. So you've got broad experience of building products for some of the biggest and best companies in the world, Google and now you're working at Amazon. But one of the key aspects of why I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about your nonprofit and the idea of how do you create a more diverse tech environment? Let's talk a little bit about your nonprofit. How did it come about and what is all about?

Nancy Wang: I founded Advancing Women in Product or AWIP for short in 2017. And the reason behind that was, you know, I found myself as one of the only woman in the room. Even though I had a great community of male mentors and sponsors and also managers who moved me forward in my career. I wanted that touch in connection with a female who I could look up to and so that was really the idea and the mission behind founding AWIP was that I wanted other women in the Next Generation not to have the same diversity challenges as I faced moving forward in my career whether it was starting out at the US government working for the Department of Health and Human Services. or moving to Google, then a venture backed startup and now Amazon. So part of our mission is to create skills-based workshops, as well as create Circles of executive mentorship, where our 12,500 strong community can come together and really Advance their careers, because seeing is believing. And I firmly believe in that when you see folks you identify with, whether that's gender and other characteristics, you then believe that you can get there as well so change for a AWIP starts at the very top. So we work with our community of ambassadors, who are. Executives in various fields to come together and either create policies or pipelines to make sure that women are well represented in the highest levels of tech leadership.

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Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Max Fergus, Founder and CEO of LUM, a music streaming app rooted in the discovery of emerging music. Brian and Max discuss disruption, entrepreneurship, trends, content creation, building a team, and corporate startup collaboration.

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.IO a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products launched new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week will give you a front-row seat to the latest Thinking, Tools, tactics, and Trends and collaborative Innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. We are excited to be live here from Milwaukee at Fall Experiment today. We have another amazing a guest Max Fergus. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Lum. Welcome to the show Max.

Max Fergus: Thank you so much. Brian looking forward to it.

Brian Ardinger: Let's get started. You've just got off stage to talk a little bit about your business and some of the new disruptions that are going on in the music industry. Let's start there. Tell me a little bit about Lum and what are you seeing in this crowded space of music?

Max Fergus: You know the truth is that when most people talk about music disruption, they write it off right away. There's a lot of corpses in the music industry, especially when it comes to emerging music. We've seen a lot of companies over the last five years try to create what a lot of people would call Spotify clones that just focus on emerging music. But the truth is that for the large part corporate and mainstream music is better than emerging music. If we are just trying to give these emerging artist a better chance to survive, if we give them the average fan or the end user the same experience that they're going to get on Spotify and try to compete with algorithms that none of us can compete with, we're not going to be able to do anything for the fan and we're surely not going to help the artist. So the truth is and what Lum is rooted in is looking at the technology that exists all around the world that's currently empowering content creators. That use streaming technology and putting that technology into music streaming for the first time, and that's really what Loom is all about.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about your background. So as a Founder, it's always interesting to me to have an interview with entrepreneur and say how did they get to this space? I know you have a diverse background you spent some time in China, I did as well, and I'm interested in finding out a little bit about how that nugget of the problem that you saw out there and and the experiences that you brought to the table, gave you the decision to say, let's start this company.

Max Fergus: Yeah, the truth is that most people think that when you start a company in college you either start it around booze or music? And so we already had a little bit of a disadvantage there because people automatically assume that we were starting another College startup, especially coming from a place like Madison in which case booze and music are both very prevalent. But the truth is that we didn't start Lum. With the understanding that we were going to do music right away. We looked at industries that were growing rapidly like streaming like music streaming and made our decision based off the ones that were the most likely to be disrupted and music streaming was really powerful because it hasn't just been growing really really far in the past. But it's growing exceptionally fast right now and it's going to grow even more so over the next 10 years

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Flavio Lobato of Ikove Capital. Ikove is a venture development company founded to pursue early-stage investments with an emphasis on technology commercialization. Brian and Flavio discuss investing in the Midwest, identifying and validating high-impact technologies, bridging the gap between R&D and VC funded rounds, and innovation talent.

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of insideOutside.IO a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products launched new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week will give you a front-row seat to the latest Thinking, Tools, tactics, and Trends and collaborative Innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always we have another amazing guest Flavio Lobato. He is a co-founder and principal at Eco of capital. Welcome to the show

Flavio Lobato: Hey, Brian, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to talk to you because, couple different things. You've been in the space for a bit of time and this new model around Venture development rather than a kind of venture capital. I really wanted to dig in on this particular episode. Maybe for the audience, let's start with a little bit about your background and a little bit about Eco Capital. Flavio Lobato: I'm originally from Brazil. I've been in the states for 35 plus years really begin my career in Investment Management Investment Banking back in the 90s after business school, working at places like Goldman Sachs, Credit Swiss. And then really my career focus quite heavily on alternative Investments and hedge funds. I launched a very successful alternative investment shop in Switzerland called Swiss Capital Group, which was a part of a very sizable fund of hedge funds Liongate Capital that eventually sold to a large insurance company. Really after 25 plus years in both traditionsal and alternative spaces. Me and my partners Adolpho Balazi, Rodolfo Bellesi, John D'Orazio, Dr. Rob Lee and David Moritz decided to put together IKove Capital to take advantage of what's happening in technology commercialization and adventure as a whole

Brian Ardinger: Excellent and my understanding is you're five years old. You probably invested in 14 startups in the Stem, Medtech, Agritech vertical and you’re based in the Midwest where we are as well. I want to talk a little bit about investing in particular markets Like the Midwest is different. Obviously investing in particular markets like med tech or ag tech and that are different. So what are some of the things that you're seeing that set you apart and set the ecosystem apart in the Midwest versus some of the tech hubs.

Flavio Lobato: What we do is we actually go directly to the source of innovation and we partner with research institutions like Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio where we identify and vet technology that's been in development through their research programs. And once we identify a technology that we really like and that and go through that process we go out and build teams around IT technology and spin them off as independent companies. What's unique about what we do is that we identified and we saw that about 25% of the US research budget, which is about 70 billion dollars invested each year to universities to front their R&D. Very little of that less than 1% of that amount is actually invested in commercialization of these Technologies.

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Dr. Nada Sanders is a Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at Northeastern University and co-author of The Humachine: Humankind, Machines, and the Future of Enterprise. Dr. Sanders talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about Humachines and the implications for the future of business.

Key Points:

Humachine - Emerging forms of enterprise. Combines human qualities (creativity, judgment, and intuition) with machines (economies of scale, AI, artificial processing, etc.). What are the capabilities?
The key difference is the human resource element in the tech era. Some will wait and see what tech is doing. Others are using tech as plug and play. Neither will work. Move towards superhuman enterprise management. The interplay between tech, people, and processes.
Tactics: How can you determine where AI can help? Don’t need all tech. Understand your strategy. Who are you and what are you trying to do.
Data: People don’t know what to ask of it. What questions do you need to answer?
AI is about how do you use it, not the tech.
Smaller companies leverage human resources and leverage the questions asked. Walmart was an industry leader.
Capabilities in silos. Systems need to be linked together.
How can organizational leaders see the human side? Period of lifelong learning. We will see repetitive jobs go away. Important areas need human communication. Cultivate in the workforce.
Systems Thinking: Coders don’t always thrive in systems or with communication.

For More Information

For more information about Dr. Nada Sanders connect with her on LinkedIn or go to the https://thehumachinebook.com. Check out Dr Sander's book on Amazon.

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Ben Yoskovitz is the Founding Partner at Highline BETA, a startup co-creation company. He is also Co-Author of Lean Analytics and a former VP of VarageSale and GoInstant, which sold to Salesforce. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside innovation Founder, talks with Ben about corporate-startup collaboration.

Ben started his first company in 1996 during University, where he got into tech and entrepreneurship. Since that time, he founded several other companies, ran products, and started one of the first accelerators in Canada called Year 1 labs. Ben applied the Lean Startup methodology to the companies they invested in, then wrote the book Lean Analytics. Soon he began angel investing and finally launched Highline BETA.

Highline BETA Highline BETA believes by working with big companies, they can build better startups. Their service arm works with big companies to identify opportunities. Their fund arm finances them. This strategy can share risk. The corporate side realizes the big model is unlikely to survive. They must diversify. Outside the valley, startups think more about the business model and problems, which makes this collaboration an excellent fit. Highline BETA doesn’t assume they have all the ideas. Uses signals from inside of big companies of what they need, and has startups use this talent and resources from big companies.

Coming to IO Summit. Speaking on Startup + Corporate Collaboration. What are the trends? Highline BETA is a commercial deal accelerator. Big companies with little companies in pilots. When they see pilots scaling, that’s a good sign. How do you navigate startups working with Corporates early? If startups need product and market and aren’t established, it’s tough to partner with corporates. Have to be ready for the relationship. Accelerators can provide the right interface with deal terms and expectations. Corporate Venture Capital - pros and cons. What’s the exchange of value becomes very important - Data, customers, co-marketing. Corporates work more slowly than startups.

Future Trends Companies are starting to take a portfolio approach to everything they do. Building ventures organically - internal or external. Separating themselves from the core, or having an accelerator and investing in startups or co-creation. Not all will win but gives a nice balance. Difficult to disrupt when incentivized to keep core going. Must do everything, a balance. Don’t innovate on your own. Inorganic and organic. How do you streamline processes in working with startups?

For More Information For more information or to connect with Ben Yoskovitz, check out Highline BETA.

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Derek Chin is Head of Innovation and Product Strategy at Nerdery, a business consulting company. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Derek about corporate innovation, adaptability, and financing innovation projects.

With the heart of a serial entrepreneur, Derek is fascinated about how to bring ideas to life. After working at a startup in college, Derek started his own business and learned the importance of design thinking and bootstrapping. He eventually went to law school and had the opportunity to work for United Healthcare, analyzing new laws and regs to discover new business opportunities. Derek continued at United Healthcare after law school, as their entrepreneur-in-residence, and was humbled by the challenges of corporate innovation. After a few years, Derek left to help start a new company called BrightHealth, with a former CEO of United Healthcare. In 5 months, they raised $80 million, in Series A, as a small startup trying to replicate a huge insurance company. Selecting the best staff and supplementing with consultants, was an important stratetgy to move fast. BrightHealth raised another $160 million in Series B and then was at a point of scaling.

Now at Nerdery, Derek helps other companies think like entrepreneurs and accelerate their growth by creating MVPs and selecting the right staff. He’s worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including businesses like Google and Purina. He thinks a key obstacle to innovation is resourcing and staffing. Companies are building teams before they know what they are doing. Derek believes small corporate innovation teams partnering with agencies like Nerdery, to find market fit, is the best approach. Innovation teams are able to integrate the project back into the business, and the agency team goes away. "Team -as-a-Service" model.

As for innovation trends, Derek sees an evolution of how companies are financing innovation projects. Many are acting like VCs, looking for results from small bits of money, blurring the lines between VCs and Corporate Capital.

For More Information For more information, connect with Derek W. Chin on LinkedIn.

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This week's podcast features RSM’s Kevin Depew and Matt Wolf talking with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about RSM's unique industry eminence program. They highlight the collision of ideas that brought this program to life and how it has enabled RSM to deliver an enhanced, differentiating client experience.

For More Information

For more information, check out RSM at RSMUS.com/IO

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io.

This podcast is sponsored by RSM: Audit, Tax and Consulting Services to help Middle Market Leaders Succeed

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Aviad Stein is the Director of Client Partnerships at Alpha, a consumer insights company. He has worked with Tumbler, Bloomberg, Nordstrom, and Dun & Bradstreet on customer-centric innovation strategies. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Aviad about his experiences with experimentation and digital transformations.

Podcast Highlights: - Aviad has taken many companies of different sizes through digital transformation. Created an innovation incubator at Nordstrom. Built online and mobile ecosystem for users engaging in-store and online. Bloomberg Digital team developed Audio/Video digitalization. Bringing content to consumers and creating partnerships. - Advice for working in large companies? Take one challenge at a time. At Nordstrom, identified acquiring new users. How can tech support them? Bring teams together to solve this goal. The business wanted to leverage tech. Customers wanted tech to engage with the company. Gathered customer feedback, then took to tech to create those services and create value. - Alpha Platform: Helps corporations manage products: feature, functionality, and target audience; Runs experiments based on hypothesis or assumptions on ideas at speed and scale to get directional input, and understand market opportunity. Smaller teams can get the same knowledge, as larger teams, and move faster. - Alpha works with one-third of Fortune 100 companies. $900 billion on experimentation is going to waste this year. Need the test and learn methodology. Alpha is a collaboration tool that enables teams to move much faster, based on input from their target audiences. - Mistakes of product people - Can't take action on relevant data. Can they identify business goal and objectives? Need to measure the success of what you've been validating. Must be able to execute successfully. - The Alpha Team is coming to the IO Summit with the Alpha Bar. Helps companies test different assumptions about their business.

For More Information For more information, check out alphahq.com to request a demo or connect with Aviad Stein at aviad.stein@alphaux.com

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This week's podcast is sponsored by RSM - Audit, Tax, & Consulting Services for the Middle Market

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After working at Nike for 20 years, Lorrie Vogel founded ImagineNOW, an Innovation consultancy. She talks with Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation, about building an innovation portfolio.

Lorrie started her career at Nike working in industrial design, then led innovation and sustainability, and finally served as Vice President of Material Science and Innovation. Today, Lorrie leads an innovation consultancy, where she helps others with emerging science and tech, systems, and innovation teams.

Key Points - Nike’s approach is very systematic. Every team has a process. Nike does early prototyping. - As we brought new innovation into the portfolio, we became more systematic when looking at tech. If it was successful, how would it impact our business? - If you work in innovation, you need a filter. Evaluate - Does it drive revenue, decrease cost, reduce environmental footprint, strategic IT, new better performance, and brand value? Look at it from different perspectives, which innovations are below this line. Does it add value? Look for the game-changer. But sometimes, specific teams want to elevate various activities for different reasons. - Make sure portfolio is broken up across business teams so every team benefits. If your company is committed to reducing enviro footprint, you need to have some key components to address this. Bulk of your innovation should be revenue focused. - How do other companies address? Google makes sure value is there in new innovation, but they can do almost anything. Think about what stage are you in your company. Don’t do it in a vacuum. Sometimes it’s around can I make this happen, but is the marketing team excited? Need to have all teams engaged. - Even by having a system, need to think about the budget. The more you learn, need to continue to evaluate. Dynamic portfolio. Monitor the market because sometimes the market is not ready for the newest innovation. - Innovator Traits - Be alright with ambiguity. Every group that performs well are reaching out to others. Open to collaborate. Design boards help others understand.

For More Information For more information, go to imagineNOWinc.com or find Lorrie Vogel on Linkedin.

This week's podcast is sponsored by Husch Blackwell For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 123 – Gatorade’s Xavi Cortadellas on Breakthrough Innovation Ep. 81 – Jack Elkins with Orlando Magic Ep. 77 – Renata Policicio with ESPN

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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David Bland is the Founder of Precoil and the Co-Author of Testing Business Ideas, along with Alexander Osterwalder. David talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about risk, generating evidence through experimentation, and listening to customers.

David’s new book is a field guide for rapid experimentation. Through tactical examples, it describes what he’s seen with various teams and testing in the market. It also describes product and backend business model testing, in addition to 44 experiments organized from low strength of evidence to high strength of evidence.

Key Points - Think about risk - I have this risk. Should we do this? Can we do this? Companies need to generate more evidence before jumping to build. Learn about desirable, viable, and feasible. - What has changed in the experimentation process? Originally landing pages were it. Now we need to think about the hypothesis we’re trying to test. Experimentation terminology and processes are being adopted by product managers. - Business Model Canvas - People stop with how to address risk and making that a repeatable process. Need to connect to outcomes. Discovery isn’t a phase. It’s continuous. Look at retail and automotive. - Need for experimentation taking hold. Need to move fast and put learning into action. Learning from customers gets you farther. - Companies need to teach experimentation. Democratizing process. Multi-year journey. - Innovator Skills and Talent: Creative problem solvers that can deal with uncertainty and take initiative. Find and give people a chance to be entrepreneurs. Exhibit behaviors that are customer-centric, data influenced, and willing to test the status quo. - Environment for innovators is crucial.

For More Information Check out David’s new book Testing Business Ideas at precoil.com, Strategyzer.com, or on Amazon.

This week's podcast is sponsored by RSM - Audit, Tax, & Consulting Services for the Middle Market

For similar podcasts, check out: Ep. 164 – Josh Seiden, Author of Outcomes Over Outputs on Being Outcome Centric Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Scott Lenet, President of Touchdown Ventures, takes a different approach to investing. With a tagline of VC as a Service, Scott helps companies set up and run their funds. Scott talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about corporate venture. Corporates can be some of the best investors on the Cap table and achieve multiple objectives, from financial to strategic.They can also help themselves while helping the startup.

How have corporates changed their startup investing? - There's a correlation between corporate venture success and longevity/experience of managers. Touchdown works hand-in-hand with corporations. - Companies should set themselves up for learning, but not as a tire kicker. - Touchdown is seeing demand from every industry. It's not only from large corporations, but also from mid-market and startups in SF. - How do we stay innovative? All companies can see disruption. Can I do learning without investing? No. Startups won't share info.

How do you help companies think beyond their existing industries? - Corporate venture capital helps you do this - Companies should be investing, differently = Core, adjacent, or disruption. Where do we want to focus our investments? - VC investing in 1% of what you see. - Intel capital or M12 ventures - Commitment to the program and helping startups. Good financial fiduciaries. Provide strategic value for startup and corporation. Relevant to businesses. Intel backs disruptive innovators.

What should startups think about for corporate venture? What should corporate venture think about for startups? - Need to recognize corporations are large — many decision-makers. VCs can help you work with corporates. - Can deliver strategic benefits for startups. Engage in market. How do we maintain dominant positions and partners? - Need a change of mindset to reap benefits in this space.

For more information For more information, on Scott Lenet or Touchdown Ventures check out touchdownvc.com

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 152 – Acceleprise’s Olivia O’Sullivan on Investing in Corporate/Startup Collaboration Ep. 133 – Drive Capital’s Chris Olsen on Investment Innovation in the Midwest Ep. 42 – John Bungert with MetLife on Working with VCs and Internal Innovation Campaigns

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Josh Seiden is the author of Outcomes Over Outputs, Sense and Respond, and Lean UX, in addition to being a designer, strategy consultant, and coach. He has worked with companies like S&P, Fidelity, and AMEX. He also started the Sense and Respond Press, which focuses on short, actionable books about innovation, product management, and digital transformation. Josh spends much of his time consulting and training teams to work together effectively and create business outcomes. In this podcast, Josh talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about applying outcomes over outputs.

When thinking about being outcome-centered in a complex, emergent system, Josh suggests defining outcome as a change in behavior that creates business value. E.g.- Twitter. The challenge is to focus all work around outputs, rather than features. The highest level of outputs is impact, including revenue, costs, and customer satisfaction. Increasing customer satisfaction isn't solved through new features. Getting the outcome level right is a challenge. Outcomes must be measurable and observable. Testing these outcome assumptions is critical, as is collaboration among teams. E.g.- HBR.org

Josh Seiden and Sarah Hudson will be at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit, Oct 20-22, in Lincoln, NE.

For more information For more information, see Joshuaseiden.com, on Twitter @jsiden, or check out Senseandrespondpress.com.

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 156 – Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking on Building a Culture of Innovation
Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO
Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Kathleen Cohen is the founder of the Collaboratorium, a consultancy that creates enhanced guest experiences, in multi-use environments, through digital, AI/ML, XR, computer vision, and immersive and experiential thought leaders. She has previously worked with DreamWorks, IBM innovation, and Disney Resorts, among others. Kathleen talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Founder, about innovation’s future through experiential technology.

What changes have you seen in innovation? - Kathleen was first an artist, then moved to digital, and now back to physical space. - Innovation brought the data layover to experiences, and now AI and Machine Learning are making an impact.

How has innovation changed because of tech? - Started as a digital strategist and now calls herself an experiential strategist - Kathleen helped launch Disneyworld.com and soon found herself asked to join the 1st meeting on Disney’s creative team to help re-architect Epcot. Although Kathleen started her own consultancy at that point, her colleagues helped create the magic band. It took nine years with substantial design challenges but brought Disney closer to the customer. Now for six years, the magic band has been collecting data which they can use to tell stories. Disney brought a holistic approach to the innovation experience.

What other companies are innovating? - Companies that are moving to the spatial web, spatial web computing, meta-verse building, and world-building - E.g., Magic Leap moved from Goggles to focusing on a Metaverse. - How do we use the Metaverse in urban planning?

Meeting Your Digital Twin Talk is a move towards humanism - If I looked at your digital trails, would you look different than your data says? - ACLU of AI and Algorithmic justice league - Organizations questioning AI - Where is agency over identity? What is mine? - Questions of digital rights and citizenship when creating digital humans

Are there common characteristics people should be building on to be better innovators? - Storytelling vs. data-driven - Need for artists asking collaboration questions.

To find out more - To find out more about Kathleen or The Collaboratorium, email kc@thecollaboratorium.com or see http://thecollaboratorium.com

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 134– Paramount Pictures’ Futurist Ted Schilowitz on VR, AR & Mixed Reality
Ep. 135– Nara Logics CEO and E.N. Thompson Lecturer Jana Eggers on Artificial Intelligence’s Past and Future
Ep. 145– Laura Anne Edwards, DATA OASIS founder, NASA Datanaut, TED Resident & SheCanHackIT on Sustainable Innovation and Big Data

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Leaders need to have a balanced stance to invest in core, adjacent, and breakthroughs innovation for the long-term sustainability of their corporations. Currently, corporations put 95% of their focus on operational excellence and 5% on innovation excellence.

Gordon Stannis is Director of Design & Strategy and Partner at Twisthink. Gordon talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about how to grow innovation excellence.

Twisthink was launched two decades ago, to solve business problems through the "twisting" of design and creative technologists. For Crown, Twisthink developed a digital glove that drives a 3-ton truck in a warehouse. It solves a safety problem by driving remotely, and also eliminates 70% of footsteps from the worker’s daily routine. Crown was able to increase the price of the product by 2X.

What process does Twisthink go through to work with clients? - Understand stakeholders and pain points and then begin to solve problems. - Use any process that yields results as fast as possible, as cheap as possible. - Create a prototype and then watch people use it. Expensive option. - The Visual Research tool is a one-month option. Create plausible processes and scenarios. 10-15 Interviews with stakeholders. Then start design process.

How do you move from idea to the market place? - Innovation phase - Human centered design - Product Development process

How do you hire talent and team for innovation? - Curious, courageous, don’t mind failing, strong work ethic, and easy to get along with.

For more information For more information about Godon or Twisthink, check out http://twisthink.com/io/

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres w/ Product Talk Ep. 106 – Amy Jo Kim – Innovation Consultant and Author of Game Thinking Ep. 108 – Taylor Dawson with GE on Product Innovation

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Omar Luqmann-Harris is the author of Leader Board: The DNA of High-Performance Teams. While leading teams around the world, he saw an employee engagement gap emerge because traditional leadership principles didn’t change with the workforce of today. Omar talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about why employees won’t respond to old ways of leadership.

Omar first looked at the titans of leadership and applied their principles to his teams around the world. Then he created new methods to determine what works today.

Leadership 1.0 - Late 1800s to post WWII - Farm to the Factory - Hierarchy, homogenous workforce - Henry Ford Leadership 2.0 - Post-WWII - 1990s - Diversity, American Dream Phase, Teams - JFK and Space Race Leadership 3.0 - 1990s - now - Information Revolution - Solution to innovation - Leadership different, organizations are flatter and connected.

Work has changed from individuals to teams, moving from A Players focus to Team Focus. Now everyone on the team is excellent at something. Empower them to lead.

Leader Board - Takes a narrative format to teach and demonstrate principles. Shows how you can apply principles. - Pprovides team performance and acceleration principles, utilizing the stages of group formation. - Provides loads of free templates and tools to implement principles.

Obstacles to developing teams - Bringing in new people - Focus on WHOM - Work ethic, heart, optimism, and maturity - Provides assessment

What defines a successful day?
What do you do to help people outside of work?
What is your biggest failure?
Tell me about a colleague you worked with that disappointed you, and that you still had to work with.

Differences in hiring between startups and corporations - Startup hiring is much more important - Scaling - Focus on raw material - Stay involved

For More Information For more information about Omar, check out www.omarlharris.com or find his book on Amazon.

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 148 – Francesca Gino, Harvard Professor and Author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break All the Rules in Work and in Life Ep. 117 – Nicole Rufuku, Author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy Ep. 104 – Shane Snow – Author of Dream Teams: Working Together without Falling Apart

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Savannah Economic Development's Jen Bonnett - VP of Innovation/Entrepreneurship & ED of The Creative Coast talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder about Startup Ecosystem Building. Jen recently moved from Atlanta, where she founded Startup Chicks, led the state of Georgia's technology incubator, and helped the ATL startup community. She ranks ALT in the top startup ecosystems in the country.

Highlights from their Conversation:

Savanah has three University assets. Similar to Boulder.
Why the Creative Coast? Savanah has a thriving arts community. How do you teach artists to thrive online?
Digital technology a significant focus. Also, healthcare tech and logistics.
E-commerce - creative meets the port.
Jen knew community and leaders. Began by building Ecosystem map — missing investor community.
Savannah is a significant port.
Startups don't know each other or their peer groups. We are creating peer group and revenue meetups.
"Slowvannah" - Blog post
Savannah has high net-worth individuals, but they don't know how to invest in startups. ATL has involved ecosystems.
Jen was active in ATL in recruiting corporations to be involved in the startup ecosystem.
She's talked with all major Savannah corporations. They want help in how to engage.
Trends in ecosystems - 20-year game. The corporate tie-in is key, as well as collaborating with other cities. Figure out what you do well and focus on those industries.

For More Information

For more information about Jen Bonnett or Savannah and the Creative Coast, check out thecreativecoast.org or email jen@thecreativecoast.org. Find her on Twitter @Jen_bonnett For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Oscar Allain is Vice President of Cross-Cultural Strategy and Research at UM Worldwide. He focuses on reaching the rapidly changing multicultural audiences in the US. Oscar talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about brands being part of the cultural conversation and doing it the right way.

Key Points - WAVE is UM’s annual study to gain a better understanding of the digital world. This year they decided to quantify the Remix cultures. - Remix Culture studies the movements within cultures that are being influenced by ethic or minorities such as Hispanics, Asians and LGBT communities. They want to understand what the implications are for certain businesses. - ReMix’s four cultural pillars - Resist, Retrograde, Re-globallize, Recreate - Latinos have changed over past 20 years from need to assimilate to amping up on sense of identity. - Ethnic Cultures are part of movement/generations that speak up against things that don’t align with values, ability to retro-culturate, have a cultural mindset that impacts mainstream culture, and maintains an entrepreneurial spirit. - Quantify Remix mindset - Not generational. In Nigeria it’s 16-24 year olds, in China it’s 25-34 year olds, and in US it’s 16-44 year olds. These are groups leading the conversation and are the agents of change. - How do brands play in conversation? - eg - Nike (Resist), Netflix (Retrograde), Uniqlo (Reglo), Starbucks (Recreate) - Brands are encouraged to be a part of the cultural conversation and doing it the right way. - Best Brands are true and authentic to the brand and consumer. Need to recognize new movements like LantinX and keep focused on changing cultures.

For More Information For more information on Oscar, Remix Culture, and UM Worldwide check out umww.com

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 134 – Paramount Pictures’ Futurist Ted Schilowitz on VR, AR & Mixed Reality Ep. 130 – Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics Ep. 122 – Jeff Rohrs, Yext CEO and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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(Replay of Nov 20, 2018 episode)

Amy Radin is the author of The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company. She was previously a Senior Executive at American Express, Citi, and ETrade. Amy’s experience includes leading the digital transformation of Citi’s credit card business ($5b bottom line). Today, Amy enjoys being on the outside of big companies and startups, to help connect the dots between growth aspirations and outcomes. Amy and Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, discuss startup and corporate collaboration, measuring innovation, and the future for financial services.

Key Takeaways in Brian Ardinger’s Interview with Amy: - The human condition is set up to stop things that haven’t happened before. - Big companies have everything they need, but can’t see the near-term value of innovation. Startups bring speed and agility but lack understanding of scale. Magic is when they can work together. - To “seed” ideas, take concepts and put them out to potential users. Then use the project to translate user reaction into a business model. The mistake is trying to predict too closely what people will do. - To kill innovation is to apply traditional metrics to ideas. Can’t expect results immediately. Instead ask, what are assumptions to get x% of market share. As you move forward, refine your benchmarks and results. - To be customer-centric, understand needs that make economic sense. What’s the problem we want to solve for the people we want to serve? - Basic business model for financial services hasn’t changed. Innovation is happening on the front end, but little is happening on the back end. Finance companies are asking the same questions as 15 years ago. - Innovation is solvable. It’s not a pipe dream, even in the most complex organizations. It’s all about execution. - Utilize the Seek, Seed, Scale framework.

BONUS: DOWNLOAD FREE TOOLS at www.amyradin.com/insideoutside, including concepts from her book, an infographic on Seek, Seed, Scale framework. and take a quiz about your innovation readiness and ideas where you can personally focus.

If you liked this podcast, you might also like:

Ep. 148 – Francesca Gino, Harvard Professor and Author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break All the Rules in Work and in Life Ep. 138 – Mural’s Ajay Rajani on Building a Portfolio Career Ep. 123 – Gatorade’s Xavi Cortadellas on Breakthrough Innovation

GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Thales Teixeira is an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and Author of Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with Thales about innovation, consumer disruption, and decoupling. They also discuss Thales new HBR article titled Disruption Starts with Unhappy Customers, Not Technology.

Key Points - Economics of Attention - To help companies understand consumer attention - Where, how and why. - www.economicsofattention.com - Understanding Digital Disruptors - Customers Disrupt Markets. - Startups are just faster at delivering needs and understanding customers. - Why do large companies think they KNOW and adapt to their customers. - Large companies are obsessed with their competitors, but should be focused on their customers. - Inside Outside Innovation Summit - Oct 2-22, 2019 - www.theiosummit.com - Customer problems might not be big enough for large companies. This creates an opening for startups.

Unlocking Customer Value Chain - New Book - Wave 1 - Unbundling products - Wave 2 - Disintermediation - Startups cutting out the middleman - Wave 3 - Startups are looking at customer value chain and breaking up links and taking one activity at a time - Decoupling - e.g. - Best Buy moved to price matching & charging manufacturers for shelf space. Supports show rooming activity and doesn’t fight Amazon.

Decoupling is happening as a result of consumers looking for lower costs of goods and services. Startups, with new business models and tech, are reducing costs. To improve relationships with customers: create value, reduce value eroding activities or reduce value charging activities.

For More Information

For more information or to connect with Thales, check out Decoupling.co

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 151 – Jeff Dyer, Author of Innovation Capital: How to Compete–and Win–Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders Ep. 148 – Francesca Gino, Harvard Professor and Author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break All the Rules in Work and in Life Ep. 112 – Ralph Welborn, Author of Topple on Corporate Innovation

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Sense and Respond, Lean UX, & Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about building a Culture of Innovation.

Key Ideas - Shifting from outputs to outcomes. - Changing incentives. - Find the person and team with the political capital to prove out the validity and scalability. - Reward learning in a way that focuses on ideas that are likely to succeed. - Incentivize learning and being transparent. - Story telling and marketing of efforts. - Overcoming National Cultural Traits. - Language and ideas are universal, but hard to implement. - Failure of the Corporate Innovation Lab. Create an innovation path.

For More Information

For more information, check out Jeffgothelf.com.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:

Ep. 37 – Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf, authors of “Sense and Respond” Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres w/ Product Talk Ep. 103 – Andi Plantenberg on Entrepreneurial Capabilities in Teams Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Taylor Ryan, CMO of Valuer.ai, talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about Startup-Corporate Matchmaking. Valuer.ai matches startups with corporates, accelerators, and investors based on AI and crowdsourcing.

Key points

Valuer.ai - HQ in Denmark. Taylor Ryan, from the US, is a six time co-founder, writer, growth hacker, and startup junkie.
Corporate/Startup matchmaking new to Europe.
Customized searches on Valuer.AI combines Crowdsource and data collection to find the right startups both locally and internationally.
Uses qualitative data of founders to determine if startups are investible.
Finding different skill sets of founders - data, block chain and finance are skills corporates are looking for.
Internal corporate innovators can use to find new ideas.
Need more education on looking to startups as long-term solutions for problems within corporations.
Trends in startup world - Different European hubs have different flavor.
Drift in European Tech to go after 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - Corporate Social Responsibility.

For More Information

For more information or to connect with Taylor, check out Valuer.ai

For similar podcasts, check out:

Ep. 131 - Sean Moffitt of WikiBrands & Author of WikiBrands: How to Reinvent Your Business in a Customer Connected Marketplace Ep. 142 - Neil Soni, Author of The Startup Gold Mine and Estee Lauder Innovator Ep. 152 - Acceleprise’s Olivia O’Sullivan on Investing in Corporate/Startup Collaboration

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Brock Blake, Co-founder and CEO of Lendio on Financing Entrepreneurs at Scale Interview with Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services helps innovators and entrepreneurs build better products launch new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption.

Each week Brian Ardinger gives you a front-row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative Innovation. In this podcast, Brian interviews Brock Blake, founder and CEO of Lendio the largest online marketplace for small business loans in America.

For more information and a transcript of their talk, check out http://insideoutside.io/the-feed/

Inside Outside Innovation Summit - Talent, Technology, & The Future Of Innovation

Mark your calendars for October 20th -22nd, in Lincoln, NE. Experts from the world of Disney, Facebook, American Express, and Nike, will talk about innovation, disruption, startups, and the world that we live in today.

Check it out at the theiosummit.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Mike McDerment is Co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks, the world’s number one cloud accounting software for self-employed professionals. Mike talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about building and scaling a company, product development, and his free e-book called Breaking the Time Barrier.

Mike built a simple tool to solve his accounting problem, and now 20 million people have used the tool. He could see the value of the tool, but he hadn’t built and scaled a company. It was the great unknown which excited him. Suddenly, Mike saw the value of the tool for everyone. He wanted to bring it into the world. After building the first version for himself, he soon added a software designer. They worked on the product for nine months to a year, then added another co-founder and hired employees. Mike’s team became very connected to their customers, always showing the product early in development. They started to understand the market and the most impactful parts of what to build.

Bootstrapping the Company - Raising capital is not success. A better strategy is to find customers and fund yourself - Over ten years, FreshBooks de-risked the market, product, team, and model. - The first round of venture money was $30 million.

Obstacles and Things That Almost Killed FreshBooks - Check out Blog post: https://www.freshbooks.com/blog/7-ways-ive-almost-killed-freshbooks - Listen to advisors, but trust yourself. - Sometimes you move fast, but some areas you need to slow down, especially with product-market fit. Don’t Rush.

Breaking The Time Barrier - Breaking the Time Barrier, Mike’s book for his customers doing client services work explains how to price services. - Focus on value-based billing instead of on the number of hours worked. Understand how big the problem is and how expensive it is. - Nobody cares about tech. They care about the value they get from tech.

Product Development - Better to focus on building benefits like time savings, revenue generation, or performance. Brings more value for your customer. - Frame pricing on value. e.g., $50 a month will save 20 hrs, or for less than a cup a coffee, you can have this service.

What’s different for a company at scale? - Culture - How does a company respond when challenged with something? - Customer-obsessed

How do you maintain the freshness of a company? - Combo of direction and constraints for motivation. - Creates a condition for taking chances.

For More Information For more information on Mike McDerment or FreshBooks check out freshbooks.com.

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Olivia spoke with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about corporate/startup matchmaking, trends and Acceleprise's future.

Key factors in selecting startups include: - Understanding the founding team. Can they solve the challenge? - Traction and product market fit. Want to accelerate growth. - Thresholds and levels of expectations. - Collaboration on the product.

Emphasis on the initial period where you make introductions. The missing piece is how to transition into providing impact. - Make sure two groups of people are set up to participate with each other and engage in a partnership. - Provide long-term strategic support. - Innovation doesn’t happen in a silo. Need a long-term strategy. Participate in the ecosystem before you see change.

Corporations are in different places in innovation - Companies wanting roundtables and market intelligence. - Companies with established processes and venture teams.

New Trends - Ten years ago, there were lots of corporate accelerators. Now a lot of established independent accelerators doing great work. - Now more meaningful partnership doing co-collaboration with startups. - Financial services companies are partnering with startups. - Health tech - Unlocking the power of data in the health world.

What are the core skills for entrepreneurs? - Long-term vision and steps to get there. - Someone who will get the work done to get over hurdles. - People who are connectors on the corporate innovation side.

What’s next for Acceleprise - Kick off upcoming programs in SF and NY - Investing in another 20 companies. Already invested in over 100. - Opening office in Toronto.

For More Information For more information on Acceleprise or to connect with Olivia check out https://acceleprise.vc

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Jeff Dyer is the author of Innovator’s DNA, Innovator’s Method, and Innovation Capital. He talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about innovative leaders and how they generate creative ideas.

In Innovator’s DNA, Jeff identifies characteristics of innovative entrepreneurs, including questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. In Innovator’s Method, Jeff identifies a process to test ideas for investment: 1) Generating idea, 2) Is someone willing to pay, 3) Rapid prototyping, and 4) Find right business model. Finally, in Innovation Capital, Jeff interviews innovation leaders and how they secure research and support to move on innovative ideas.

Innovative Leaders are Judged on Three Things Human capital, social capital, and reputation capital (track record). Forward thinking, problem-solving, and persuasion.

Innovation Capital can De-risk Innovation Leadership Innovators paradox: You have to take novel risky ideas forward. Look at INC 50 each year. What are new companies, with new business models, doing?

Social Capital Most people think your strongest 150 ties are most important. Your weak social ties are likely to be much more important. How do you connect to those weak ties?

Human Capital Innovation skill sets are becoming more important because it’s critical to know how to move ideas forward and create value.

For More Information: For more information about Jeff or Innovation Capita, check out https://innovatorsdna.com/

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 137 – Deloitte’s Michael Frankel on Growth, Hybrid Talent & Corporate/Startup Collaboration Ep. 136 – Simone Ahuja, Author, Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business Ep. 124 – Amy Radin, Author of The Change Maker’s Playbook & FinTech Guru

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Alain Sylvain is the founder of Sylvain Labs, a strategy and design company helping corporations like Google, Spotify and Nike, think about their future. Alain Sylvain talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about how to create new ideas that solve for business and consumer needs.

Innovation is evolving - The fetishization of innovation. Define what innovation means within the corporation - e.g., transformational, new products? - Innovation groups within large companies are outsourcing their innovation needs. - Innovation is the creation of new value.

What are good or bad practices of innovation? - The company wants to be "sprint" focused. Not possible if the company doesn't have that spirit. Look at how the company changes to be more innovation focused. - When do you bring in design? Early.

Is it essential for companies to look outside and work with startups? - Necessary to look for external points of view. Innovation in a silo will not get game-changing innovation. - Founders mindset vs. corporate mindset. At Patagonia, innovation comes from the founder's perspective of the end user.

How essential is the C-Suite vs. individuals within the organization? - Both perspectives are important. Low appetite for risk. Can you create a culture of innovation where all ideas are valid - Create an open culture of ideas. Enable people's side hustles to thrive. - Acceptance of failure. Pull out what worked. Fear of risk is internal perception. The test is in the marketplace.

For more Information For more information or to connect with Alain, check out sylvainlabs.com

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 136 – Simone Ahuja, Author, Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business Ep. 120 – Digital Intent’s Sean Johnson talks Corporate Innovation Strategies Ep. 86 – Carie Davis, Your Ideas Are Terrible FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Paul Skinner is the author of Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success and founder of Agency of the Future. His work has always been about helping people create a collaborative advantage. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside founder, talks with Paul about using a collaborative advantage approach at every level.

What is collaborative advantage? - Collaborative advantage is the business advantage from harnessing value creation potential outside and inside the business. It has been overshadowed by competitive advantage. Helps us to grow our businesses more quickly. - Businesses need to be improving people’s lives, if not, why should they exist? - See customers as primary value creators or non-profits help to create social change

Examples of companies/communities/organizations moving towards collaborative advantage? - Rotterdam - Connected to other cities through the port. City water scheme is a reusable water bottle with a financial contribution to water systems in other parts of the world. Then you get access to refill bottle from city pipes. Pipes provide business sponsorship opportunities. Also, Rotterdam has a gym called Pay More/Train Less. However, If you work out more, you pay less.

What are the obstacles to embracing collaboration? - Including collaborative advantage in strategies and having a collaborative framework. - Idea of competitive advantage has become so dominant. Can hold us back. Too often a 0 sum game. Can extract value from both businesses or can be used to prioritize shareholder advantage. Most significant disruptions don’t come from competitors. - The dominant story of competition and competitiveness causes us to miss advantages. Reinforces that only value is created inside. - Value can be created by customers and is a collective process. Orientate ourselves around our customers so we can co-create value.

Collaborative Advantage Framework - “Outside In” Framework - Audit provided within book. 1. Find Common Purpose - See as an enabler of change instead of a deliverer of change. What do we do to enable people to do better? E.g., Amazon changed the competitive model and let customers choose between all the options. 2. Make innovation more useful - Structure right opportunities for people to pursue that purpose. Put it at the heart of divisions or missions. e.g., Argentinian Shopping Center - Instead of an advertising campaign, they built a world-class bridge. 3. Make engagement more effective by designing an environment conducive to the purpose you are enabling - Choices are influenced by the environment like the social, customer, and internal environment. 4. Iterate and accelerate - Work with early adopters to better understand and respond to their needs as revealed in practice instead of what people say that they will do. E.g., Coke 5. Build partnerships to help us scale over what we can do alone - Look outwards in the same direction. Clearly understand the end-user purpose. Align interests around purpose. Adapt over time to unlock collective value.

Does adopting a collaborative advantage framework have to be top-down driven? - Collaborative advantage begins by defining our core purpose differently. There is a role for leadership to play. Better to mobilize towards this mission. Can be applied at all levels of an organization. - Evaluated sustainability programs at Eden Project, an Eco-Tourism development in Cornwall. The most exciting part of the presentation was by the cleaning staff. They bought into the sustainability mission. They knew the most sustainable ways to clean a toilet. Made adjustments to make cleaning processes to be more environmentally friendly.

For More Information

To find out more about Paul Skinner or his book Collaborative Advantage, conn...

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Francesca Gino is a professor/affiliated with Harvard’s Business, Law, and Kennedy Schools. She is the author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break All the Rules in Work and in Life. She also recently published an article in Harvard Business Review on Why Curiosity Matters - The Business Case for Curiosity. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with Francesca, about when rule breaking happens and what happens to people that do it successfully.

Curiosity Curiosity is an important driver behind the experience of rule breaking. We are born with lots of curiosity, but it starts declining at five years old. When people join new jobs, they have high curiosity, but in 9 months, their curiosity has dropped 20%. What can companies do to keep that high?

What can organizations do to support curiosity? - Change the mindset about what curiosity can do. - Good for business and leaders to model behavior. Ask What if we changed … - Hard to know what outcomes of questions are. As How and What questions.

Are there different ways to measure curiosity? - Intuit has innovation and failure awards (lessons learned and comes with a party). - Wake for Startups ending - A company gave 1 hr for lunch and 1 hr for culture. Then opened a library in the manufacturing plant.

Rebel Talent - People who challenge rules for positive change - Talents include curiosity, novelty, perspective, diversity, and authenticity. - You can foster each trait. Releasing a sculpture from a block. Don’t have to be born a rebel, but bring those traits out.

Can curiosity be effective in moving an organization forward? - Thoughtfulness by leaders. - Develop Performance Goals and Learning Goals.

Obstacles to overcome? - Leadership level. Sense of fear. If you allow for curiosity, you’ll end up in chains. Allowing curiosity says I trust you. - Employee side - Change starts with each one of us.

How do you hire Rebels? - Pay attention to answers matching skills. E.g. - Hiring people with different perspectives than you.

If you want to find out more about Francesca or her book check out rebeltalents.org. There is a FREE test, with no email required, that tells you which type of Rebel you are.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:

Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Ep. 117 – Nicole Rufuku, Author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy Ep. 109 – Greg Larkin, Corporate Entrepreneur and Author of “This Might Get Me Fired”

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Scott Kirsner is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Innovation Leader. As a journalist, Scott spent his career covering how ideas in companies get commercialized. Five years ago, Scott launched Innovation Leader, a company focused on how innovation happens in big companies. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, spoke with Scott about emerging issues in corporate innovation.

What innovation issues are tops for companies? - Innovation Leader Survey - Solving bureaucracy and How to Tap Employee Ideas - Highest areas of Internal innovation interest - Startup engagement meaningful, but companies have only started their collaboration experiences.

Why did corporates jump in and now are reassessing? - Corporates need results near term. - Successful companies focus on white space areas. Scout areas where startups can address problems areas. - Develop strategies to set up a proof of concept. - Jet Ventures - Doing corporate VC. Need to be in it for 7-10 years

What toolset is being used at startups, that could be used in corporations? - Slack, GitHub, 3-D printer, landing tables, quick websites, Airtable, Coda, crowdfunding, etc.

How can the rise of new tech play out in corporate innovation? - Companies are becoming aware of how business can apply new tech. Creating comic books, videos of vision, etc. - Have more conversations and lunch and learns in your company to explain emerging tech and how the company can apply. Ask for engagement and put dots on the radar screen. - Innovation teams shouldn’t be only ones tracking new innovations. Spread far and wide in company. - Challenge of Innovation officer - change culture and training or build stuff and prototype. Execute the ideas.

What are you most excited about? - New events, research reports, magazine covering top cities around the world for corporate innovation, and awareness of best practices in big companies. - Don’t need to start with a white paper. Lots of innovation resources available - Inside Outside Innovation podcast, Harvard podcast, Innovation Answered podcast.

For more Information For more information or to connect with Scott, check out Innovationleader.com, on Twitter see @innolead and listen to Innovation Leader's Innovation Answered podcast.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:

Ep. 128 – Aaron Proietti, Author of Today’s Innovator & Transamerica Innovation Champion Ep. 120 – Digital Intent’s Sean Johnson talks Corporate Innovation Strategies Ep. 118 – ExxonMobil’s Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock on Corporate Innovation

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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James Gill is founder and CEO of GoSquared, a simple, live analytics platform for websites. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, spoke with James about product trends, design, getting close to the customer and growing a company outside the Valley. Based in London, James started GoSquared with friends, while still in school. They found success in building websites, but soon were asked how the sites were performing. Very few tools existed at the time, to answer these questions. Since then, GoSquared has created simple analytics software, on a subscription basis, for small businesses around the world.

What trends are allowing you to build new things? - No code applications. - Real-time and live response. - Everyone today wants to have an online presence or small businesses. - We always wanted to work with small businesses and integrate into similar products like Go Daddy, Wordpress, Shopify, etc - Make it as easy as possible.

How do you decide what you develop? - Everyone has a different process depending on what works for each company. Some use tons of Data. Data creates lots of confidence in decisions. - We use our insights and engage with our customers. E.g., Onboarding - Do a lot of user testing. Make it fun. We show the visitors to your website instantly. Gamification.

How do you introduce new products and services? - Software is being adopted from bottom up, before senior management even knows about it. - Solving problems wins. Trend in B to B software. See small business/startups as early adopters. - Use new tools for Corporates that don’t need IT support. Cheaper and faster.

Ability to get close to the customer. - GoSquared changed dynamics to get immediate feedback from customers. - Test out ideas immediately. E.g., Landing pages and Payments - Zapier and Airtable.

What was it like to build a tech company outside of the Valley? - We didn’t make a choice. Left school and stayed in London. Thirty-seven signals/BaseCamp inspired us. - We build great products and tell our story and what we’ve been learning. We don’t spend much on Marketing. We share what we learn. Building trust. Sharing what we learned on our Blog. https://www.gosquared.com/blog/

What’s Next? - Training for the London Marathon in April - Introducing Free Tier soon - More new product improvement to help customers grow.

For More Information For more information on James Gill or GoSquared see gosquared.com, @GoSquared or @Jamesjgill on Twitter.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 130 – Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics; Ep. 129 – Paul Jarrett of Bulu on New Trends in Collaborative Marketing; Ep. 122 – Jeff Rohrs, Yext CEO and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers; Ep. 114 – Canva’s Cameron Adams on Democratization of Design; and Ep. 113 – ProfitWell founder Patrick Campbell on Growth, Pricing and SaaS

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Laura Anne Edwards is founder of DATA OASIS and serves as a NASA Datanaut, TED Resident and with SheCanHackIT. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with Laura Anne about sustainable innovation and big data.

Important Take Aways:

Sustainable Innovation is Key! - Maintain innovation over time through systems. What you are doing, who you are doing it with, and create creative collisions. - Key elements: Know who you’ve hired. Use innovation audit to look at information flow. - Address process changes, information flow, and awareness about how to support creativity.

What trends and tactics are useful? - Small changes in meeting schedule, office layout, what info is shared. Eg - Donut carts bring out introverts - What can you do to create intentional and organic collisions for the team. - How to change info flow to build on introverts in the room. - What is your company’s version of prototyping? - Do you have regular airing of ideas, instead of annual sharing. Appeals to extroverts and performance. - Can’t keep doing same five things. - Look at who you have and what you are trying to do.

Have trends and tactics changed over time? - Don’t just put creativity into tech teams. - For diversity, look at age, race, and where people come from, but go deeper. Look for different ways of thinking. Understand your people. - Product managers act as facilitators, instead of driving the product.

How do you measure if the company is on the right path? - Retention of talented teams and ability to use teams to understand and be a feedback loop. - We’ve applied industrial tactics to human assets. Need new set of processes and facilitation.

How does open data change the way we create and build new innovative ideas? - By connecting and making available the silos of open data, it solves the last mile problem. - Apply new big algorithms and computing powers to open data. Currently there is no tracking of doctoral research. - We don’t have a data arch. What information is most important to us? - Data Oasis creates an index of data sources and wikis. Models of gathering info around subfields. Marrying it with AI.

To find out more about Laura Anne Edwards or about Data Oasis contact her at lauraanneedwards.com, on Twitter, or through Brian Ardinger at brian@insideoutside.io.

You can also check out her TED Profile (https://www.ted.com/profiles/845) or this article on her work at NASA (https://open.nasa.gov/blog/data-discovery-mapping-nasa-dataverse/)

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:

Ep. 135 – Nara Logics CEO and E.N. Thompson Lecturer Jana Eggers on Artificial Intelligence’s Past and Future Ep. 130 – Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics Ep. 107 – Azeem Azhar, Author of “Exponential View”

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER

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Ben Nelson is the CTO and Co-founder of Lambda School, a 9-month online education/training program. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, spoke with Ben about Lambda School’s disruption of the education market, the creation of an online school, and the use of an Income Share Agreement. Through an Income Share Agreement, students agree to pay back the costs of their training, once they receive a $50,000 a year job. A percentage of their income, up to $30,000, is paid back over the next two-year period.

New Business Model & Trends - We started as a code boot camp. Now we’re in our own category. Competitors are changing to mimic the model. Competition doesn’t usually kill early startups. - Universities are overshooting the mark. Saddling students with big debt and students are wising up. People can get in trouble financially. - Fast tech change. People need to switch in the middle of their careers. Lambda is putting elasticity in the labor market. - More people are moving towards portfolio work and we’re seeing job categories getting disrupted. Need new training - e.g. truck drivers. Provide a path in a new industry. - Online can scale with more students. Lambda margins can absorb longer payback period and better instructors. - With students graduating, income share agreements are a valuable security that debt can be borrowed against.

Y Combinator & Lambda’s Future - How can this become a billion dollar company. How do you scale the idea? - It’s a school for startups, and they teach you how to do it, with weekly investor meetings. Provides a network to fundraise. Avoid pitfalls with standardizations. - Amazon started with books. We teach software engineering now. Looking at how to expand into other areas like nursing school. - We don’t want to focus on ed research. We’re about jobs and accessibility.

Skills and Traits Attractive to the Model & Challenges - We live in a distracting world. Ability to focus and remove distractions is essential. Lambda wants people who are hungry. It’s difficult to predict these qualities. They don’t ask for test scores. - Lambda has a free course called Intro to programming. Through it they check student’s aptitudes. It’s an open-ended course, with no deadline. If students perform well, we can invest in them. - We must maintain high standards, but we’re not exclusive. We want a high bar but will accept anyone willing to do the work. - Need scalable processes for placing students. - Provide more depth and a guided job search. Remove false finish line of graduation. Your certificate is your job.

For more information about Ben and Lambda School, check out www.Lambdaschool.com.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:

Ep. 93 – Natalie Fratto with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Ep. 69 – Slava Rubin, co-founder of Indiegogo Ep. 51 – Lucy Beard, founder of Feetz, a 3-D shoe-printing company

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Energize Your Company's Culture Jon Katzenbach and Gretchen Anderson are co-authors of The Critical Few: Energize Your Company's Culture by Choosing What Really Matters. They spoke with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about why culture is important for innovation and how to tap into the behaviors and emotions that can make a significant cultural impact.

The Critical Few Their book, The Critical Few, looks at working within an organization and drawing on a company’s strengths, rather than looking at what’s not working. Lessons are written within the story of a fictional CEO, focused on a company’s culture. While there are many universal issues of culture, Jon and Gretchen recognize that all cultures are singular and unique and that people within the company impact that culture.

Traits, Behaviors, and Emotional Connectors Jon and Gretchen explain that we must identify what the cultural traits are within a company, behavior that is happening around those traits, and who the people are within the company that have their fingers on the pulse of the culture. These elements are the critical few areas that can impact culture. For example, within one large health care organization, the critical behavior was around collaboration. The company narrowed in on this behavior and found those employees doing it well. Once you understand what’s happening in culture, you can develop programs to address these areas. Ideas need to come from people doing the work.

Innovation Needs to be as Unique as your Thumbprint Critical Few also refers to the traits that have emotional sources which clients can tap into to create critical behaviors. Behavior also depends on where it’s happening within the company. Focus in on a few behaviors. Follow these traits to a few specific emotions that the company can encourage. The company is reliant on specific people who have tapped into these particular emotions. When identifying cultural traits for companies that want to be more innovative, ask yourself “What would innovation look like given who you are.” It must be how an organization already likes to behave.

Innovative Companies Focus on Strategy, Operations and Culture Jon and Gretchen see relationships between companies that focus on a broader range of metrics and their ability to innovate, and companies that are less hierarchal and their ability to innovate. Companies are saying that they must approach culture with the same effort as strategy and operations. Leaders understand things are changing. Innovation is going to be easier if you also tackle culture issues.

For More Information To connect with Jon and Gretchen check out https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/the-critical-few. They are also on Twitter and LinkedIn where they post new research and articles they love.

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy: - Ep. 130– Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics - Ep. 124 – Amy Radin, Author of The Change Maker’s Playbook & FinTech Guru - Ep. 104 – Shane Snow – Author of Dream Teams: Working Together without Falling Apart

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Neil Soni is the author of The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business. Neil spent years with startups, focusing on the sales and marketing side, trying to sell into large organizations. He then moved to Estee Lauder, where he specialized in external innovation. After seeing both sides, Neil wanted to create a resource to help startups understand the corporate side and corporations to understand the startup side. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, spoke with Neil about how to succeed through corporate/startup collaboration.

Pitfalls of Corporate and Startup collaboration - Different timeframes - Size of deals

Incentive structures for partnerships - How comfortable is the corporate team in innovating? If comfortable, they’ll have a higher tolerance for misses. Look at the entire portfolio. - Companies that allow intrapreneurship, give employees new outlets to thrive.

Should you expose corporates to startups? - Inside large companies (10,000+) it’s an echo chamber. They only see direct competitors. - Need someone looking outside at competition. Expose the corporate team to new ways of startup thinking. - Startups also get exposure to see how their tech can apply to different domains.

In The Startup Gold Mine Book - Understand what is going on behind the scenes. What is your corporate counterpart doing? - How is your colleague rewarded or punished? Are they paid for the home run? Are they new to the company? - Corporations have been very interested in the book to shed light on the startup side. - Reduce the language barrier between corporates and startups.

To connect with Neil go to neilsoni.com or on Twitter at @therealneils. You can also get his book, The Startup Gold Mine on Amazon.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:

Ep. 98 – Sean Ammirati with Birchmere Ventures & Author of The Science of Growth
Ep. 96 – Chris Shipley at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit 2017
Ep. 63 – Dave Knox with The Brandery and Ep. 64 – Dave Knox part 2
Ep. 45 – Michael Docherty, Author of The Lone Wolf Innovator

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.

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Gary Shapiro is the author of Ninja Future: Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation and president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies and which owns and produces CES - The Global Stage for innovation. Gary has helped direct policymakers and business leaders on the importance of innovation in the U.S. economy. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Gary about innovation, creativity and how to thrive in a changing marketplace.

Gary initially worked as a consultant to CES, then was hired to lead the organization. He was excited to discover that the CES board was committed to allowing anyone with an idea to get exposure. This action spoke to him. Years prior, Gary was involved in a lawsuit over the VCR. He coordinated and spoke on the issue, and now sees the parallels in the video, audio, and sharing industry. Today Gary continues to fight for innovators and breakthrough technology.

Pace of Change

With the pace of change accelerating, Gary sees the future in areas such as robotics, AI, self-driving cars, drones, medical, dealing with pain, etc. He’s optimistic about the future. Today, the path to corporate success is showing a broad set of skills in a variety of industries and being able to put different things together. Gary is concerned with China’s move on AI and their urbanization leading to an increase in creativity. CES Asia has been happening for five years now with a growing level of innovation.

Ninja Future

Gary’s book, Ninja Future, is for people who want to understand what’s going on today and what we should expect in the future. Big companies used to have an advantage; however, they are slow to change. Startups have to adapt to survive in a rapidly changing marketplace. If you act like a ninja, you have to have flexibility to move and change quickly. Get a team that’s not like you. Ninjas are people who recognize that change is afoot. The book also includes life hacks and ideas, a tech overview, and things in Gary’s life that made a difference.

For More Information

For more information or to connect with Gary see https://www.cta.tech. CES is held each January in Las Vegas.

You can also check out Gary's previous best-sellers, "Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses" (HarperCollins, 2013) and "The Comeback: How Innovation will Restore the American Dream" (Beaufort, 2011).

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 124 – Amy Radin, Author of The Change Maker’s Playbook & FinTech Guru, Ep. 121 – Herman Miller’s Melissa Steach on Design Innovation, and Ep. 102 – Sunayna Tuteja with TD Ameritrade on FinTech Innovation.

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play

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Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs and Author of Escaping the Build Trap: How effective product management creates value. She believes that as companies scale, they lose track of what makes them successful and they just “ship.” Companies forget to bring products back to the overall strategy and talk with their customers. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Melissa about getting out of the build trap and having a customer-centric culture.

Companies in the Build Trap - Software startup - Growing and trying to exit. Look for product managers early. Can get out of build trap. - Enterprises - Haven’t scaled through software. Brings in others to be product managers. A new discipline. Struggles with build trap.

As companies scale, they are close to the customer. As they execute, they forget to talk to the customer. Athena Health developed a portal for user research with its customers.

Escaping the Build Trap Takeaways - Explains how to think about Product Management - Step-by-Step processes - Helps people understand what Product Management is and how to set it up. - Helps managers implement a system.

Product Trends - More people understand discipline - Silicon Valley thought - You own software, streamline, talk to customers, and turn ideas into business models - Agile school of thought - Product owner vs. product managers - Similar roles

Product Manager Role - Has authority on how to build, and sometimes on what to build. - Teaches product managers to question why. Can the team build it in a better way? Push back. Show why it should be different.

For More Information:

For more information on product management or to connect with Melissa, see http://www.produxlabs.com, https://melissaperri.com or on https://twitter.com/lissijean. You can find her book, Escaping the Build Trap on Amazon.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 119 – Voltage Control’s Douglas Ferguson on Inside Innovation, Ep. 99 – Ryan Jacoby with Machine & Author of Making Progress, and Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres with Product Talk.

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play

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Vivek Bedi has worked in both corporate and startup innovation. His experiences range from positions at Goldman Sachs, to running his own company. Now at Northwestern Mutual, Vivek is the Head of Consumer Experience, Digital Products, working in both New York and Milwaukee. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Vivek about Northwestern Mutual's digital transformation.

Vivek's team is responsible for everything digital that touches Northwestern Mutual’s 4.3 million clients. Three years ago, 150,000 of Northwestern Mutual's customers used their digital products. Today, over 1.8 million customers are engaged in the digital experience.

Culture Change

Northwestern Mutual is changing the culture around digital development, innovation, and collaboration. - New York had a startup culture, but Milwaukee had subject matter expertise. Both matter. How do they work together? - Pizza Pie teams - Developed small teams across two cities, tasked with one charter and putting something out every two weeks. Teams are virtual and cross-functional (product, design engineers and business) that have standup meetings every day. - Three years ago there were 89 digital releases. Last year, there were 4,005. - Culture has also become research and iterative, through research communities with both advisors and customers.

Challenges

Vivek has had to overcome a variety of challenges, including: - Getting people to believe the new model will work. The right approach is not reading a book about Agile or Lean. - Highlighting the Pizza Pie team process as a model for other projects. Now Northwestern Mutual has 30+ teams. - Pizza Pie teams have both a product lead and engineering lead. - When building talent, Vivek looks for people who can bring people together, gel with groups, and understand different perspectives - Now Northwestern Mutual is trying to understand if the model can work with big systems and legacy components. - Access to customers is a big theme in Vivek’s work. 60% of his time is spent with advisors, learning the nuances of the business, tools, and concepts. On the client side, he must design for all types of customers, including those who type, swipe, and print.

For More Information

Connect with Vivek on Twitter @Vivbedior http://www.vivekbedi.com

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 127 – Vanguard & CEC’s John Buhl on Lean Startup at Scale; Ep. 123 – Gatorade’s Xavi Cortadellas on Breakthrough Innovation ; and Ep. 42 – John Bungert with MetLife

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play

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Ajay Rajani is an investor, entrepreneur, and author of Navigating the shift to a ‘portfolio career’ - How we should think about our professional identities — when they’re designed to change. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, and Ajay talk about building and highlighting a portfolio career.

After leading Nexxt, a digital remote accelerator that helps people take ideas and turn them into experiments, Ajay launched Mural. Mural helps people create portfolios based on skills and linked assets. It also makes it easy to curate versions of yourself for different people.

Defining a Portfolio Career

A portfolio career emphasizes passions, curiosity, and self-actualization. Types of jobs where a portfolio may apply: 1) Someone who wears multiple hats, 2) Someone who wears one hat, but in various contexts, 3) Someone who has different passions to highlight like copywriting and animal activist, and 4) Someone who is building a portfolio like VCs and freelancers.

Portfolio Growth

The portfolio trend is increasing because we are adding new skills all the time and it’s easier to share and collaborate online. For freelancers, a portfolio helps customers understand their products, services, frameworks, and templates. It also allows freelancers to productize the services they provide and create a level of trust and fit for customers.

A Portfolio for Corporate Innovators

For corporate innovators, with tons of skills and know-how, a portfolio helps to unlock and curate examples of their best work. It can highlight 5 or 6 work assets and can help innovators think through what can they replicate, what are their experience and skills, and what are they comfortable sharing.

For More Information

To find out more about Mural or Ajay check out Muralapp.io/ajayrajani.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 117 – Nicole Rufuku, Author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy; Ep. 93 – Natalie Fratto w/ SVB; and Ep. 48 – Founders of Nex.tt

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play

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Michael Frankel is the Managing Director of Deloitte’s New-venture Accelerator, a strategy and operations team for new business models. He believes people need to disrupt themselves continually or they will fall behind.

Emergence of the Hybrid The broader trend of the journey from human to tech is not happening instantly. Things that require judgment and strategy, need a hybrid solution. A lot of technology has moved ahead of the user’s ability to use them. For example, we’ve digitized everything, because companies wanted the data. Now they are suffering from death by data. Talent profiles, of those better at adapting, are the Connector and Implementor. These are people who can be super users and use the info to solve a business problem. Product managers are critical with the adaptability to collaborate across technologies.

Technology that improves Human Life Conceptual technology that improves human life is an area Michael is excited about. AI, RPA and machine learning can solve a concrete problem in areas we can drive metrics from.

Corporations & Startups Corporations interacting with startups is a great challenge. They have mirror image problems. Hard to self disrupt for the corporation. Interacting with startups helps corporate think differently and break the rules. Startups have a blank sheet. Both can benefit from each other. Tactics to collaborate: 1 ) Align your innovation and corporate venturing efforts with people who know sector. 2) Create an environment that allows you to interact. Startups want to talk to people that know the space and can give advice and access.

For More Information

Find Michael Frankel on LinkedIn or at www.michaelfrankel.net.

You might also be interested in his publications:

Mergers & Acquisitions Basics The Key Steps of Acquisitions, Divestitures, and Investments - 2nd Edition
Mergers & Acquisitions Deal-Makers: Building a Winning Team - 2nd Edition

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy: - Ep. 118 – ExxonMobil’s Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock on Corporate Innovation - Ep. 115 – Doug Branson, Author of The Future of Tech is Female - Ep. 112 – Ralph Welborn, Author of Topple on Corporate Innovation

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play

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Simone Ahuja, Author of Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business---Before the Competition Does, researches barriers that are preventing large companies from innovating internally. Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation talks with Simone about these innovation barriers and what managers and leaders can do to support innovators.

Highlights from the discussion:

Why is it so hard to innovate? - Lack of alignment - Disconnect between senior leaders and feet on the street. Lack of knowledge in the middle. Innovation is a relatively new discipline. There's a difference in metrics and incentives. Need to establish new metrics at all levels, creating space for innovation. - Innovation is different in companies that are large and older, where culture is deep. Not specific to the industry. - Need to encourage people to put forward innovative ideas (Value-creation innovation). It's the pathway to innovation, but not everyone has to be an innovator or intrapreneur.

Innovation Principles - Who is innovating inside large organizations or as a side hustle? How do we harness that? Engage people so they feel satisfied and want to stay around. Only 14% of college grads want to work in large corporations e.g., Medtronic. - How do you identify those people? Managers seem to know who they are. Action-oriented and risk-taking. Don't know how to support them. Need to provide "air cover." Built on trust, autonomy, and space. Assisting people in transitional innovation. - Managers need to have the Idea of fluid and agility. How do you manage info and change? How do we create flexibility in our organizations?

What's exciting you about this space? - Optimistic that innovation is becoming more of a discipline. - The human side of innovation. Passion and purpose and why to harness it.

To find out more, you can purchase Simon's book Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business---Before the Competition Does or learn more at www.Blood-orange.com or on Twitter @simoneahuja.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 124 - Amy Radin, Author of The Change Maker's Playbook & FinTech Guru, Ep. 109 - Greg Larkin, Corporate Entrepreneur and Author of "This Might Get Me Fired, and Ep. 78 - Katherine Manuel w/ Thomson Reuters.

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play

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Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, is an expert on Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation, talks with Jana about the evolution, promises, and risks of Artificial Intelligence. Jana will be speaking at the E.N. Thompson Forum, in Lincoln, NE, on Feb 26, 2019.

Highlights from the discussion: - Jana trained as a mathematician and has worked at organizations like the National Science Foundation, Los Alamos, and a search engine company where she’s always used AI as a tool. - Computing power is now commoditized, and there's lots of data from databases like ImageNet. These changes have brought Artificial Intelligence to the forefront again. - AI examples - Calendar scheduling, language translation, Waze, and Google - Machine learning vs. AI - e.g., Artificial light vs. natural light. Ask has the machine learned? Did it calculate how to respond? Did it recognize the context? - We need to understanding AI risks, but people should have a realist attitude. Don’t run in fear. We’ll find more things to do as AI takes over the basics. - Microsoft’s Tay has been live in China for years. Big difference in internet culture in China vs. US. Tech Companies have had major gaffes on AI applications. There is plenty of thought on how to prevent bad things from happening. - China is using lots of data and getting practice and application with AI. Government is also investing. The US should invest in infrastructure. Could make a big difference. - In Europe, GDPR will allow us to be better custodians of our data. - Nara Logics has an AI platform which enables engineers to put AI into their products faster. e.g., Proctor and Gamble creates advisor products using AI. One-on-one customer communication.

To connect with Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, find her online or at https://naralogics.com

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy: Ep. 107 - Azeem Azhar, Author of Exponential View, Ep. 101 - Daniel Fozzati with IdeaLondon on System Innovation; and Ep. 80 - Ari Popper w/ SciFutures

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play

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Ted Schilowitz serves as Paramount Pictures' Futurist, as well as an advisor to the University of Nebraska’s Johnny Carson School of Emerging Media Arts. He sees himself as an explorer, with an eye toward storytelling and creativity. His modern lab rat approach, allows him to experiment with all types of technology and determine what makes it valuable for the future. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside founder, and Ted discuss the intersection between storytelling and human behavior. Specifically, they address next-generation screens to create the illusion of reality.

Highlights from the discussion: - VR is an emerging process of teaching people about new ways of using more powerful screens in their lives. - People want entertainment when they want it and where they want it. Connecting the screen to your eyes and your brain, something that doesn’t exist yet at scale. - Experiments with VR, AR, and mixed-reality headsets. Logging hours in experimenting, then bringing back experiences to the studio. - The power is accelerated to create an illusion of things that aren’t real. There are ethical, safety and truth concerns. - Mixed reality or extended reality is the thing to watch. - VR is a multi-level/multi-year evolution. We’ve seen good progress, investment, and predictive analysis. - Viable businesses are enterprise and heavy and light industrial markets. Things are getting adopted when people use them differently. - Read The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christianson. - How can people tap into creativity and adaptability? Read Creativity Inc, about Pixar, where story means everything and technology is used in service to the story.

To find out more or connect, find Ted on Twitter at @virtualtedfor email him at ted_schilowitz@paramount.com. You can also learn more from his augmented mixed-reality discussion on the AR Show or from various articles found online.

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy: Ep. 107 - Azeem Azhar, Author of “Exponential View”; Ep 106 - Amy Jo Kim, Innovation Consultant and Author of Game Thinking, Ep 80 - Ari Popper w/ SciFutures; and Ep 60 - David Mattin w/ TrendWatching

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If you don’t like disruption, you are going to HATE irrelevance.

Chris Olsen of Drive Capital talks about investing in world-class companies located in the Midwest. Drive Capital, a venture firm based in Columbus, OH, developed a $550 million fund with this aim. Chris believes the Midwest will see more billion-dollar companies in the next five years, and based on GDP, the Midwest is the 4th largest economy in the world. If there are more Venture Firms in the Midwest, we’ll see faster growth with LPs making more money in Midwest Venture funds than in Silicon Valley companies.

Why is today the right time? The Midwest is typically cheaper than the coasts, and with cloud computing, you can rent all the engineering and computing power you need. The access to technical specialty is now unlocking other geographies, like China and Europe. We are melding knowledge and tech and making advances in areas such as car insurance, healthcare, taxi rides, etc. There’s also an imbalance of venture capital invested in the Midwest. Dive Capital is spending time in the Artificial Intelligence, Insurance, Robotics, and Ed-tech markets.

When developing the fund, Drive Capital made the mistake of replicating a Silicon Valley approach. You can’t build companies in the Midwest and assume capital is unlimited. They learned to determine when products are working or not. Stop earlier if they aren’t hitting milestones. They also thought they'd have to import talent from the coasts, but have had a much better success rate in using employees from existing businesses, and retraining them in a startup. There is an engine of talent that doesn’t want to go to coasts. E.g., Root Insurance. Taking advantage of Nationwide Insurance experiences to help startups succeed.

Chris hasn’t seen a lot of change in existing businesses. He believes it’s just time before some of these companies will wake up and deal with irrelevance. What should companies do? Stop trying to be venture capitalists. Companies can innovate and work with startups, but should invest in Venture Capital firms. VCs will share their best innovation with the companies. Big companies have different skills than startups.

For more information or to connect, email Chris Olsen at chris@drivecapital.com or see www.drivecapital.com

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy: Ep 105- Randy Komisar with Kleiner Perkins and Straight Talk for Startups Author; Ep 91- Paul Singh @ I/O Innovation Summit; Ep 65- Jason Calacanis, Angel Investor and Author of “Angel”; and Ep 52- Ann Winblad w/ Hummer Winblad VP

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Why do some people have innovative, creative ideas that change the game for everyone and challenge the way life is, and others don’t? Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside talks with Arjuna Ardagh about how brilliance and innovation can become more of a predictable outcome and less of an accident. They discuss his new book, Radical Brilliance - The Anatomy of How and Why People Have Original Life-changing ideas and the four phases of the Brilliance Cycle.

Brilliance Cycle Defined

12:00 - Moments where you transcend your mind. Get to the middle ground. Not in a hurry. Brain chemistry changes from Serotonin to Dopamine 3:00 - Full creative flow. Effortlessly. Intention to take a creative act. Movement from intention to accomplishment. Brain chemistry changes to Testosterone/Estrogen and Oxytocin. Begin to operate within limits, creates stress. 6:00 - Accomplishing goals. Parasympathetic flooding begins. Start to have experiences of regret, when you are operating in constrained limits. Then movement to learning and humility. 9:00 - Recognition of your limits and boundaries. Brain chemical Gava, permits you to rest. Your deeper self or divine intelligence returns, then it's moved back into awaking.

Innovators who are serially brilliant have all quadrants active. The cycle can also be a way to map what gets in the way of brilliance. Blockages include addiction, judgment, aspiration resistance, and looping. Recognize where the cycle is blocked and apply individual practices to unblock brilliance including diet, sleep, supplements, sexuality, friendship, and vacations. Rest is critical for innovators. Consider living in natural rhythms. Sleep soon after dark and wake before the sun. The most creative time is the hour before dawn.

More Information To connect with Arjuna or to learn more, check out RadicalBrilliance.com.

More Podcasts If you liked this podcast, you should also check out: Ep. 110 - Shaina Stigler with Betwixt on Building Coworker Trust; Ep. 104 Shane Snow, Author of Dream Teams: Working Together without Falling Apart, and Ep. 12 - Liz Elam from Link Coworking and GCUC

Free Innovation Newsletter Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events.

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Sean Moffitt is Managing Director of WikiBrands and Author of WikiBrands: How to Reinvent Your Business in a Customer Connected Marketplace. He focuses on helping people develop a transformational arsenal, including skills in culture and talent, innovation and future proofing, technology and digital, and leadership/pivoting business models.

Highlights of Sean's conversation with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Founder, include:

What’s changing the corporate landscape: - Speed at which things are happening. 7x faster than 25 years ago. - Startups and Scaleups are much easier to create. Corporate innovation needs a wake-up call. - Leverage corporate advantages with startup innovation. - Culture eats strategy, innovation, and tech for breakfast. Keys are people.

New WikiBrands Research Study - Looking at the difference in how startups, scaleups, and corporates approach things and innovation in the wild. What’s working? - Hoping to find a definition of innovation and more focus on breakthrough Innovation. - Business Models - 32 of the most competitive business models of the future. What works? - Approaches to Market - e.g. Design or Agile - Different types of modes of practice. Who is the most successful using the different strategies? - Research is based on collaborative thought, with insight from nine innovators and answers from 50 survey questions.

More Information For more information or to connect with Sean, check out Wiki-brands.com and take the innovation survey. You can also search on social media under #corporateinnovationplaybook.

If you liked this podcast, you should also check out, Ep. 112– Ralph Welborn, Author of Topple on Corporate Innovation, Ep. 98– Sean Ammirati with Birchmere Ventures & Author of The Science of Growth, and Ep 87 – Tom Lockwood and Edgar Papke on Innovation by Design

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Dr. Victoria Gerstman is the Assistant Director at Canopy Insight, a cultural insight and innovation consultancy. She helps companies and brands understand the cultural significance of different phenomena. Using semiotics, a method to interpret signs and symbols of culture which brands operate in, Victoria helps companies learn what’s important to people.

Canopy Insight works with many large brands around the world, to help them understand culturally specific meanings and the way meanings change over time. These meaning could be different across markets and demographic groups. This recognition is especially important for brands that have sub-brands which need to remain culturally relevant, that have a multi-market presence, and to avoid assuming home markets trends, are dominate in other places.

New Emergent Trends: - Shift away from individualism towards communal experience. - Changes in ideas of ownership. E.g. - Do you need to own a vacuum. - Mainstreaming of sustainability for affordability. - On-demand everything in the home is something to watch. - Home space is changing. Home and work barriers are being broken down. Homes are now sites of production, like cottage industries. - Sexual and gender identities - More understanding of distinct identities and new ways of living.

To find out more, connect with Victoria at canopyinsight.comor Victoria@canopyinsight.com

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy Ep. 60– David Mattin with TrendWatching, Ep. 69– Slava Rubin, co-founder of Indiegogo, and Ep. 80– Ari Popper with SciFutures

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Paul Jarrett is co-founder/CEO of Bulu and a former Inside Outside podcast co-host. Bulu creates private label subscription box programs for large companies like Disney, GNC, Lululemon, and Crayola. In this episode, Brian Ardinger and Paul discuss new trends in big brand marketing, including getting in front of specific customer segments in new ways. Paul believes that in this changing marketplace, big companies are willing to collaborate and “horse trade,” but are also focusing on key metrics like customer acquisition costs. Key highlights include:

Tell us about Bulu 1. Bulu is now at 250 FTE and managing revenue of over $50 million. Challenge is finding the right people to help scale. 2. Companies that want a physical interaction with customers are using subscription boxes.

Key factors when working with large brands 1. People managing the project have to get stuff done, transcend the business, and get along. Bulu won’t work with companies that don’t provide that. 2. Companies need entrepreneurs to understand working with startups. Non-entrepreneurs don’t see beyond the box, to see things like revenue and margin flexibility. 3. Companies need to invest in the relationship with a startup for the future.

When to walk away 1. Unhealthy focus on driving the price down. 2. When a person starts saying “we” or “us,” Paul feels they’re on the same team. He’s not interested in a big company serving as the “coach” of the project.

How to get in front of big brands 1. Pick up the phone. Call every week. 2. Social media - Friend and Follow key people everywhere. 3. Innovation should be in the corporate person’s title.

For More Info To find out more about Paul Jarrett or Bulu, connect at pauljarrett.com or tweet him @Pauljarrett.

See Paul and Stephanie Jarrett on PBS's show Startup - Season 6, Ep 8

If you like this topic, you might also be interested in Ep 114 - Canva’s Cameron Adams on Democratization of Design; Ep 105 - Randy Komisar with Kleiner Perkins and Straight Talk for Startups Author; and Ep 96 - Chris Shipley - Author, Advisor, Innovation Advocate at 2017 I/O Innovation Summit.

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Creating environments where innovation can thrive

Aaron Proietti is author of the new book, Today’s Innovator. He’s spent 17 years working in the innovation space, including leading initiatives at Transamerica and Capital One. Aaron believes everyone wants innovation to happen, but the traits that make the company successful are the very things that are standing in the way of innovation.

Today’s Innovator

In his new book, Today’s Innovator, Aaron focuses on how to create an environment where innovation can thrive. He focuses on strategy, culture, systems and that YOU are today’s innovator. Who do you need to be to thrive in a complex organization (people, politics and traits). Aaron also examines the stages of Innovation maturity and business models. Can you have core business operations, but push innovation and invent new things? It’s difficult to find the balance.

Innovation should be considered a business competency

Systems are not setup to be innovative. You need repeatable, scalable, and sustainable ways to be innovative. Innovation should be considered a business competency. Companies used to bring in consultants to help develop ideas. When the consultants left, the idea generation stopped. They didn’t change the nature of the business. Organizations are now talking about culture and competency. When you build a leadership and more nimble culture, it allows for innovation to last and be sustained.

How do you get over the hump?

Companies need a strong champion at the highest levels of the organization. Sometimes innovation becomes important because one aspect is not meeting objectives. The champion needs to call out roadblocks. This process is broken or we need to go around the process here. Agitate organization to create a new awareness or muscle.

Making changes from the middle

If companies don’t have a burning platform, how can a person in the middle of the org make changes? Aaron’s book, Today’s Innovator, is designed to help them. They need to build a new skill set which includes: becoming an Innovation leader, building high performing teams, setting expectations, strong innovation network, empathy, and how to lead and promote change.

Where to start?

To create quick wins, start with the innovation layer, instead of the core operating business. At Transamerica they started with the data layer, because they had tons of data and a great data science team.

You can Preorder Aaron’s book, Today’s Innovator, on Amazon or contact him on LInkedIn.

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy Ep 95 - Steve Glaveski with Collective Campus and Episode 124 -Amy Radin, Author of The Change Maker’s Playbook. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Changing everything while disrupting nothing

John Buhl spent the last 13 years at Vanguard, innovating at all levels. He loved applying Lean Startup principles at scale and discovering what elements needed to change. Unfortunately, he hit many brick walls and found friction to make changes throughout the organization. The system of annual funding, with specific deliverables, was well entrenched. John wanted to understand, how do you shift a large company to be outcome-oriented and realize that old systems can be detrimental.

Recently, John joined the Corporate Entrepreneur Community, formed by Eric Reis and Steve Liguori. Together they discovered three things: every company has the same problems, innovation is not science yet, and there’s a gap in peer-to-peer corporate community learning.

One obstacle to innovating at scale is changing everything while disrupting nothing. John believes companies can succeed with incremental improvements and making it their own. On the team level, companies need to get senior leadership aligned and invested. They also need to have an excellent governance structure, manage change, and have top-down buy-in.

For an individual, pushing against a culture can be risky. Try to align with a leader that allows you to experiment. You’ve got to give the leader evidence that innovation works, in addition to showing them things that didn’t work. Solving tactical barriers such as the budget process and breaking down internal silos, will also generate more speed, flow, and throughput.

FOR MORE INFO

To find out more about Corporate Entrepreneurship Community see Corpentcom.com or find John Buhl on LinkedIn.

If you liked this podcast, try Ep 118 - Exxon Mobil's Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock on Corporate Innovation and Ep 98 - Sean Ammirati with Birchmere Ventures & Author of The Science of Growth

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Barry O’Reilly is the Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. He and Brian Ardinger discuss creating a culture of experimentation in enterprises and seeing everything as an assumption.

Barry came to the U.S. originally from Ireland on a student visa and worked at City Search “putting people on the Internet.” He soon joined a mobile games development company and created a popular game called Wireless Pets. Soon large corporations started calling asking the company to build games. This caused Barry to develop an experimental mindset.

Soon Barry moved to Australia to build next-gen content for E-learning in Southeast Asia. Game design and game theory is teaching new skills in safe environment. It allows for rapid experimentation and behavior. Then Barry joined a consultancy in London called ThoughtWorks. They were pioneers in Agile software development where he worked with companies to reinvent portfolio management and how to fund and test ideas.

Barry’s first book, Lean Enterprise, highlights how to create experimentation in enterprises. Amazon does this well because they have a culture that makes experimentation cheap and fast. They are able to gather better data and are unlearning existing beliefs and learning new ones that can help them break through and innovate.

In his new book, Unlearn, Barry says people recognize that we always have to be learning, but it’s tough to learn new stuff. The limiting factor is the ability to unlearn behavior especially when it’s made you successful. Letting go and moving away from things that limit us, like outdated info. Barry highlights the most bureaucratic regulated companies in his book and describes how these people are making amazing changes.

Barry also hosts Exec Camp, where execs leave their businesses for up to 8 weeks to launch new businesses to disrupt their existing companies. It’s like an accelerator for senior leaders. They learn and unlearn new things about themselves. For example, the International Airlines Group came to Exec Camp, to launch six new ideas to disrupt the airline industry. They tested ideas with customers and had to unlearn the behavior of pushing ideas on customers. They soon began to see everything as an assumption.

We’re conditioned to believe that the way we solve a customer problem is the only way to do it. Tech changes how to solve problems. Startups are able to start with a blank set of assumptions. Individuals get disrupted not companies. If you are adapting your features and behaviors, you won’t be disrupted. May need to shift your tactics or beliefs.

FOR MORE INFO

To find out more, go to Barryoreilly.com on Twitter @BarryOReilly. You can also find his book on Amazon.

If you liked this podcast, try Ep 99 Ryan Jacoby with Machine, Ep 43 Ash Maurya, Author of Scaling Lean, and Ep. 20 Lisa Kay Solomon with Design a Better Business

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Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results

Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean (O'Reilly))

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Innovation is No Longer Optional

Doug Hall has been in the innovation space for more than 30 years. His new book, Driving Eureka!, is about finding, filtering and fast-tracking to market and includes an update on what is continuously being learned about creating, communicating, and commercializing ideas.

In 1986, Doug started Eureka Ranch, an early "accelerator" program focused on commercializing products. He took a system-driven approach to innovation to enable businesses to increase speed and decrease risk. In 2008, Doug created Innovation Engineering, a field of study that will be on over 100 campuses by 2019. Innovation Engineering focuses on how to find, filter and fast-track ideas. He backs it with software that helps users find data through tools like rapid cycles, sales forecasts, writing patterns, and project management designed for innovation.

Doug’s seen many ideas get compromised through development. His software captures data and helps businesses use the data as they go through the process. It’s designed to deal with uncertainty and helps companies document, creating quantitative information. Doug uses a Deming approach. Innovation has to be in everyone. May need a culture shift in companies, but have to change the person before you can change the organization. Culture change two ways: led by the top or enable the workers. Train to work smarter in their job.

It’s all about cycles: run experiment, study what you learned, do it again. How does a cycle work? An idea faces three death threats: market risks, tech risks, and organizational risks. Then you get a meaningful uniqueness score. Then put the idea through a 4-step Deming Cycle: Plan (what are you trying to do), Do (what experiment are you running), Study (why did it work), and Act (What are you going to do. Go around again or change, adapt).

SPECIAL BONUS: To find out more, go to Doughall.com/VIP and you’ll find a one-hour audio Book with a prescription for success and to help you understand your strengths and abilities to innovate.

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy Ep. 109- Greg Larkin, Author of This Might Get Me Fired, Ep. 95- Steve Glaveski with Collective Campus and Ep. 94- Andy Cars with Lean Ventures

GET THE LATEST RESOURCES: Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Amy Radin is the author of The Change Maker's Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company. She was previously a Senior Executive at American Express, Citi Group, and eTrade. Amy's experience includes leading the digital transformation of Citi Group’s credit card business ($5b bottom line). Today, Amy enjoys being on the outside of big companies and startups, to help connect the dots between growth aspirations and outcomes.

Key Takeaways in Brian Ardinger's Interview with Amy: - The human condition is set up to stop things that haven’t happened before. - Big companies have everything they need, but can’t see the near-term value of innovation. Startups bring speed and agility but lack understanding of scale. Magic is when they can work together. - To “seed” ideas, take concepts and put them out to potential users. Then use the project to translate user reaction into a business model. The mistake is trying to predict too closely what people will do. - To kill innovation is to apply traditional metrics to ideas. Can’t expect results immediately. Instead ask, what are assumptions to get x% of market share. As you move forward, refine your benchmarks and results. - To be customer-centric, understand needs that make economic sense. What’s the problem we want to solve for the people we want to serve? - Basic business model for financial services hasn’t changed. Innovation is happening on the front end, but little is happening on the back end. Finance companies are asking the same questions as 15 years ago. - Innovation is solvable. It’s not a pipe dream, even in the most complex organizations. It's all about execution. - Utilize the Seek, Seed, Scale framework.

DOWNLOAD FREE RESOURCES at www.amyradin.com/insideoutside, including concepts from her book, an infographic on Seek, Seed, Scale framework. and take a quiz about your innovation readiness and ideas where you can personally focus. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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There’s no way to innovate if you only stay in your court

Xavi Cortadellas is the Head of Innovation and Design at Gatorade. He focuses on innovating in the newest spaces, like tech and services, rather than incremental innovation. Gatorade invented sports drinks 50 years ago and now has an 80% market share. With little room to expand, they actively look for new spaces to grow. Because Gatorade is a huge part of sports in America, when entering a new market, they are careful to examine what’s the right things to do and to always have patience and perseverance.

Gatorade started their innovation journey in 2010 with the G Series. They wanted to expand their product portfolio for before and after sports occasions, such as energy drinks and recovery shakes. In 2015, they changed their approach to viewing themselves as a sports fuel company, providing solutions for the 24/7 athlete in multiple spaces and with numerous products. Some products worked, while others did not.Today, Gatorade is in the third wave of innovation and is now looking at services. Xavi believes in the future, Gatorade may be able to provide sports nutrition information through tech like wearables and heel implants or offer recovery tips and move from delivering products to providing monetized services.

As the quarterback of a small innovation team, Xavi corals different groups that touch innovation, such as a daily relationship with R and D. He also works with external design agencies, external tech agencies, and sports marketing teams, which connect him with professional sports teams. Gatorade must understand what the professional athletes want and need. However, working with them can be challenging. Products and services must work the first time, and there’s no time for incubation. When moving products and services from the pros to consumers, Gatorade will make some changes, but already has received valuable input about the products or services from the pro athletes.

Prioritizing new ideas at Gatorade comes down to a few things. First is money. What is the size of the prize? Second is an equity play. Is it a good niche investment for Gatorade and does it create a story that helps them tap into new spaces? Third is complexity. Do they have the right capabilities to accomplish this idea? Cross-functional teams help vet this question and typically have a reasonable consensus on prioritizing and killing ideas. Applying the proper discipline up front, helps the company stay successful.Xavi believes two pitfalls for innovation teams include the tension between the core and innovation, and the complexity of entering new territories.

For more information or to contact Xavi, go to Gatorade.com or email him at Xavi.cortadellas@pepsico.com

If you liked this podcast, you might also enjoy Jack Elkins with Orlando Magic, Santhi Ramesh with Hersheys, and Derek Mauk with Anheuser Busch. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Jeff Rohrs is the CMO of Yext and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers, and The Everywhere Brand ebook. He’s also a former VP at Salesforce and ExactTarget. In this episode, Brian Ardinger and Jeff talk about managing content and brands across the web and how hard it is to put perfect information into consumer’s hands everywhere. Yext uses a digital knowledge management (dkm) platform to automate this process.

With consumer behavior changing, 73% of a business’s traffic is now taking place off their website. The smallest content is becoming the most important, such as updating store hours and phone numbers. Companies need to update all the customer endpoints that matter, which is different from SEO.

Jeff's book, The Everywhere Brand, with co-author Jay Baer (also the author of Talk Triggers), discusses how brands are going to have to be everywhere. The challenge is how they will control their appearance around the web. You can download The Everywhere Brand ebook or watch a YouTube video on The Everywhere Brand with Jay Baer and Jeff Rohrs (31 min)

As for future trends, Jeff is watching the use of voice. Voice refers to voice commands or voice as discovery. AI is also growing, such as in visual search with Google Lens and Google Photo. More than 85% of Americans are using AI in services like Uber and Google. Jeff believes you can’t control UI and AI, but you can manage the info it has about your company.

Additional knowledge resources include Smart Brief and EMarketer. To find out more about Yext, see yext.com or connect with Jeff on Twitter at @jkrohrs

If you liked this podcast, you might also enjoy our interview with Patrick Campbell with ProfitWell on Growth, Pricing and SaaS or Justin Mares, Co-Author of Traction

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Melissa Steach is an ergonomic specialist with Herman Miller. She works to educate various communities about ergonomics in the workplace while valuing and focusing on the importance of the human for design innovation. Brian Ardinger and Melissa take a look at innovation from a design perspective and how that can impact the workplace and home environments.

The built environment helps human growth, relationships and caring for the health of people. New healthcare research is reflecting this idea. Trends we are seeing include multiple generations living together and people placing more emphasis on health.

Companies can create innovative environments by asking people what they want. Don’t invest in a pingpong table or junk food if no one is interested. Today, companies need to take a hard look at their space to attract talent, because one-third of a company’s costs go towards real estate and a similar amount goes towards human costs. Look at "who" your company is and understand and develop a built environment that reflects that.

A person and organization must find fit. If not aligned, they will self-select. The more cohesive your organization is, and mission/purpose is visible, people will know if they are a good fit. Take care of people when they are there. If they don’t feel well, they don’t perform well. Ergonomics plays a role in a company’s bottom line.

Herman Miller values a strategy called placemaking. It’s a personality chart for your organization. Start by examining the big three: conference room, work desk, and private offices. Need to optimize those spaces for need or make them fun.

To stay relevant, Herman Miller focuses on being a human-centered research design company. Years ago they made the first splint with curved wood, similar to the design of their Eames chair. It has stood the test of time. They also don’t lose sight of how important the person is to everything they do. However, their drivers, motives, and needs must keep evolving.

For more information, contact Melisa Steach on LinkedIn or at Melissa_steach@hermanmiller.com

If you liked this podcast, you might also enjoy Ep. 70 - Jyoti Shukla with Nordstrom

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After years of working in startups, Sean Johnson and his team began getting approached by enterprises. These companies needed help moving on ideas, accessing specialists and understanding how to be iterative. Today, Sean's company Digital Intent works with venture-backed startups and Fortune 1000 companies wanting to be tech-enabled businesses. He is also a general partner at Founder Equity.

Brian and Sean discuss a variety of corporate innovation strategies. Here are a few highlights: - Companies need to be making lots of little bets, with little bits of funds. Think like investors. Spread the risk. - Corporations innovation teams can have a similar cadence to a venture fund. Life of 7-10 years and 3 deals a year. Team churn concern. How to preserve knowledge. - Have conversations with corporate teams who are connected with customers early. Act like a startup and get realistic feedback for needs and products. - Partner with startups. Startups are getting a channel they didn’t have, but are putting in resources and time to appease the corporation. Good strategy for corporations. - Try an EIR (Entrepreneurs-in-residence). No legacy baggage. - Arm corporate startup teams with a coach. - Develop internal VC boards with members that are external and bring domain experience. - Leverage the data companies collect by understanding how to use the data. This may create opportunities for less disruptive and more incremental improvements. - Traditional service companies (law, accountancies, and management consultants) will automate significant portions of their work. Reinvent these business models. - Use more tactical growth accounting. Manage to growth metrics and experiments.

To connect with Sean Johnson, follow him at @intentionally, Digintent.com or founderequity.com

If you like this interview, you might also be interested in Ep. 98- Sean Ammirati with Birchmere Ventures & Author of The Science of Growth and Ep. 54- Robert Walcott with Kellogg on Innovation Trends

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Douglas Ferguson, founder of Voltage Control, a company focused on design sprints and getting new products to market. Douglas tries to look at the product as a whole unit and is convinced that ideas are worthless. It’s more about focused execution. Douglas brings an operators viewpoint, as he moves into consulting and thinking about Innovation from a broader perspective.

Brian and Douglas discuss some of the problems companies face, when building from within, including the desire to standardize. Companies try to jam everything together and avoid focusing on customers’ needs. For example, AT&T buys other company's services and then takes them to market. With this strategy, AT&T will never be able to provide a superb service, because they are so far from the consumer.

When companies try to innovate, often the problem is putting a lot of resource constraints on projects. Douglas uses a framework called Eco Cycles to view the innovation processes. Projects move from birth to maturity to creative destruction to rebirth. In between, there is a rigidity trap and poverty trap. Many big company projects get stuck in that poverty trap.

Douglas also highlights an interesting article from Josh Baer @CapitalFactory called the Texas manifesto. In the article, it explains that Austin will never be a Silicon Valley, but that to succeed Texas needs to connect their four major cities. With that aim, Josh and others load up a bus with VCs, startups, and mentors and travel to a Texas city each month. Check it out at https://austinstartups.com/the-texas-startup-manifesto-42f06f2a7075

Austin is starting to see organizations mature and more second and third-time entrepreneurs taking more swings at bat. However, startups doing big bold things and raising large amounts of capital are still getting sucked out to Silicon Valley.

To contact Douglas and read about Voltage Control check out Voltagecontrol.co

For more content like this, check out Brian's interview with Teresa Torres at Product Talk - https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-90-teresa-torres-w-product-talk/

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In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger talks with Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock with ExxonMobil. They discuss successes and challenges of innovating in a large corporation. Christopher and Kim will also be speaking at the Back End of Innovation Conference in Phoenix, AZ on Oct 17-19, 2018.

Key strategies and lessons they learned include: - Create space for idea creation and tools to process. - Protect people and their time from their existing roles. - Train the managers of intrapreneurs on how to treat them differently. - Teach the right senior leadership how to understand innovation. - Develop a VC board/Accountability model to guide investments in new ideas. Innovation teams return for more funding and identify what they need to learn. - Try smallest versions of everything and then iterate, but be prepared to kill or park ideas that don’t move. Need clear decision points. Killing ideas was a considerable hurdle to get past. - Use data to validate every step. - Create internal education opportunities like a podcast.

At the BEI conference, Christopher and Kim will share more of their journey and stories through a two-hour workshop. They want people to leave with information they can use. Key ideas will include: - Understand healthy tension between intrapreneurs and leadership. - Employees can’t work differently when they use the same old tools. - New innovation teams can’t be treated as they always have.

If you’d like to connect with Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock and learn more about their Innovation initiative, message them on LinkedIn.

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy Ep 100 - Tom Bianculli with Zebra and Ep 83 - Navin Kunde with Clorox

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In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger has a great conversation with Nicole Rufuku, author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy: Three steps to improve performance and diversity. They discuss how to hire for innovation in a world that’s changing.

In her book, Nicole gives teams a set of innovation principals to use in the hiring process. They are: 1. Collaboration 2. Continuous improvement 3. Focusing on the user

Nicole also provides three specific tools. They are: 1. Star mapping - Determine nine attributes of someone you want to hire. What is going to give you an advantage in the market? 2. Structuring the interview process - Predetermine your questions as a team and ask in the same order. 3. Evaluating candidates needs to be data-driven - Score candidates after every question, bringing bias near zero.

Connect with Nicole on Twitter @Nicolerufuku or Nicolerufuku@gmail.com to preorder her book.

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io

You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Jeremy Lockhorn is VP, Experience Strategy, Mobile + Emerging Technology at SapientRazorfish and has served a wide variety of roles during his 20-year tenure. The common thread is on a focus of what’s next. In this podcast, Jeremy and Brian Ardinger discuss technology changes over the past 10 years and the implications for the future. They know each other from their days in the digital signage space.

When the iPhone was launched more than 11 years ago, it was immediately breakthrough technology. What people didn’t know, was how big and disruptive it would be. We never imagined how seamless the phone would become in our lives today. Jeremy believes the Fourth Industrial Revolution is coming. He defines it as an Intersection of emerging tech such as smart home, self-driving vehicles, wearable tech, AI, VR/AR, and smart speakers, etc. Of course, the phone has a role to play in everything.

The next 10 years will move faster and be more disruptive. In the past there was one disruptive tech at a time, now all this new tech is hitting at the same time, with interconnectivity. Consumers are going to expect companies to be where they are. Creating magical experiences for customers. When you make things so simple, the interface fades into the background. Jeremy provides other examples from Whirlpool Appliances and Hertz.

Are companies that will win, the ones that can customize and predict what customers want? Jeremy believes companies must use “Clairvoyance Marketing.” That is removing friction, predicting need, and then completing the task. Anything that does not do that in the future will jar the customer. It’s hard to keep up with that pace of change. Creating collaboration opportunities to drive innovation and bring in outside thinking is crucial. Look at companies like Mercedes Benz and Patron Tequila as early leaders in the space.

Note: Since this recording, Jeremy Lockhorn has left SapientRazorfish and is consulting and public speaking while finding his next full-time gig.

Connect with Jeremy on Twitter at @newmediageek for more information.

For more interviews like this one, check out Brian's interview with David Mattin at TrendWatching - https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-60-david-mattin-w-trendwatching/

GLIDR This episode is sponsored by GLIDR. GLIDR software helps you validate that you’re going to market with products and business models that drive real value. Check them out at https://www.glidr.io/iopodcast For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Doug Branson about his new book The Future of Tech is Women: How to Achieve Gender Diversity.

Brian and Doug start the conversation by looking at trends in the market. Doug outlines the history of women in senior corporate positions. Of the 70 women that have been CEOs of publicly held companies, 70% have MBAs. Of the 27 women that have held exec positions in IT companies (out of 600), two have STEM backgrounds and 25 have business or law backgrounds. Doug believes the current emphasis on STEM for women produces lopsided experience. It won’t take women higher in the company. They also need business and marketing backgrounds. The IT industry, Doug suggests, is the worst of all industries for representing females. In Silicon Valley, the men they bring in, to fill the middle-level ranks using H1B visas, crowds women and minorities out and prevents them from rising in these environments.

Doug’s book, The Future of Tech is Women, is about how industries can generally improve diversity. There’s been little to no emphasis on what corporations can do and lots of emphasis on how women can change what they are doing. Doug recommends 15 ideas that companies can try. He says individuals can also offer earlier and equal treatment of girls, especially exposure to computers, and suggests there are good arguments for single-sex education. We also need an awareness of the nerd and geek phenomenon that happens as teens to prevent girls from getting involved in computers.

When looking from a global perspective, diversity and corporate governance in the US is a back-burner issue. In Asia and Europe, it’s a very front burner issue. Europe has focused on quota laws which has worked in some countries, while women have made no headway in Japan.

Doug disagrees with some of Sheryl Sandberg’s advice in her book Lean In. He says women won’t have 11 different positions climbing the corporate ladder, but rather 3.3 positions on the way to CEO. Also mentoring programs rarely work for women to advance through companies. Australia is now trying mentoring + sponsorship to place women on executive boards there.

What should corporations be implementing? Address work life issues and support women for child birth and rearing without hurting their career. It’s statistically insignificant for a women to take off two years during a working life. Some companies are supporting women this way. Other companies are using a structured search, where they include and have an interview with a minority member. The most important thing for companies is to have this idea of dignity, respect and equality for everyone.

Things are getting better for women. Half of law and medical schools are female, and 40% of MBA programs are women. Sometimes Doug advises women to go where women aren’t, like the Oll and Gas, Ag and Utilies businesses. These industries all have females leaders. On the other side of the coin, things haven’t changed for women. Those in dominant positions in tech are choosing people that look like them and that excludes women.

If you are interested exploring more of these ideas with Doug, you can contact him at branson@pitt.edu or order his book The Future of Tech Is Female at Amazon or NYU Press.

If you are interested in learning more about women in technology and HR trends, check out Inside Outside Innovation Ep. 97 China Gorman on HR trends

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Canva, an easy graphic-design tool website, started six years ago, after two of its founders found success making customizable school yearbooks. Through this process they discovered the power of putting easy-to-use tools in the hands of their customers. Cameron Adams, Canva’s Co-founder and Chief product officer joined the team with his design and tech experience, and Canva was born. Today, Canva, an Australian-based company, has over 10 million users and is valued at $1 billion.

In this episode, Cameron talks with Brian Ardinger about Canva's work bringing goodness to the world through individuals and companies of all sizes. The Canva tools give companies and people the opportunity to easily experiment with design.

One reason, Canva has seen such great success, is due to the experiences and "pain points" the founders had prior to starting the company. As the founders developed the product to address the problems in the market, they continued to do many interviews and prototypes. Canva likes to aim for the vision and then fine tune to make sure they are improving what people like. They do a lot of user testing and surveying, as well as listening to their intuition.

Canva hasn’t seen any disadvantage of building in Australia. Cameron said it was slightly hard to raise funds, when they started. They ended initially with a 50/50 funding split between American and Australian investors. Today it's relatively easy to recruit talent and raise funds. They love being in Sydney.

As a part of the Asian Startup Scene, Canva thought "global" from day one. Asia plays a massive role and diversity in the market, with many different economic and socio-economics to design for. This helps Canva build a better product. As for design aesthetics, there is an international style but each culture has its own details. Last year, Canva was launched in 100 different languages. This year their focus is on deeper localization.

Cameron says as Canva builds more products, they seem to find more opportunities. This year they are tackling presentations. They believe it should be more like a dialogue between the speaker and audience. Canva also recently released an animation tool. There are many additional areas they want to pursue in the future.

For more information, contact Cameron Adams on Twitter at @themaninblue or connect with @canva for questions about their products.

Brian recorded this interview at the Rise Conférence in Hong Kong. For more information see https://riseconf.com

For more interviews like this on on design and product design, listen to Episode 90 - Teresa Torres with Product Talk

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Growth, Pricing and SaaS

Patrick Campbell is the CEO of ProfitWell (formerly Price Intelligently), the software for helping subscription companies with their monetization and retention strategies. ProfitWell also provides free turnkey subscription financial metrics for over 8,000 companies. Prior to ProfitWell, Patrick lead was an Economist at Google and the NSA, an experience he thought was surprisingly similar.

With 50 employees in Boston and Argentina, ProfitWell has been funded by bootstrapping and a growing customer base. They serve about 25 percent of the market.

In Brian Ardinger's interview with Patrick, they started by discussing two important business themes. First, being customer focused and second, placing a high priority on building the team and hiring. Patrick believes a company needs to be direct about the type of culture they want. Focus on the right behaviors and values and bring in a diverse amount of thought.

Patrick then highlighted three key issues that ProfitWell helps SAAS companies focus on: - Utilizing the right value metric. Companies that use it grow at twice the pace. - Localizing their pricing. Make sure your pricing is localized on a currency and demand base. - Delinquent Churn on Credit Cards. Cancelled for reasons or bad credit cards.

He also discussed various trends they are seeing in the industry. For example: - Seeing aquistion-based marketing backfiring a bit. Not where hyper-growth is coming from. - Design and usage more important than ever. - Rise of the anti-usage product. Allowing you do your work, while software does the mechanical work.

To talk further with Patrick Campbell or learn more about ProfitWell, you can email him at pc@profitwell.com or connect on LinkedIn.

For more interviews on growth, pricing and SaaS, check out Brian Ardinger's interview with Tom Samph and Ajay Rajani with Nex.tt.

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Corporate Innovation, Mid-Level Managers and the New 20%

Ralph Welborn has spent over 25 years providing business and technology advisory services to both private and public sector organizations globally. He has held a variety of leadership positions, including CEO of Imaginatik, the market-leading innovation advisory and platform company; leader of IBM's Strategy & Transformation business in the Middle East and Africa; senior vice president at KPMG Consulting; and a cofounder of an e-commerce company.

In this podcast, Brian Ardinger talks with Ralph about his new book Topple: The End of the Firm-Based Strategy and the Rise of New Models for Explosive Growth. The Topple Rate refers to how major companies are failing, and how that is fall is accelerating. Companies are attempting digital transformation efforts, with little success.

Ralph believes we need to avoid running the Red Queen race and learn from the companies having explosive growth. Currently, approx. 20% of a company’s capabilities are driving 70% of value. However, this will not be the new 20% that they will need tomorrow. Companies don’t have to focus on a lot of things to make a big impact. Understand that you should focus your innovation program on the new 20%. We must not look at firm-based strategies anymore. We must engage with emerging business ecosystem to capture new value. Orchestrating capabilities of others.

We must also turn the lens around on the points of friction of our customers. What are the capabilities we need to solve that problem and then, what are the products and services we have that could fit, or what do we need to create? Examine where value is being created and destroyed and where are we going to plant our flag. What are the unique set of capabilities around planting that flag and how are we going to orchestrate our ecosystem to plant the flag.

They also discussed why mid-level managers are key to innovation.

To continue the discussion, connect with Ralph at ralph@capimpact.com. or http://www.capimpact.com. or check out his book Topple on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/2Nx4Ylk

If you are interested in more discussion on corporate innovation, check out Brian Ardinger’s discussion with Janice Fraser with Bionic at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-84-janice-fraser-w-bionic-solution/

This episode is sponsored by GLIDR. GLIDR software helps you validate that you're going to market with products and business models that drive real value. Check them out at https://www.glidr.io/iopodcast For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Topple: The End of the Firm-Based Strategy and the Rise of New Models for Explosive Growth

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Peter Gardner is the Founder and CEO of Startgrid, a company focused on connecting entrepreneurs and enterprises. His mission is to use software to build the density of resources (VCs/accelerators/access to capital/relationships) in innovation ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley. He believes innovation can happen anywhere.

In this podcast, Peter talks with Brian Ardinger about how enterprises need to take a collaborative approach. They need to engage with global innovation ecosystems and integrate new technology, to stay competitive in a changing marketplace. Innovation teams need to develop internal skills and capacities, while growing their external collaborations. Startups should consider a more strategic approach to building relationships with enterprises, giving both a competitive advantage.

Peter has spent 20 years as both an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, helping early-stage entrepreneurs seed and build their businesses. His experience includes being a General Partner at Allegis Capital, where he worked with more than 30 large enterprises on their external innovation programs.

Learn more about Peter at https://corp.startgrid.com/author/peter-gardener or email him at peter@startgrid.com.

If you are interested in building and accessing innovation ecosystems, check out Brian's talk with Daniel Fozzati at IdeaLondon https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-101-daniel-fozzati-with-idealondon-on-system-innovation-at-30000-ft/ or Paul Singh's talk at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit 2017 https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-91-paul-singh-i-o-innovation-summit/ For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Shaina Stigler is chief empathy officer at Betwixt, a startup focused on enhancing communication and building coworker trust. With remote work growing rapidly, building trust through technology can be challenging.

Shaina spoke with Brian Ardinger about building coworker trust in exclusively digital environments. If we believe success in our work relies on our ability to trust each other, then how do we use technology as a tool to bring us closer together. We need to understand how people build trust and then realize that trust is something that takes time.

Shaina also shared some insight they’ve gained on how to jumpstart and measure this growth in trust, as well as how improvisation is integral to startups. To learn more about the company, check out https://betwixt.us

If you like the topic of building teams, listen to Brian’s discussion with Shane Snow, Author of Dream Teams: Working Together without Falling Apart https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-104-shane-snow-author-of-dream-teams-working-together-without-falling-apart/

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Greg Larkin is the author of This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Surviving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Underground. He's also a corporate entrepreneur, launching more than 30 new products with Fortune 500 companies and startups.

On this podcast, Greg talks with Brian Ardinger about practical tactics for a corporate entrepreneur forging ahead in new innovation waters.

Greg believes innovation only works when there is a very high cost of not innovating. He shares key innovation strategies like finding an innovation executive and seeking out others within the company that identify as corporate entrepreneurs. If you have support within an organization, launching a product in a very short period of time is easier. Greg also suggests to never pitch ideas, only pitch outcomes. Saying no to outcomes caries a risk, while saying no to ideas is easy.

As a corporate entrepreneur, if you can solve innovative problems in an innovative way, now is your time. Break through the politics, analysis, and process testing because the market won't wait any more.

Check out Greg's bestselling book This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Surviving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Undergroundon Amazon at https://amzn.to/2PfV09c

If you are interested in corporate entrepreneurship, check out Brian's discussion with Ryan Jacoby. He is the Founder of Machine and Author of Making Progress: The 7 Responsibilities of the Innovation Leader https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-99-ryan-jacoby-w-machine/

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This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Thriving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Underground

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Taylor Dawson is a founding member of GE Appliances’ FirstBuild and CEO of Giddy. In this podcast, Taylor talks with Brian Ardinger about GE Appliances's FirstBuild's origins, the obstacles they’ve conquered and the challenges they’re still solving. They also discussed product innovation and the experiences of building a Microfactory.

Taylor was also a featured roundtable speaker at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit in May, 2018 (https://www.theiosummit.com).

Learn more about GE's Firstbuild at https://www.firstbuild.com and Giddy at https://www.giddy.io

If you are interested in product innovation, check out Brian's interview with Slava Rubin, co-founder of Indiegogo at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-69-slava-rubin-co-founder-of-indiegogo/

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Exponential View - An Innovation Newsletter

Azeem Azhar is the author of Exponential View, a weekly newsletter about innovation. He talked with Brian about broad perspectives, geography of innovation, corporate venture capital, and why you shouldn’t take a golf club to a tennis match.

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Product Development to Create Raving Fans Using Game Thinking

Amy Jo Kim is a longtime innovation consultant and author of Game Thinking, a step-by-step system for building lasting engagement into product experience and based on design techniques from hit games.

With a wealth of knowledge, Amy Jo spoke to Brian about the concept of superfans, mainstream majority and early majority, and why identifying these demographics is crucial for success.

Check out her book at https://gamethinking.io

If you are interested in product development, check out Brian's interview with Laura Klein at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-34-laura-klein-w-lean-startup-for-product-design/ GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Straight Talk for Startups: 100 Insider Rules

Randy Komisar is author of "Straight Talk for Startups: 100 Insider Rules for Beating the Odds--From Mastering the Fundamentals to Selecting Investors, Fundraising, Managing Boards, and Achieving Liquidity." He is also an entrepreneur and partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, a Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm.

In this episode, Randy and Brian Ardinger discuss why experience is so valuable now and why startups can stop worrying about scaling.

For more background see https://www.kleinerperkins.com/people/randy-komisaror grab his book on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/2PiYqIf

If you are interested in more insider rules for startups, check out Brian's interview with Jason Calacanis at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-65-jason-calacanis-angel-investor-and-author-of-angel/ GET THE LATEST RESOURCES

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Straight Talk for Startups: 100 Insider Rules for Beating the Odds--From Mastering the Fundamentals to Selecting Investors, Fundraising, Managing Boards, and Achieving Liquidity

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Building Dream Teams

Shane Snow is an award-winning journalist and entrepreneur. He spoke with Brian Ardinger about his new book, Dream Teams: Working Together without Falling Apart.

In Dream Teams, Shane uses psychology, neuroscience, and business, to reveal what separates groups that simply get by together, from teams that get better together.

His examples range from rap groups to pirate gangs, and buddy cops to pioneering women in journalism. A dream team combines the familiar with the uncomfortable, and gets things done that have never been done before.

Find out more at http://www.Shanesnow.comor grab a book on Amazon at https://amzn.to/2OM3Drk

If you want more stories on how to build a team, check out Brian's interview with Ryan Paugh at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-89-ryan-paugh-w-community-company/

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Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart

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Building Entrepreneurial Capabilities in Teams

Andi Plantenberg is an innovation consultant who helps companies, that are preparing for disruption, by building entrepreneurial capabilities in teams. She teaches them to operate more like startups— creating competencies in experimentation, validated learning, rapid prototyping and entrepreneurial management.

Her history includes consulting with large organizations (NASA Ames Mission Control, The Lending Club, Public Library of Science, Coke Founders, BISSELL floor-care, RWE Innogy New Ventures, and Mayo Clinic), small startups, and starting her own business all on the path toward working to expand entrepreneurial capabilities in teams.

Andi's conversation with Brian Ardinger addresses many subjects including: how teachable is innovation, and what’s the most effective incentive?

Reach out to Andi on Twitter @andisf or http://andibyday.com

If you are interested in building entrepreneurial capabilities, consider listening to Sean Ammirati at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-98-sean-ammirati-w-birchmere-ventures/ and Teresa Torres at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-90-teresa-torres-w-product-talk/

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FinTech Innovation

Sunayna Tuteja is Head of Strategic Partnerships and Emerging Technology at TD Ameritrade and a speaker at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit 2018on Fintech innovation.

In her conversation with Brian Ardinger, she shares a preview of what’s to come including the four pillars of their approach to innovation at TD Ameritrade, up-and-coming trends for startups and corporations to keep their eyes on, and why FinTech is in a unique position when it comes to innovation.

Find her on Twitter @Sunaynaor at TD Ameritrade at https://www.tdameritrade.com/home.page

If you are interested in another large corporation looking at innovation, try Brian's interview with Tom Bianculli from Zebra at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-100-tom-bianculli-w-zebra/ or his interview with Atul Kamra from SixThirty, a fintech fund in St. Louis at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-79-atul-kamra-w-sixthirty/

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System Innovation at 30,000 ft

Daniel Fozzati is Head of Product Development and Commercialization at IdeaLondon, an innovation center by Cisco, EDF and UCL. As a product engineer who always finds himself frustrated by the ground constraints of innovation systems, he takes the 30,000 foot view and works to help facilitate both visionary and nitty-gritty system innovation.

Daniel talked with Brian Ardinger about Idea London, China’s involvement in European innovation, and up and coming trends he is witnessing in the UK.

Reach out to Daniel on Twitter @fuzzydanielor check out IdeaLondon at https://www.idea-london.co.uk/empowering-tech-start-ups-grow-faster-stronger-and-further-they-could-alone

If you are interested in system or community innovation, check out Brian's talk with Azeem Azhar at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-107-azeem-azhar-with-innovation-newsletter-exponential-view/

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Tom Bianculli is the Chief Technology Officer at Zebra Technologies. Before Brian and Tom's conversation, Tom took part in a panel about the Internet of Things held at The Economist's Innovation Summit in Chicago on March 22, 2018. In this episode, we pulled a clip from the panel discussion, and then we transition into their conversation. Key takeaway: there’s still so much more to develop with IOT, but you don’t have to know where you’ll end up to get started. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Ryan Jacoby started in systems engineering doing consulting but when he went to grad school he stumbled upon a class that changed his trajectory fundamentally just as design thinking and development has changed the business and innovation world. Now Ryan, with a ton of experience behind him is eager to tell others about what’s different now and how to take full advantage of these massive improvements. His new book, "Making Progress: The 7 Responsibilities of the Innovation Leader" is out now. Hear him talk more about what's in it and what to do about what's in it at the Inside/Outside Innovation Summit May 29th-31st here in Lincoln, Nebraska. Register today at theiosummit.com.

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Sean Ammirati really knows both sides of the table. He’s gone from founding multiple companies to being a partner at Birchmere Ventures and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He’s written numerous books including “The Science of Growth: How Facebook Beat Friendster” and will be speaking at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit happening May 29th-31st. In his conversation with Brian Ardinger, Sean talked about his unique journey, big versus small, and tools that have helped him help others.

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China Gorman has spent over 20 years in the HR consulting world including as CEO of The Great Place To Work Institute and Chief Operating Officer and interim CEO of The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). She came on our show to talk about her upcoming conference called UNLEASH taking place in Las Vegas on May 15-16 and to address some of the questions about technology and humanity that everyone in innovation must wrestle with. For more information about the China's conference, visit unleashgroup.io. To register for the Inside Outside Innovation Summit happening May 29th-31st in Lincoln, Nebraska, visit theiosummit.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Chris Shipley is a long-time innovation consultant who's worked with many organizations including Guidewire. At the 2017 Inside/Outside Innovation Summit, she talked about some key learnings about dancing with elephants. To hear more content like this in person, register for your ticket to the 2018 Summit at theiosummit.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Steve Glaveski, who will be speaking at the Inside/Outside Innovation Summit, is the chief executive officer of Collective Campus based in Melbourne. Steve shared what the innovation ecosystem is like in the Asian Pacific part of the world as well as some common pitfalls that corporations can fall into when asking their employees to innovate. He capped it off by telling Brian about important innovation in the legal services sphere, which his company is involved with. You can catch Steve at the Inside/Outside Innovation Summit as well as on his podcast, FutureSquared. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Andy Cars is the founder of Lean Ventures based in Stockholm, Sweden. Brian and Andy talked about what is most important for a corporation to decide before they begin innovation in a meaningful manner. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Natalie Fratto is Vice President of Early Stage Practice at Silicon Valley Bank. She also was involved with a startup that went through Y Combinator and was eventually acquired by a larger organization in the beauty tech space. She talked with our host Brian about what it’s like to sit on both sides of the table and what sort of intelligence will be the most important for teenagers when they seek jobs in a few years. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Doug Durham has over 30 years of experience in software and software related fields. In his talk he shared best practices and lessons learned from working with product development teams with a focus on agile methodology. The last day to get an earlybird discount for the 2018 summit is March 15th. Visit theiosummit.com for more information and to buy your ticket. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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The 2018 Inside/Outside Innovation Summit is taking place May 29th-31st in the hub of the Silicon Prairie: Lincoln, Nebraska. With a $50K pitch contest and hundreds of corporate and startup attendees, this summit is the perfect opportunity for you to come together with like-minded individuals and get inspired and connected.

As a taste of what's to come, today's show features a clip from Paul Singh's talk at the 2017 Summit where he talks about simultaneously living out of a trailer and transforming the trajectories of dozens of startups and cities across the U.S. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Teresa Torres is the founder and Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk. She and Brian discussed product prototyping and what some common pitfalls are that corporate teams fall into when trying to develop and validate new and emerging technologies. You can find her blog posts and more at producttalk.org and additional educational material at producttalk.org/learn. Email her at teresa@producttalk.org and follow her on Twitter @ttorres. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Ryan Paugh is the COO of Community Co and co-author of the book Super Connector: Stop Networking and Start Building Business Relationships that Matter. Ryan offers an entrepreneurial view of what’s important when entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and startup founders connect. He also gives some insight into the type of person who’s most effective at networking and how anyone can foster those skills. Email him at Ryan@community.co email and follow him @ryanpaugh on Twitter. Found out more about the book at Superconnectorbook.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today's show is from the Inside/Outside Innovation summit we hosted last summer. In his talk, Michael Docherty lays out some really great advice and anecdotes about what disruptive innovation looks like in a large enterprise. Michael also emphasizes the importance of a "both/and" approach to startup collaboration. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Tom Lockwood and Edgar Papke came together with different backgrounds but the same goal: helping large enterprises innovate. Using design thinking and leadership psychology, Tom and Edgar have written seven books between them about making innovation work despite corporate obstacles. They co-wrote their latest book titled: "Innovation by Design." Find out more at lockwoodresource.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s show is from our summit last summer. Carie Davis, who is formerly with Coca-Cola and is now the founder of Your Ideas Are Terrible, gave a talk where she shared the top ten things she and her co-founder Shane Rieser have learned from their work with corporations and startups. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Gregg Garrett is the founder of Connected Detroit Innovates. He talked with Brian about how the program’s membership works, and how it seeks to serve small communities, as well as the larger populace of Detroit, while furthering goals of disruptive innovation in numerous industries. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s show is from a talk Janice Fraser gave at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit in the summer of 2017. Janice has worked with large organizations including the White House, Navy Seals, Lyft, and Proctor and Gamble. She is currently the Chief Product Officer at Bionic Solution. She shared a three-part opera about growth in large and small enterprises and why it's an issue of (gasp) life or death for organizations. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Navin Kunde is with open innovation, R&D, and is a business networks leader at The Clorox Company. He talked with Brian about making external innovation a key part of their team’s efforts to be prepared for the future. He also talked about the multiple components of metrics that they use at Clorox and how these metrics can help define what the culture of innovation is or isn’t at a company. Reach out to him on LinkedIn For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Rewind: "Traction" For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Jack Elkins is the head of innovation at the Orlando Magic. He talked with Brian about how the NBA is not immune to the need to innovate and how to make everyone equal when they come to the table. He also shared the address you can email to get the ten key phrases that he uses with his team to create a culture of innovation: language@persportives.com. For the Making Innovation Count in 2018 conference in Kansas City: https://nvite.com/InnovationCounts/le4e79. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Ari Popper is the founder of the innovation consulting organization, SciFutures. SciFutures is a fascinating blend of science fiction and corporate innovation in which sci-fi writers team up with corporations to imagine futures in their industry. Brian and Ari talked about how they make these imagined futures tangible and what the responsibility is of innovators as we continue in this era of technology. Reach out to Ari at scifutures.com and to us @theiopodcast and insideoutside.io. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Atul Kamra is a managing partner at SixThirty, which is a seed fund based out of St. Louis. Atul talked about what makes SixThirty unique, what attitude is best to adopt for combining startups and corporations, and how to keep a narrow focus to stay on track for your goals. Contact him at atul@sixthirty.co

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Katherine Manuel is the senior vice president of innovation at Thomson Reuters. She has had a vast and varied journey in innovation before coming into her present role a couple years ago. In her conversation with our host Brian Ardinger she talked about the real details of innovation at Thomson Reuters including some specific campaigns they ran to develop thinkers who go outside the boundaries. Katherine also shared some specific advice for people who might be new to a similar role as the one she is in. Learn more about Katherine’s team at innovation.thomsonreuters.com and our team at econic.co. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Soccer and market research For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Tom Rideout, formerly with AAA, is now with Blue Rocket, which specializes in digital product design and development. Tom is also speaking at the Back End of Innovation conference happening this week in Orlando, Florida. We invited him on the show to share about something we haven’t addressed much: coordinating and engaging with boards of executives. Tom shared an exciting example of how to get them involved, and he also dived into how he was able to boast a 4:1 ROI ratio with four products during his time at AAA. Reach out to him on LinkedIn or at bluerocket.us. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Santhi Ramesh works for Hershey's as a global lead with Snacks, Refreshments, and Futures. She's also speaking at the Back End of Innovation conference. Santhi and Brian talked about what it takes to launch a product in an emerging market and how to accommodate for all the cultural differences that come with operating in a different country. Connect with Santhi on LinkedIn and with us at insideoutside.io. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In this episode about venture capital we're reaching back to hear from previous guests Christina Bechold with Samsung NEXT Ventures and Ann Winblad with Winblad Hummer Venture Partners. Between them they cover: how to find a good founder, how corporate venture capitalists can work with startups, and what it means now that "customers are buyers." Find out more insideoutside.io and reach out to Christina and Ann on LinkedIn. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Janette Edelstein is the director of external innovation at Johnson & Johnson. She and Brian talked about how to include startups without suffocating them, how to do this in a large corporation, and how mid-sized organizations can jumpstart innovation. Janette is the first in a series of four guests who are all speaking at the Back End of Innovation Summit in Orlando, Florida, October 22nd-25th. You can find more information about the summit here: https://marketing.knect365.com/bei/ and reach out to Janette through her email: JEdelste@its.jnj.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Greg Satell is the author of "Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age.” Greg talked with our host, Josh Berry about his book and what his goal was in writing it. He also broke down common constructs about innovation including portfolio management and finding the right process for the problem. Greg provided a great list of resources for mid-level companies who want to get more involved in research but aren't sure where to start, including: Holland's Manufacturing Initiative, Materials Genome Initiative, Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, and the Fuse Program at GE. Reach out to Greg at Digitaltonto.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Ken Skistimas, director of User Experience at GE Digital., joined Brian Ardinger to talk about the "the power of sketches." With previous experience at Salesforce and a family background in illustration, Ken has been in and around design all his life. He shared how his small team works on a wide gamut of project sizes and types of problems. Ken emphasized the value in leaving things a little raw when suggesting new products and how it allows customers to interact more honestly with the prototypes. You can find out more at GE.com/digital or reach out to Ken on LinkedIn. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Brian Ardinger, co-founder of Inside Outside Innovation and Econic, sat down with Jyoti Shukla, senior director of user experience at Nordstrom. She talked about some of the challenges they’ve faced as a 116 year old retail business transitioning in a world of disruption. Jyoti also gave some specific examples about how to prioritize customers when testing new user experiences and emphasized the importance of diversity when considering and developing profiles of customer personas. The best way to reach Jyoti is through LinkedIn. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Slava Rubin is a co-founder of Indiegogo, the crowdfunding website that helps entrepreneurs and startups validate products and bring them to market. Slava shared with Brian how corporations, such as GE and Whirlpool, are using the platform as well to validate their product research with massive success. He also gave an excellent example of how sites like Indiegogo allow product developers to adjust to market demands almost immediately. You can reach Slava directly at slava@indiegogo.com. For another perspective on democratization of retail and dispersal of capital, check out last week's episode (number 68) to hear from Lindsay Angelo, a strategy consultant formerly with Lululemon. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Lindsay Angelo is a former Strategist with Lululemon but is now pursuing a new venture as a strategy consultant. She talked with Josh about trends in the retail space especially around the idea of a self-actualization economy and how democratization of retail influences the way that people invest and the way products are developed. She also touched on what brands she sees doing things right and what the innovation scene looks like in Vancouver. Reach out to her at www.Lindsay-angelo.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Dan Toma is a co-author of the book "The Corporate Startup" along with Tendayi Viki and Esther Gons. He got his start as an entrepreneur working in and around startups and then in accelerators. The book came out of one of his first corporate innovation jobs with Deutsche Telekom, which is the third largest carrier in the world. Dan and Josh talked about some of the trouble spots for corporate innovation teams, how to measure results for optimization and innovation differently, and some examples of what those different innovation accounting measures look like. Find his book on Amazon and find Dan on LinkedIn. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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David Robertson, author of Brick by Brick and formerly at Wharton, just recently accepted a new position at MIT’s Sloan school. He also hosts a podcast of his own called Innovation Navigation that’s available on Sirius XM channel 111. David and Josh sat down to talk about what third wave innovation really is and examples from GoPro to Lego about the possibilities for success and failure that go along with incremental innovation Go to Innonavi.com to find about workshops and "Brick by Brick.' You can find his podcast on itunes and live on Sirius XM channel 111 Tuesday 9-10 EST and replayed throughout the week. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s episode features special guest, Jason Calacanis, longtime angel investor and author of the book "Angel." He and Brian talked about why he wrote this particular book, what it takes to be an angel investor, and how senior executives in a corporation can harness the power of angel investing for the sake of their personal portfolio and the benefit of their company. Jason’s handle on social media is @Jason, and you can find his book on Amazon.

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In part 2 of our interview with Dave Knox, founder of The Brandery, we talked about melding the cultures between startups and corporations and also between people within just one organization. Dave also gave some tips about how to bridge both gaps. The takeaway? Don’t be a tourist. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In our interview with Dave Knox, the founder of The Brandery, we talked about how geography and history can uniquely influence a place to be innovative and how that tradition has played out in his city of Cincinnati.

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Today's show is part one of a two part series with Arvind Nagarajan who is the director at Pearson Affordable Learning Fund (PALF). Arvind shared with Josh about the unique structure of his organization, what for-profit schools look like and how they've been successful. Reach out to him on linkedin or at affordable-learning.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s show is an interview with David Mattin, a global leader at Trendwatching. He talked about the shift he’s observed in the values of status and some examples of how that shift has affected marketing and branding. Reach out to him at david@trendwatching.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s show is a sneak peek at three of the speakers who will be featured at the summit next week. Simona Ahuja, Josh Ness, and Jonathan Bertfield shared their insights about mindsets and tools and which one has to come first. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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For today’s episode we’re bringing back an interview with Christina Bechold from Samsung Nextventures and founder of Empire Angels, a venture capital firm based in New York. She shared the insights she’s gained about the difference between corporate and private VC funding and how to navigate the dynamics when a startup fosters a relationship with a corporation. Connect with her on Twitter @CMBechs or at SamsungAccelerator.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today's show is the third part of our series from interviews we recorded live at South by Southwest. This one is all your questions and our answers: How to balance separate cultures in the same corporation; how to manage a portfolio for innovation; what is innovation; and what does it take to achieve it? For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s show is the second part of our three part series from our live recorded session at SXSW. Our guests were founders and CEO’s from Target’s Techstars accelerator. Fernando Moncayo is a co-founder of Inspectorio, a service to streamline the process of inspection in a variety of verticals and to make the process more accountable and fair. He also shared insights about what it means to fail as an entrepreneur and how to avoid common pitfalls. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s show is the first part from our live recording at south by southwest where we interview teams from Target’s accelerator techstars. Atif Siddiqi, CEO of Branch Messsenger, and Nevin Shetty and Lizzy Ellingson, founders of Blueprint Registry, joined us on stage to talk about Target's Techstar program, work/life balance, and asking what you can do for a corporation in addition to what they can do for you. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Robert Wolcott is a professor of innovation at Northwestern's Kellogg school of management, co-founder of the Kellog Innovation Network, and his articles can often be found in Forbes. Robert shared how corporations can start the ongoing process of innovation including the important step of scouting in the periphery of startups instead of just the core parts of major competitors. You can reach Robert on LinkedIn or at his email: r-wolcott@kellogg.northwestern.edu For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Tristan Kromer is a lean startup coach with the Global Lean Startup Movement. With years of experience and a broad perspective, Tristan brings a global perspective to ecosystems from Lincoln to Ramallah. With his open source book, Tristan is all about helping innovators find the right tools wherever they are, and especially outside of silicon valley. To contact him about his open source book, you can email (tk@tristankromer.com) or by visiting his blog at grasshopperherder.com or his website trikro.com. You can also download the book on his blog and website. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Ann Winblad, with Hummer Winblad venture partners, has seen a lot. From pre-pc to artificial intelligence, Ann knows what it takes to be successful inside and outside of the valley and knows how to spot the people who will make it or not. Reach out to Ann at awinblad@humwin.com. Find out how you can be successful outside the valley at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit. Tickets and more information at theiosummit.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Lucy Beard is the founder and CEO of Feetz, a revolutionary 3-D shoe-printing company that makes shoes just as customized as coffee orders. Coming from an actuarial science background, Lucy has a fresh perspective on corporate innovation, entrepreneurship, and what it means to partner between the two in new and exciting ways. Find out more about Feetz at Feetz.com and more about our summit, including the 100k pitch contest at theiosummit.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In the second episode of Josh's conversation with Arnaud Bonzom, he talked about the different approaches to innovation that he observed among the 500 corporations in their study, especially BMW. Find the full report here: http://698640.hs-sites.com/500corporations This episode also features important clips from Brian's conversation with Gregor Gimmy, founder and head of BMW Startup Garage. Gregor talked about how their Venture Client model works, what makes it different than an accelerator, and how it bridges the gaps between startups and corporations that Arnaud discussed. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Arnaud Bonzom is the Directory of Corporate Innovation at 500 Startups. In his conversation with Josh, Arnaud shared some insights from their report on the status of corporate innovation in the world's top 500 corporations, which you can find here: http://698640.hs-sites.com/500corporations Get your ticket for the Inside Outside Innovation Summit at theiosummit.com where you can also learn more about startup partnership opportunities available at the conference for corporate teams. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In this interview Brian, Tom Samph, and Ajay Rajani talk about how designing quick, cheap, and smart experiments can revolutionize how startups validate their products and how corporations can validate the startup. With a framework of working within constraints and leveraging skills of experts who offer their time and knowledge, Nex.tt has helped many entrepreneurs take the first steps toward launching their innovative businesses. Ajay also shares the story of one of those entrepreneurs. To find out more and connect with the team at Nex.tt, go to Nex.tt, interact with them on twitter (@ajr771 and @twsamph), or follow them on medium. You can hear these two speak at the Inside Outside Innovations Summit, along with many other incredible experts, by securing your ticket today at theiosummit.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Derek Mauk is a senior innovation brand manager for Anheuser-Busch. In part 2 of his interview, he shares more about how the Best Damn Brewing Co. team was able to pull off such a multi-dimensional innovation effort in a relatively short amount of time, and how they dealt with the inevitable problems that arose along the way. We also get to hear about the diverse set of outlets ABI uses to engage with startups and solve problems without having to completely reinvent the wheel--or the beer. Connect with Derek at https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekmauk or on Twitter @AnheuserBusch. Find information and tickets for our innovation summit at theiosummit.com and tell us your story on Twitter @theiopodcast to get on the show. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Derek Mauk is the senior innovation brand manager at Anheuser-Busch. In part 1 of his interview with Brian, he talked about their new project, Best Damn Brewing Company. Derek laid out how the new line was built using design thinking, lean startup, and startup engagements, all of which we'll hear more about in part 2. Follow @theiosummit for updates on the Inside Outside Innovation Summit in June and get your ticket at theiosummit.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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The first episode in a series that will feature former podcast guests who are speaking at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit, June 19th-21st in Lincoln, Nebraska. Michael Docherty is the author of the book “Collective Disruption: How Corporations & Startups Can Co-Create Transformative New Businesses” In this clip he gave us a glimpse of some of the incredible wisdom he’s picked up from dozens of interviews with corporate innovators and leaders. He also shared tips for the corporate innovator who’s on their own and how an event like our summit can be especially helpful for kick-starting something at their mid-sized to large organization. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Ari Kern is the Community and Programs Manager with the Sprint Accelerator in Kansas City. In her insightful conversation with Brian she talked about how the design of Sprint’s physical accelerator space cultivates community and innovation and what exciting new shift Sprint is making in its next accelerator round. Listen carefully near the end for information about how you and your startup or Kansas City corporation can take part in Sprint’s new process. Applications are at sprintaccel.com and Ari encourages startups to apply ASAP. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today’s interview is with Ash Maurya, the author of Running Lean and his newest book Scaling Lean. With decades of experiences as an entrepreneur and almost 10 years as a lean coach, Ash talked about the product design mistake that almost all innovators make, and where he tells those innovators to go with their failed product and what to do with it. Ash also gave an outline of how his new book adds to the ongoing innovation conversation by giving practical tips and exercises for designing value metrics, among many other things. Connect with Ash at leanstack.com and find out more about the Inside Outside Innovation Summit at theiosummit.com

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Our team here at Inside Outside Innovation along with our sponsor, Econic, is very excited to announce the first Inside Outside Innovation Summit on June 19-21st. In what will be a premier conference in the Midwest focused on startup driven innovation, there's something for everyone. Corporations can match with startups, and startups can compete in a $100k pitch contest. Learn more and buy your ticket at theiosummit.com and talk to us on twitter @TheIOSummit For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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John Bungert is the Director of innovation at MetLife. He talked with Brian about the breadth of Metlife’s approach to innovation by partnering with a large network of venture capital firms as well as using internal campaigns to find and then implement innovative and relevant ideas on horizons 1, 2, and 3. He also talked about how working for small wins can help the most when you’re just getting started with a corporate innovation arm. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In today's epsiode from the Lean Startup Conference, Josh talked with Jonathan Bertfield. Jonathan has more than two decades of experience focusing on digital transformations in large enterprises and is an expert on implementing lean startup in these giant organizations. He discussed the importance of high level managers actually talking to real customers, the potential of the Objectives and Key Results tool for calculating incentives for internal innovators, and the thing that is more important than tools for a company to be successful at lean. Connect with him on twitter @Berters and at myspinnaker.co For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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This episode was recorded live at the Lean Startup Conference 2016. Brian talked with Susana Jurado who is a head of the Product Portfolio in Telefonica's R&D department. Susana shared some insights she’s gained as an innovation leader in a very large corporation that not only implements lean startup in its daily innovation efforts but also used lean tactics when it transformed entirely into a digital telephone company that suddenly needed digital products. Susana also talked about their Open Future program that offers incredible opportunities to startups and entrepreneurs with great ideas in this industry. Connect with Susana on twitter @sjapru and learn more about Telefonica's innovation at www.tid.es For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today's conversation with Tren Griffin was recorded live at the Lean Startup Conference where gave a talk about learning from failed startups and the world's most "unlean" startup that he was a part of. He also talked about applications of lean startup that corporations often overlook. Find Tren's blog at 25iq.com and follow him on twitter @trengriffin. He co-authored "Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor" which is available on Amazon. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In another interview we recorded live at the Lean Startup Week, Josh talked with Dan Olsen about the really practical process he's designed for innovators and product managers who want to make their organizations lean. Dan's Amazon Best Seller book, "The Lean Product Playbook" walks through a six-step process to help this transformation on multiple levels of leadership. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn and on twitter @danolsen For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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The market of innovation consulting has transformed in the past 5 years and Jeff and Josh have witnessed it all. In their book "Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously" they answer the need for clear and detailed instruction to execute true lean strategies in large businesses. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon and you can connect with Josh and Jeff on twitter @jseiden and @jboogie. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today we split from our usual corporate focus and returns to the startup perspective. Topology Eyewear is designed to give users a choice. But not too much choice. In this episode, Eric Varady discussed this and other challenges his startup is overcoming by using lean strategies. Right now, as it becomes more and more necessary for corporations to understand and use lean startup, this conversation serves as a great reminder of the fundamentals for innovation anywhere. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today's interview is another that we recorded live at the Lean Startup Week. Jitendra Kavathekar, the managing director of Accenture Open Innovation explained what open innovation is and how accenture approaches it at both a global and local level. He also pointed out some things ingrained in corporations that can specifically harm partnerships with startups. Learn more at accenture.com and connect with Jitendra on twitter @JeetKavathekar For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Laura Klein got involved with lean startup at the very beginning and "on accident." With decades of experience in user design she was working with Eric Ries about five years ago when he came out with "The Lean Startup. Now Laura applies those same methodologies to her current work helping corporations manage and understand valuable user insights as they steer innovation. Laura published her first book, "UX for Lean Startups" in 2013 and her second, "Build Better Products," was published earlier this year. With practical and tangible instructions, this book can be an extremely helpful "handbook" for the corporate teams making successful products that are centered on users' needs. Find a sample chapter at uxmatters.com

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Today's episode is a conversation with David Bland we recorded live at our Lean Startup Week booth. David has been in the lean startup and corporate innovation space for many years, being involved with Eric Ries and Neo Innovation. Listen in to hear his valuable insights about internal innovation, assumption mapping, and what he thinks the next big thing will be among innovators. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today's episode is a conversation with Eric Schulz, a lean startup coach at John Deere that we recorded live in our booth at the Lean Startup Week 2016 in San Francisco. Stay with us as Eric tells about how they’re using lean methodologies from the valley to innovate at this iconic and massive company with big Midwestern tradition. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Here's part 2 from our talk with Blood Orange founder and best-selling author Dr. Simone Ahuja. Today, we share some of Simone's incredible stories about intrapreneurs who harnessed their passion and a few resources to change industries and lives through innovation. You can also connect with Simone on twitter @SimoneAhuja and follow her blog at hbr.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In part 1 of our interview with Blood Orange founder and best-selling author Dr. Simone Ahuja we learned about a different approach to innovation called “Jugaad Innovation.” With a focus on innovating with limited resources, Simone explained how this practical method can be extremely helpful for corporate innovators and intrapreneurs who have an industry-changing idea but don’t have the top-down support to make it happen. Come back next week for part 2 which will include some inspiring stories Simone tells in her 2017 book “Disrupt It Yourself - Hacking the Corporation to Make if Fast, Fluid and Frugal” about intrapreneurs who overcame resource and organizational obstacles, and used their passion and a smart approach to solve real problems. You can also connect with Simone on twitter @SimoneAhuja and follow her blog at hbr.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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While at the Lean Startup Conference, Brian and Josh sat down for a conversation about a WIRED article in which Narry Singh from Accenture said, "Corporate innovation does not work." Find out why we think this is false and learn where our team will be appearing in the spring on this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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With over 187,000 hypotheses tested and almost 180,000 interviews conducted, LaunchPad Central is changing the landscape of innovation. Jim Hornthal explained to Josh how this organization is helping collect and manage learnings for startups and corporations and uses lean methodology to do it. Also this week: catch Brian and Josh in the Inside Outside Innovation booth at the Lean Startup conference. Interact with us on twitter @theiopodcast or come on down to the booth; we'd love to hear your perspective. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Smashbox changed the world of lipstick. This week, Jill Tomandl, the VP of product development and innovation, talked with Brian about their new 3-D printed lipstick line. She shared details about the design process, their marketing strategy, and how they took the dynamics of the beauty product world into consideration through all of it. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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If you're going to change things, the top leadership has to want change, too. That was one important thing we learned from Kyle Nicholas McCray as he told us about managing innovation at American Pacific Mortgage. While American Pacific has set up tents in both general camps of innovation, Kyle also told us about the skills and strategies he and his team are developing especially for disruption. If you want to learn more about investments they're making or the amazing success they've experienced so far with startup-partnership, visit their website at apmortgage.com or connect with Kyle on Twitter @_thedisruptor. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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This week we revisited an interview from our previous podcast season with New York Times Bestselling author Diana Kander. Passionate about entrepreneurial education, Diana talked with Brian about her innovative book "All In Startup," the benefits of starting things outside the valley, and why it's hard to get people to take a free dollar. Connect with Diana at dianakander.com, and on Twitter @dianakander

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This week Brian got the chance to talk with Jess Knox, the chairman of Startup Champions Network. Jess has a passion for creating sustainable jobs and finding new market opportunities in the places big corporations might overlook. Listen to find out what he's doing with lobsters to make Portland, Maine an innovation destination. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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How does a company that started as a noodle shop become a massive corporation with more yearly patents than Apple or Google? In today's episode, Christina Bechhold, principle of strategic investments in Samsung's Global Innovation Center, talks with Brian about the innovation that makes it all possible. She also talked about the benefits of CVC, the importance of flexible founders and the ability to start something anywhere. Connect with Christina on Twitter @CMBechs and check out Samsung's innovation center at samsunggic.com For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In today's episode, Josh and Brian sit down to talk about the most important thing in any innovation project: the team. To help out we pulled clips from conversations with Ken Durand, Daniele Dondi, and Sean Sheppard, who gave some great advice for identifying talent and using that talent effectively in today's market. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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This week we were privileged to have a conversation with Gregor Gimmy and Mathias Meyer who are directors of BMW's Startup Garage. Their philosophy emphasizes the importance of that first client for a startup. So, BMW simultaneously becomes a client for the startup as well as helping the startup through the processes of operation. Learn more about the unique and highly competitive Startup Garage at bmwstartupgarage.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Lisa Kay Solomon knows that details matter. In this interview with Brian she highlights that much of the necessary skills for innovation aren't taught in typical educations and that top support is crucial for internal innovation to get momentum. Her book "Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindsets for Strategy and Innovation" gives practical advice for corporate innovators and includes dozens of case studies so that you're prepared for even the most finite aspect of your innovation process. Find a preview of her book at designabetterbusiness.com and continue the conversation on Twitter @lisakaysolomon. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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For this week's episode, Josh talked with Aya Zook who is a global marketing director at Microsoft Accelerator. Aya discussed many interesting observations from the first three years of Microsoft's accelerator. A couple of these learnings include why where you're hanging out is more important than the platform you're using and why competitor acquisition of startups doesn't worry him. Connect with Aya and his team at microsoftaccelerator.com and on twitter @msaccel. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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It's August and the blogs are ripe for gleaning. In this episode, Josh brought our market analyst, Bill McBride, on to the show to talk about some of the most interesting articles Bill's noticed in his research. These articles include corporate venture capitalists who "tell-all," an inquiry into the slowdown of accelerator launches, and an exclusive report about the status of startup and corporate partnerships. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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This week's episode showcases the international perspective of Eric Broekhuizen who is a director and program leader at HighTexhXL in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. HighTechXL is a six-month accelerator that focuses on advanced hardware technology. Eric shared how their campus with 140 startups has catalyzed acquisitions by companies like Intel, Amazon, and Medtronic. HighTechXL is now accepting applications for their 2016-2017 program. The deadline is 2 October. Learn more at hightechxl.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Tristan is a veteran in the lean startup and accelerator space. He is a founder and coach and always interested to know more. A result of his open curiosity is his open-source book for entrepreneurs of all kinds that you can contribute to by emailing Tristan (tk@tristankromer.com) or by visiting his blog at grasshopperherder.com or his website trikro.com. You can also download the book on his blog and website. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In a special episode focused on the nuts and bolts of growth hacking, Josh and Brian sat down with Sean Sheppard, a founding partner at GrowthX Academy, to get his perspective on what works when starting a corporate accelerator. He emphasized "growth hacking," which is sometimes overlooked or misunderstood by corporate and startup innovators alike. So, Josh and Brian also talked to Steve and Brian (from Seed Sumo) to discuss and advocate for growth hacking as a very important skill for anyone interested in innovation. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Seed Sumo is a startup accelerator based in Texas. Josh discussed with Bryan and Steve what their paticular environment looks like and why their setup works. From growth hacking to a unsual startup pairings to minimal mentors per team, Seed Sumo is all about doing what works and getting rid of what doesn't. Check out their Hot Pepper Pitch videos, to see them and their startups bring the heat. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF-5uPdn3_uSx_QP5WNESeg For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Liz Elam is on the frontline of the fast-developing sphere of coworking. She is the owner of Link Coworking and founder of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) and the League of Extraordinary Coworking spaces (LEXC). In today's show she discussed the unique dynamics of coworking spaces and the people who fill them as well as how these atmospheres catalyze corporate innovation and partnerships with startups. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Mike Docherty is the author of a new book titled, "Collective Disruption." Brian got the chance to ask him about his ideas in the field of open innovation and what comprehensive partnership looks like. Mike stressed that innovation through partnerships isn't enough for a corporation to move forward but that a new form of full-scale collaboration with startups is necessary for real progress. He also shared stories and insights from his 10+ years in the innovation space. Mike would love to hear about your perspective and experience at venture2.com and on twitter @dochertymic. You can also find "Collective Disruption" on Amazon. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In this fast and furious interview, Brian sat down with Amee Mungo who is a product lead with the brand and credit card division of Capital One. She discussed both the challenging and beneficial dynamics of bringing a startup mentality to a corporate worlds. Amee also emphasized the importance of an encouraging leader with a clear goal in motivating innovation within a large organization. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Brian recently sat down for a conversation with Chaz Giles and Neil Soni who are the global heads of external innovation at the Estée Lauder Companies. Both Chaz and Neil use their vast and varied startup experience to cut through the more cumbersome processes of corporate innovation to find meaningful and useful insight on products with an ever-present focus on the customer. They also discussed the ongoing changes in venture capital culture and what these changes mean for startups. Continue the conversation with Chaz and Neil on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/chazgiles and https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilsoni or at http://intrapreneur.co/ For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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In part 2 of our interview with Daniele Dondi, the co-founder of the ING Innovation Studio, discusses the need for customer validation and sponsor support and the crucial role experiments play in any innovation venture. He also shared his insight on ensuring the experiments are well-designed, even if that involves using an external team. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Part one of a two-part interview with Daniele Dondi, the co-founder of the ING Innovation Studio. Daniele wrote an article titled, "Four Controversial Learnings After Setting Up a Corporate Accelerator." He discussed some of the less-talked about issues that arise in corporate innovation, many of which are absolutely vital to address for the accelerator to be successful. Today, Brian and Josh sat down with Daniele to talk about the specific "controversial learnings" regarding the dynamics of external and internal teams and the environment and timing necessary for the teams to succeed. Check back next week (or subscribe!) to listen to part two of this interview which will focus on crucial, but usually ignored, realizations about validation and sponsors in corporate innovation. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Innovation is an easy thing to get excited about--without actually knowing what it is or how it looks in a specific organization. Josh and Brian dive into discussing the different stages and manifestations of innovation depending on the organization's needs, as well as determining if innovation is vital for a group's growth. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today, Josh Berry and Josh Ness take a little more time than the typical show to talk about the way StrategyHack is connecting startups and marketers to encourage innovation. Ness discussed his time at The Economist Innovation Forum where he led a StrategyHack workshop and both the problems and solutions produced during these clinics. If you need some help focusing, check out this playlist of angsty teenage music https://open.spotify.com/user/jcness/playlist/1p0pEqnRLINl44I3HXjm3L that Ness personally curated for our audience. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today, we got a chance to talk to Scott Childs, Senior Experience Design Lead at Capital One, about the Five-day Sprint Design Process. From problem to prototype, we explored how this simple and sleek lean start-up tool can be an excellent tool to develop new perspectives for any business. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Today, Josh Berry and Brian Ardinger are discussing the important factors to figure out if innovation is the right step for your business and after evaluating that, determining what kind of innovation will best suite your company's needs. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Celeste Henkelmann with Konica Minolta spoke with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about how a big corporation with a traditional set of products, positions themselves to be more receptive to innovation and how that plays into their product line.

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Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE

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Ken Durand runs the Atlanta Idea Factory as part of Ericsson's innovation model. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Ken about how to sift through the existing culture of a company to find the right people to spur innovation from the inside.

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER

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An introduction to a new season with a new podcast: Inside Outside Innovation with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder. This year, we're taking a closer look at the means and methods of innovation both internally and externally.

We'll be doing a couple different formats of episodes, some shorter, some longer, with exciting guests from companies such as Ericsson, Capital One, and Konica Minolta. We hope you'll join us.

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER

Inside Outside Innovation: Recent Episodes

Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, InsideOutside.io, and the Inside Outside Innovation Summit