On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Duncan Wardle, former head of Innovation and creativity at Disney, and author of the new book The Imagination Emporium. Duncan and I talk about his recipes for innovation and common tactics you can use to make your life and work more creative and inventive. 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 Duncan Wardle, Former head of Innovation and creativity at Disney and author of The Imagination Emporium

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 Duncan Wardle. He has spent 30 years as the head of innovation and creativity at Disney and is releasing a new book on December 10th called The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation. Welcome Duncan. 

Duncan Wardle: Thank you very much for having me actually straight, I wasn't head of innovation and creativity for 30 years, but I actually started as a coffee boy in the London office. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. Obviously, you spent a lot of time at Disney and that. Let's talk a little bit about the journey of how you learned everything about innovation and creativity.

Duncan Wardle: Very first assignment. Basically, I, I was taught persistence. I called that office every day for 27 days to a lovely lady by the name of Julie who was on the reception desk. There were only 16 people at Disney in, back in 1986, and now there's 3000. She got so fed up with taking my phone calls, they made me coffee boy. So, I used to go get cappuccinos from my boss down the road. About three weeks into the role, I was told I would be the character coordinator. That's the person that looks after the walk around characters at the Royal Premier of Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the Odeon Leicester Square, in the presence of the Princess of Wales, Diana. I was like, oh, what do I do? They said, well, you just down at the bottom of the stairs, Roger Rabbit will come down the staircase. The princess will come in along the receiving line. You either greet him, or she'll blow him off and move into the auditorium.

How could you possibly screw that up? Well, that's the day I found out what a contingency plan was because I did not have one. A contingency plan would tell you if you're going to bring a very tall rabbit with spectacularly long feet down a giant staircase towards the Princess Wales, one might want to measure the width of the steps, before the rabbit trips on the top step, it's now hurtling like a bullet at torpedo speed, head over feet, directly down the stairs towards Diana's head, where upon he was taken out in midair by two Royal Protection officers who just flattened him. This very famous picture on Reuters of Roger going back like this.

Two secret service heavies, dude's diving towards him in a suit and a 21-year-old PR guy in Disney at the back. Going, ah, shit, I'm fired. So, I got a call the next day from a person called a CMO from LA. I didn't even, you know, I was like, well, what's a CMO? I thought he was going to tell me I'm fired. And all I heard was that was great publicity.

I was like, wow, who knew? And so, I built a career on having mad audacious, outrageous ideas. But I got 'em done. So, I convinced NASA to take my son's Buzz Lightyear doll into space for the opening of Toy Story. He served 18 months on the International Space Station, the longest consecutive astronaut in space. I'll have, you know. I stole a Turkey from the White House on Thanksgiving Day, took it to Disneyland, happiest Turkey on Earth. 

So I got to do some of the crazy, just mad ideas with Pixar for new storylines and Lucas films and, and Marvel and. One of the biggest challenges is when you are on the outside looking in, oh, they're so creative, it's still a corporation, right? It still has processes and everything else. So I was tapped 10 years ago, and the boss said, right, you are going to be in charge of innovation and creativity. To which my exact response was, what the hell is that? He said, well, I don't know exactly. We just want to embed a culture of innovation and creativity. Everybody's DNA. 

So, I tried three models. Number one, I hired somebody who knew what they were doing and said, make me look good. Number two, I thought I'll create an innovation team. What could possibly go wrong? I'll be in charge of it. Well, no. Nobody outside of legal does legal work. Nobody outside of sales does sales work.

So, if you have an innovation team, you've subliminally said to the rest of the organization, Hey, you're off the hook. These people have it. Number three, we did an accelerator program, which worked to a certain extent, but we only were touching 0.02% of our population. So, I said, right. What if I create a toolkit that has three principles, takes the BS out of innovation and makes it less intimidating for normal, hardworking, busy people.

Makes creativity tangible, for 50% of the people who don't like ambiguity or gray, but far more input, make it fun. Give people tools they enjoy using, then they'll use and when we're not around. So yeah, 

Brian Ardinger: Love the stories. One of the things that. You think of Disney, and most people out in the real world think of Disney as one of the most creative, innovative companies out there, and yet even they said, we need somebody to take care and help us figure out creativity and innovation within our rank-and-file folks that are at Disney. How did that process come about? Why did Disney think, well, we need to be more creative or innovative when everybody looks at them as one of the key people that does it well. 

Duncan Wardle: Think about the theme park division, right? I was with theme parks for a relative, some of my career. And you've got third generation cast members. Their moms and dads work there, the grandparents work there, and this is the way we do it here. And trying to change that culture was like trying to move the Titanic. So, we did, we created this toolkit. Eventually we were training it. We made it so impactful. We had a three and a half year wait list for a voluntary two-day training course.

So, I thought, and then they gave me the Jiminy Cricket, bronze, thank you for 30 magical years of service statue. And I looked at it, I thought, shit, I'm nearly dead. So, I thought I better go do something else. So I left. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. I went home to Colmore and sat in the pub for six months and felt sorry for myself and thought, what the hell have I just done?

I thought, you know what? I got to write a book. And the reason I love doing things I don't know how to do. And I thought, okay. And I said to the publisher, I said, it's not a book. He said, well, why is it not a book? And I said, well, because nobody reads books. They're always on the bookshelf. We don't have time. We are busy people. 

So, I thought, okay, how do I create an innovation toolkit, but make it accessible to normal, hardworking, busy people who have deadlines and everything else? Wel...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dave Brown, founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration. Dave and I talk about the innovation economy and the importance of immigration, and the impact immigration policy has on its success. 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.

Podcast Transcript with Dave Brown, founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration

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 Dave Brown. He's the founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration, where he works closely with emerging companies, VCs, and private equities to solve immigration challenges. So welcome to the show, Dave. 

Dave Brown: Thanks for having me, Brian. Great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Dave, we've known each other as friends and poker players for a while, but I wanted to have you on the show, because we've occasionally had these conversations about how does the law fit into innovation and specifically the law that you focus on, which is the immigration law. Let's start by giving a little bit of background of the things that you work on. 

Dave Brown: Of course I'm happy to share. You know, the interesting thing about me, I think that draws a lot of the clients we work with is I'm originally from Canada. I was actually a lawyer sitting in Toronto doing a lot of inbound US immigration for startups, companies, founders, and found a special someone who's a US citizen. She was getting a PhD at Stanford.

So, I made a decision since I was supporting all these clients and companies in the Bay Area. That I'd actually moved to the US and so I came here at the end of 2000 and spent about five years in the Bay Area supporting a lot of founders’ companies there before finding myself moving to the Midwest here where my wife originally came from.

But the through point in all of this is that I've been dealing with a lot of individuals over the years who have started companies in a wide variety of tech spaces, and there are a lot of interesting people I've worked with over the years. 

Brian Ardinger: Obviously immigration, you hear it in the news, and I think there's a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings what, what immigration is and how does it play into the tech space and that. So, tell us a little bit about the messaging that is out there in the media about immigration and what are the different nuances around that? 

Dave Brown: Yeah, I guess I would say that the messaging is just wrong to start with. It's unfortunate, and I think that this narrative has been kind of fostered as immigrants or the other, that they're bad, that there's some negative element associated with bringing people into this country. Which is amazing to me because this country is completely founded on immigration and this country, quite frankly, wouldn't exist without immigration in the way it does today.

So, the, the current media blitz is bad, and the thing quite frankly, I'm concerned about is it impacts a lot of what we do. You know, when I run into someone, people always seem to think that I'm dealing with someone at the border. That's someone who's trying to sneak in and take someone's job. And the reality is, is we're all about innovation, right?

You know, the people you talk to in this space, they're all about creating something new, creating something that didn't exist before. When I think about my own journey, I've got a firm with about 50 employees that wouldn't otherwise potentially be employed in this space if I didn't immigrate to this country and decide I wanted to start the firm.

And every day I deal with people who have decided to come to the US to make that choice. And they're kind of fearless. You know, they've already made that choice. They're just going to uproot their family and come to the US. They're comfortable with the idea that they're going to start a company that may never make any money, that may never go the direction they hope it will go.

But they're kind of fearless and they're willing to do that. And that's really what we need. And if you look at the history of this country, this country's been founded by immigrants who have made that step and, and really pushed in that direction. 

Brian Ardinger: If you think about in a lot of the big companies that we think about, Google and others, were founded by those who immigrated here to the United States. Let's talk and unpack a little bit about the visa policies. I think we hear, you know, words like green cards and H1B visas and that. Maybe tell us a little bit about what's the visa policy in the United States now, and how do people get here? 

Dave Brown: The first thing I would say is the visa policy is woefully inadequate for the size of our economy right now. Most of the laws that we deal with and interpret and use to support our clients have been in existence for four or five decades, some even longer than that. And, and at that point, our economy was less than a fifth of the size of our current economy. Our population was about a hundred million less. And so, we really need to revamp our immigration rules.

Really, the legislation itself. But obviously what my job is, is to try and get the best result for someone despite what the challenges may be. And so, there's still tools in the toolbox. We still find a way to make things work. And definitely if we're dealing with someone who's very highly regarded in their particular field, very highly educated, that does open up options for things like the O1 visa, that's a visa for someone who's an alien of extraordinary ability.

And I will say that the thing that we've seen more recently, because it, you can look at what happened under the four years under the prior administration and kind of juxtapose it against this current administration. There were a lot of kind of things that were put in the system four years ago that didn't really make any sense.

That made things harder for people to come in and to maintain status. And we, we had people, quite frankly, who we filed to extend their status. And they were denied on the extension when there was a longstanding policy that if there's no material change and the government had already made a decision that this visa is appropriate, that they shouldn't suddenly say no to an extension of that same visa.

And so, when Biden came back into office, he reinitiated that policy. So, we don't have those kind of weird disconnects when we extend. That's just one example of the changes. 

Brian Ardinger: In a case like that, so, so let's say a person comes to the United States to get a degree, wants to stay on as working in AI or working in the tech sector and such, what does that process look like?

Dave Brown: So, most people who come and get a degree, they have an ability to get a work permit immediately following their degree program. And if they're in a recognized STEM program, science, technology, engineering, or math, they're el...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Richard Lyons, Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer. Richard and I talk about the evolving role of innovation and entrepreneurship at universities, as well as some key trends, opportunities, and challenges. 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 Richard Lyons, Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer

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 Richard Lyons. He's the Associate Vice Chancellor at University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer. Welcome, Richard. 

Richard Lyons: Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board. I think one of the first things I wanted to talk about is, what is the role of a Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer at a major university? 

Richard Lyons: Ah, good question. You know, it actually, the role didn't exist four years ago. It started at Berkeley at the beginning of the year 2020. A number of universities, as you know, have launched this job category. You know, most universities that were pretty decentralized places, I like to use the phrase distributed creativity. Things happen in engineering, they happen in business, what have you.

And I think the idea was, well, could we collect ourselves and become, you know, a little bit more than the sum of our parts in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship capacity? That's one way to think about why the job was created. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, you used to run, you're the Dean of the Haas School of Business. How does it differ when you're focused on, I guess, MBAs and the business side of things versus now there's more cross-collaborative curriculum and such. 

Richard Lyons: Yeah, well, I love that question because it's part of what's so much fun about being in this role You know, so CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, one of the faculty here, shared the Nobel Prize in biochemistry a couple of years ago You know, right, science. I mean, I'm like a half an inch deep in science. I'm an economist just to put it on the table. 

And so, I get to mix with all these lab directors and scientists and not just Jennifer. She's just one of many but, So that idea of boundary spanning, right, in a really fundamental way, touching on people that are doing deep science, but also the social scientists and the humanists, and how do we sort of create a for all ecosystem that everybody's feeling like, yeah, well this, this serves me and is also interesting to me.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's quite interesting, you know, we've seen a lot of trends in higher education. It seems more and more Universities are jumping on this idea of cross collaboration with business. And, you know, you've always had tech transfer and things like that. What are you seeing when it comes to trends and this kind of move to focus on entrepreneurship and innovation?

Richard Lyons: I think the trend is unmistakable. My own view is that you could go right to the mission statements of these universities, because I think 20 years ago, people might've said, you know, the deep why of this university is research, teaching and public service. And, and you still hear that phrase. But, you know, reaching out to, like, Simon Sinek's work, Start With Why, or whoever the idea might be, you know, those are really what and how.

I mean, really important what's and how's. But the deep why is, is impact. And so, if you really thought that the mission was research, teaching, and service, Then you might look at innovation and entrepreneurship and say, oh, we're a public research university at Berkeley, and you're kind of way off on the periphery. But if the deep why is impact, no, you're kind of at the center of the mission, not the only center of the mission. Even at kind of this reframe of university missions is helping people to see that, no, this stuff is mission advancing, folks. This is not mission distracting. 

Brian Ardinger: Some universities get a bad rap when it comes to entrepreneurship. Maybe the old version of tech transfer where, you know, the university wanted to keep control of what was being created on the university and sharing the profits or the upside on that with the professors and venture capital and that. Can you talk a little bit about how maybe that whole tech transfer process and that has evolved and what you're seeing? 

Richard Lyons: Yeah, happy to. So, I was thinking a little bit before we got together here and I thought, well, I want to present four mind blows.

And I think all four of these are related to your question and I don't want to get too edgy, Brian. So, here's one and we don't have to talk about all four, but, but I think it really is an answer to your question. Well, first of all, If you asked a university, is it possible for a startup, or a big company, but let's think startup, to be able to access a mass spectrometer on your campus, or a DNA sequencer, or a shake table, or in on all the IP?

Is there kind of a porous way to access scientific equipment on Campus. And almost every university would say, yes, that's possible, that happens. And MP3s existed when Apple created the iTunes Store. So, Berkeley created a platform, we call it Berkeley RIC, the Research Infrastructure Commons. It's a platform with 27 labs on it, and virtually all the equipment in those 27 labs.

And you, Brian, or a company of any size, could access a mass spectrometer or a cell sorter. And own all the IP it's fully priced. But this creates this sort of porous foundry and its relationship building with a lot of these companies and so forth. So that idea of opening up the infrastructure to innovation and entrepreneurship, because there's a lot of excess capacity if we're going to be honest about it.

In fact, we even spun out a company based on this. It's called Second Labs, secondlab.com. And they're basically prosecuting this, you know, in a nationwide, worldwide way. So that's a fun platform. For us, it was a mind blower. 

Brian Ardinger: The other thing that I think comes into this conversation is the whole funding aspect. How are, and how do private funds work with, you know, public education and that? Some of the trends I know that I saw recently, you were talking about some of the interesting work around shared carried funds and that. So maybe let's talk a little bit about the finance mechanism around funding innovation.

Richard Lyons: Yeah. Thanks for that. So, it actually was one of the things on my list of the four, but I'll just get right to ...

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 a...

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.

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 a...

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...

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 ...

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 experiment...

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 environmen...

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...

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.

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. Sometime...

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 bett...

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 shoul...

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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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 thin...

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...

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...

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 basi...

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...

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, ...

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...

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 mar...

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. A...

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 thinki...

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 scientifi...

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 i...

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 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 you...

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 ...

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 indu...

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 conver...

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 magi...

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 patchwo...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the amazing Janice Fraser, one of the leaders in the Lean Startup movement and co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama. Janice and I talk about the evolution of leadership and how today's world of uncertainty and change requires new behaviors and mindsets to lead teams and companies forward. 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 Transcription with Janice Fraser, Co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama

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 Janice Fraser. She's co-author of Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead. Welcome Janice.

Janice Fraser: Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: This is a super honor for me, quite frankly. Janice, you, and I met over a decade ago and you've been hugely influential in my journey around this whole startup and innovation space. I think you and I met at one of the first Lean startup conferences in San Francisco, and this was when I was spinning up Nmotion startup accelerator and I said, I need somebody with the chops, who understands everything from customer discovery to product development to help our teams through this process and teach me quite frankly how to do some of this stuff. 

So, I brought you into Nebraska a while ago, and since then we've been friends and have learned so much through that process of watching you help teams and help people grow in this space. And, and now you're in a different journey, but how did you get involved in product development and Lean Startup, and then how did your career journey get you to the point where you've written this book? 

Janice Fraser: It's so lovely when I hear people say that I was influential. I'm always the most grateful when I've been helpful. Right? Honestly, that was the best compliment you could have ever offered to me, so thank you. Thank you very much for sharing that. 

My career journey, like so many of us in the innovation space has not been a straight line at all. And really it started my journey into product. And then from product into innovation, it really goes way back.

I accidentally ended up a product manager at Netscape in 1995 when we didn't even call it that for the work that I was doing. And from there I moved into user experience consulting, and I started a company that did that. And then it became Luxer where it was like, helping startup companies kind of get off the ground.

And when I look back over the arc of my career, if you remember the Crossing the Chasm model, like I'm that first person, you know, on the far side of the chasm, sort of like holding my hand out, helping people jump across the chasm. Like my job is to sit at the edge of the newest thing and make it boring.

I had to write a six-word biography at one point for some offsite or retreat or something, and it was knitting at the edge of newness. Whatever the bleeding edge thing is like I'm just sitting there figuring out like, how can we do it in a way that everybody, normal people can practice. 

And like I keep a sticker on my computer that says regular people just to remind us all like. The world is made up of regular people and they're doing extraordinary things all the time. And so, I want to just, I just want to help that process out. 

And so right now it's been innovation. Before that it was product management or starting a company. And it's, what I want to do is just figure out like, how can we do it reliably better?

And of course, that takes you to lean start up because you know, Lean Startup isn't going to make you successful, but it will keep you from failing or it will help you raise the floor on how bad that failure could be. And so that's how I got here. 

Brian Ardinger: I think you're underselling yourself to a certain extent. You've had a chance to work with some of the best companies in the world when it comes to innovation and you've kind of been behind the scenes player when it comes to a lot of this stuff and helping companies understand that. 

The next thing I really want to talk about is this book, because it's slightly different than a, you know, product strategy book or something. You know, Farther, Faster, and Far less drama. It seems to be a culmination of what you've seen in the workplace and in creating companies and working through this uncertainty that it, it is to create new stuff, but less from the product and the tactical side, but more from the people side, the leadership side. Talk a little bit about why you decided to write this book. 

Janice Fraser: So the book is co-authored by my husband, who was my co-founder at Luxr, where we had like 50 companies go through this 10 week program, which ended up being an accelerator kind of thing, right? He's still very much focused on product management.

He runs a team of like 50 people who all work with federal government clients. All product managers and product designers. I come at it more from the innovation side, from, you know, how do you get very large organizations to be more agile or more lean, or to simply create value from new ideas and especially new ideas that challenge the status quo.

That's a hard thing to do, to get a large organization that's been around for say, 150 years to begin to actually change their behavior. When we started writing this book, it was four years ago. That's when we first did the very first outline, and we thought that it would be a very tactical book for practitioners of like meeting facilitation. Because a lot of the ideas land at that moment of like, I need to run a strategy session, or I need to get more out of this leadership thing, and I was doing a lot of network then.

But over time and, and in consulting with some editorial folks and some of my closest advisors, my ex-boss, a guy named David Kidder, who’s a dear, dear friend David said, this is bigger than what you think it is. The way that you lead is different than the way that other people lead. And those kinds of feedback over a period of a year or two really gave Jason and I pause.

And so, we sat down and thought like, what is it really that we're seeing that's different and what I think is that the leaders that are most successful, whether it's agile transformation on the software side or innovation execution on the non-software side, what we see is that the most successful leaders were leading differently than the ones who seemed the most stuck. 

We can call it could be mindset like the Carol Dweck book. It could be any number of things. But some leaders were able to, as the book says, go farther, get there faster. And my favorite thing is to go there without a lot of bickering, without a lot of hassle, without frankly, drama. Like, we just don't have time to mess around th...

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. 

...

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...

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 b...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 l...

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...

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 t...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Rogers, Columbia University professor and author of the new book, The Digital Transformation Roadmap. David and I talk about why corporate innovation is so hard. And we unpack the iterative steps needed to navigate a path to digital transformation success. 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 David Rogers, Columbia University professor and author of the new book, the Digital Transformation Roadmap. 

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 Rogers. He's a Columbia University professor and author of the new book The Digital Transformation Roadmap, rebuild your organization for continuous change. Welcome David. 

David Rogers: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Really appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here because your book couldn't have come out at a better time. We are in the midst of a lot of accelerating change as everybody is going through, whether it's covid or inflation or, or technology changes like AI. Your book, I wanted to delve into a lot of the details around it. One of the things that stood out is you outlined in your book several studies that have come out, basically say that 70% or more of digital transformation efforts fail. Why is that the case and why is it so hard for people to do this? 

David Rogers: Yeah, it's really sobering. So, I wrote, what was the first major book on the subject of digital transformation a few years back.

So, I've been looking at the subject for some time, and what I was sort of shocked to see was at that point I was really sort of evangelizing, Hey, if you're an established business and you really want to grow for the long term and survive even, let alone thrive, you're going to have to embrace new digital business models.

Really set aside a lot of the old assumptions of the corporate playbook of strategy. How do we think about competition? How do we think about customer strategy, use of data, et cetera. Really embrace new business models. And so that was really my approach was to help companies who had sort of been in business for decades, maybe a century or more, to say, hey, it's great that your core business is there and you have customers.

But the sort of strategic landscape is really changing, and you need to sort of master this and, and really sort of open up your thinking. But what I found in the years since was people really embrace this idea of, okay, at least sort of, at least I would say, people give lip service to digital transformation.

Oh yeah. We're going to do this. We're, we're going to hire somebody, a Chief Digital Officer, we'll put it on the agenda. Transformation digital. Very common now and yet, including companies where there's support from the very top. Real resources put into this, not just sort of some PowerPoints and emails sent around.

And yet years go by, and they come to me and say, I don't know why we're not changing, you know, or not changing fast enough. What's going on? Why are we like stuck in slow motion? So, I started looking at the broader, you know, research and as you said, I found this pattern that, you know, by and large, all the major studies are reporting about 70% or higher of failure.

That's self-reported, right? The people with don't like to admit, companies admitting by our own standards, we are not achieving what we set out here. So, what that opened my eyes to a whole, you know, second wave of research on my part was to try to understand why. What is the barrier or barriers here? You see, you know, a litany of symptoms.

Well, our people are afraid, or they don't want to change their jobs or the technologies too expensive. Or we come up with lots of ideas, but none of them scale or, and we just can't move as fast as all these startups. You know, there's lots of sort of symptoms. What I found looking across, many different industries, many different organizations, was a pattern. 

Really there were sort of five organizational barriers, and that's the key. They're all barriers, actually, not in the technology. The barriers, not usually, it's not really about finances and things like that. It's about organizations themselves. And unless you can address those and get past them, and there are ways to get past them, but unless you do that, your efforts are just never going to have the impact that you, that you really need out of them.

Brian Ardinger: You know, one of the things that I see when talking to other corporations out there is they don't struggle with execution because they have business models. They have customers. They know how to execute that particular model. They know how to budget for it. They know how to build for it. They know how to hire for that.

But where they struggle is that exploration phase. Where they don't know exactly what to do. They haven't figured out the next new business model. They haven't figured out exactly what they should be building or the new pricing and that. And it's that realm of uncertainty where they haven't seemed to build an execution model to execute in the uncertain environment. Is that what you're seeing as well? 

David Rogers: Absolutely, and the problem is you can't use the same model. I have nothing against companies say, look, we've got a really well owned machine. We know how to operate our core business. We've been in it for a long time. We've got a functional system of, you know, you could call them silos, but we've got a functional organizational structure, really knows how to operate and deliver against this core business.

I have no idea, no feeling that, oh, I'm going to come in and say, oh, you should turn yourselves into a startup and blow that all up. No. What companies need is what I call flexibility in governance. That's one of the core, one of these five barriers. There's a lack of flexibility in governance, so they're applying the same BAU, as we call it, business as usual operating model to that core business that they know really well is operates under low uncertainty and is sort of what they're organized around currently. And they know the metrics, et cetera. 

And then they try to apply that same operating model, that same governance I would call it, to pursuing new opportunities which have first of all, simply by bringing virtual, new and fast-moving digital error likely to have much higher uncertainty. And so that operating model execution model is not going to work in a highly uncertain context. We've got a lot of theory and a lot of experience to show why. But they also don't know how to operate outside of their core business.

So, you've got these sort of twin challenges, as I call them, really for corporate innovation and, and growth, which is the challenge of uncertainty, not being used to the methods which allow you to tackle an iterative experiment, kind of driven kind of fashion. Opportunities tha...

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. A...

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 u...

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.

For More Information

• 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.